She picked it up. Inside she could feel the familiar weight of the battered volume, the cracked spine under the cloth cover. The pages her mother's hands had touched hundreds of times before hers did. She turned to go. Part of the ceiling above the chimney housing gave a sound like a groan, and she moved fast, and she was through the kitchen door and into the entry when she heard the larger collapse behind her.
Not the full roof, not yet, but a section, the housing itself, coming down in a cascade of burning wood and plaster that hit the kitchen floor where she had been standing 3 seconds earlier. She was in the yard. The cold hit her and she was in her nightclo and her feet were in her house shoes on the snow. And none of that mattered because she was counting. Two boys, Gideon, Mateo running from the bunk house with Roy behind him, the ranch hands coming out, everyone.
She counted again. Everyone was there. EMTT had Jaime against his side with his arm around his brother's shoulders. And Jaime was watching the fire begin to show through the kitchen window with wide eyes and a stillness that was their shock or particular steadiness that sometimes comes to people who have been. Frightened enough times to know how to stand inside it.
Gideon appeared beside her. He had come out behind her. She didn't know when. She hadn't seen him go back in, and he had a blanket in his h hands that he put around her shoulders without asking. And then he stood beside her and looked at the kitchen window.
"It's not the whole house," he said. "No," she said. "The chimney housing and the section of roof above it. " "If Matteo's men can get water on the north wall from outside, we can keep it from spreading. " He was already turning to Mateo. She heard him giving the instructions she just laid out. Heard Mateo moving the men. heard the organized noise of people responding to a problem with direction.
She stood with the ledger under one arm and the recipe book box against her chest and the blanket around her shoulders and she watched the kitchen window. Jaime appeared beside her. He put his hand in the pocket of the coat he'd grabbed correctly. He'd grabbed his coat and he looked at the window. Is the starter still in there?
He said. She looked at him. The croc, he said. Is it in the kitchen? Yes, she said.
It's in the kitchen. He was quiet. Is it gone? Thought she thought about the packed earth floor and the stone counter where the croc sat away from the wooden surfaces that were burning. The croc itself might survive, she said.