He stirred. He watched the pot like it was the most important thing he'd ever been asked to do. She set the table without asking anyone to help. Gideon came in from outside at 6 minutes 6, which she suspected was actually very close to on time for a man who spent his days managing cattle and ranch hands and problems that didn't keep to anyone's schedule. He stopped in the kitchen entry and looked at the table and then at Jaime standing at the stove with the wooden spoon.
Something moved in his face that he covered quickly. He hung his hat. He washed his hands at the basin. He sat down without a word. She put the cornmeal cakes on the table, the beans.
She went back for the pan bread she'd made with the last of the flour. EMTT came down on his own. He sat across from his father without looking at either of them. They ate in silence. She had not expected conversation.
She ate standing at the counter the way she'd always eaten in kitchens out of habit more than anything else. And she watched in the unobtrusive way she'd learned to watch, the way the two boys handled their food. Jaime ate everything on his plate. He mopped the bean liquid with the cornbread with the focused intensity of someone who'd been hungry before. EMTT ate more slowly, but he ate it all.
Gideon said nothing until he pushed his plate back. Then he looked across the table at the empty dishes and said without looking at her. That was better than I expected. The pantry needs restocking, she said. Significantly, I know.
Before the roads get bad, she said, "We need to go to town within the next 2 weeks or we're going to be stretching things by February. " He looked at her then, not annoyed, she noted. Something more like someone recalibrating. "I'll look into it," he said. He stood, put his hat back on, and went out toward the bunk house. She cleared the table.
Jaime brought his plate to the counter without being asked, which she suspected no one had taught him recently. EMTT disappeared upstairs. Later, when she'd cleaned the kitchen and banked the fire, and finally let herself sit down with her coat around her shoulders and her mother's recipe book open in her lap, Rosalie Hartwell looked around the dim, cold, quiet kitchen of Blackthornne Ranch, and thought about what she had, a job, a room, two boys who might eventually stop waiting for her to leave. A man who had said five sentences to her and meant all of them. She opened the recipe book to a page near the middle, one she knew by heart.
Her mother's handwriting, slanted and quick, a recipe for sourdough bread that took 3 days to do properly. She hadn't tried to make it since her mother died. She thought about the pantry about February. About the way Jaime had stood at that stove like the wooden spoon was something worth holding. She closed the book.
She went to bed. And in the morning she got up before first light and went down to the kitchen and started making a sourdough starter from the last of the flour. And the water left standing in the basin because if she didn't start it now, it wouldn't be ready before the flour ran out. She was not a woman who waited for things to get better. She was a woman who made them better.