The next three weeks were the shape of what her life at the ranch would become. Martha fell into the rhythms of the place the way she fell into most things by observation first, then adjustment, then quiet insistence, where the adjustments weren't enough. She was up before Silas and had breakfast made by the time he came in from the morning chores. She reorganized the larder on the third day which Silas watched with the expression of a man who was not certain whether to be grateful or defensive and who settled on grateful largely because the result was a pantry where he could find things without looking for them. She took inventory of the winter stores and presented him with a written list of what was needed organized by urgency.
He looked at the list and looked at her. How did you know we were short on lamp oil? He said, "I counted the cans and calculated the burn rate for three people through 5 months of winter." She said, "You have enough for two people through 3 months. Your ranch hands get here in a week and the cold front is building. You need to send an order down to the valley before the week is out." He sent the order.
His two ranch hands arrived. Of the Delgato brothers, Roberto and Miguel, 23 and 25. Dark eyed and quick and initially very uncertain about the large woman who had apparently reorganized everything they were used to finding where they'd left it. Roberto in particular looked at Martha the first morning with a weariness she had seen before and was prepared for. Mr.
Boon didn't mention Roberto started that he'd hired a housekeeper. Martha said pleasantly, setting a plate of eggs and salt pork in front of him. He mentioned it to me in slightly different terms. Eat while it's hot. Roberto ate.
By the end of the first week, the Delgato brothers were bringing her coffee in the mornings when they came in from the early work and telling her about the harness that had been giving trouble since August. And Miguel had started asking her opinion on a wheel rim that he wasn't sure about before he went to Silas with it. She examined the rim and confirmed his instinct and told him to replace it before the freeze and explained exactly why. And Miguel listened with the focused attention of someone who was genuinely interested in the reason behind the advice, not just the advice. Your father was a mechanic, he said.
My husband, she said. Miguel nodded, absorbing this with the equinimity of the young. He teach you? We taught each other," Martha said, which was the truest version of the answer. Silas watched all of it.
She was aware of him watching without making it awkward, not hovering, not directing, just present in the background of her days in the way that his ranch was present in the background of his own. He brought her coffee when she was working in the mornings. When she spent a long afternoon under one of the supply sleds that she'd identified as dangerously underbuilt for the winter loads it would expected to carry. He appeared beside it eventually and crouched down to look at what she was doing. And when she explained the problem, he asked intelligent questions rather than dismissing the diagnosis, which was not a small thing, and she was aware of it.
The sled was the thing that first made her understand he was paying a specific kind of attention to her. Not to her work, to her specifically. She had been working under the sled for about an hour when she became aware that the rolling board was shifting in a way that was making everything harder. The board Henry had built her was wider than a standard repair board to account for her size, and the one she'd improvised here was not. She hadn't said anything about it because saying something felt like complaining.