Page 55 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“Your wife would’ve known about the brandy. She would’ve known about the gums and the trick with the handkerchief and a hundred other things I’m gonna get wrong because I’m just... makin’ it up as I go. Every single day. And one of these days, everybody’s gonna figure that out, and...”
The rest of the sentence dissolved somewhere in her throat.
Rafe sat quietly for a stretch. The clock marked the seconds. Through the window, the afternoon light caught the dust motes drifting above the table in slow spirals.
“You wanna know somethin’ about my Miriam?”
Grace wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“First week she had Logan, she fed him goat’s milk ‘cause her own hadn’t come in yet, and the boy screamed for three days straight ‘til old Mrs. Patterson next door told her to try cow’s milk instead.”
Grace looked down.
“She didn’t sleep more’n two hours at a stretch for the first six months. She burned supper at least twice a week for the whole first year of our marriage, and Lord, the woman couldnotgrow tomatoes.”
“Really?”
“Every summer, she tried. They always came up small and bitter, like they took her efforts personally.”
He pulled off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Point is, she didn’t come out of the womb knowin’ how to be a mother or a wife or a ranch woman. She figured it out the same way you’re figurin’ it out. Day by day. Mistake by mistake.”
“But—”
“The fact that you’re sittin’ hereworryin’about whether you’re doin’ it right?” He put the spectacles back on. “That’s how I know you are.”
Grace pressed her lips together hard.
“You brought my roses back.” Rafe scrunched his eyes and took a deep breath. “I look out that window every mornin’ now, and those flowers got color in ’em for the first time in two years.”
“She did most of the work…”
“You named this baby after my wife, and she carries that name around this house like a little piece of Miriam has come back to us.” He cleared his throat. “And my boy. That stubborn, stiff-necked, impossible boy of mine... You got him tolaughagain, Grace. I can hear it from the porch when y’all come in from the fields. I can hear it in the mornings when you’re in the kitchen together.”
He stopped. Worked his jaw under that mustache. Blinked at the ceiling the way he did when the feelings outran the words, which for Rafe Foster happened about twice a year based on Grace’s calculations.
“You ain’t a fraud. And you ain’t doin’ everything wrong.” He leaned forward and set one rough hand on top of hers, where it rested on the table. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to this family since we lost the last best thing. And I... I’m proud of you, girl.”
Grace’s throat closed.
Because nobody had said that to her. Not once. Not in twenty-one years of scrapping and surviving and holding things together with both hands and her teeth. Jonah loved her, sure, and showed it in his own joke-cracking way, but Jonah operated on the assumption that Grace could handleanything, whichmeant he never stopped to ask whether the handling cost her something.
Yet, this gruff, quiet, grief-worn man, who’d lost his wife and closed himself off from the world, sat here and told her he saw what she did for his family. That it mattered. Thatshemattered.
She stood up from the chair, careful not to jostle Miriam, and crossed the three steps between them.
Rafe opened his arms.
She leaned down and pressed her face against his shoulder. He put his hand on the back of her head the same way her own Pa had done before he’d died.
The clock ticked. Miriam sighed in her sleep. The brandy bottle stood open on the table, sending a sharp smell into the kitchen that mixed with the pine smoke from the stove and the soap on Rafe’s collar.
“Now.” Rafe patted her shoulder twice and pulled back. “You mentioned stew?”
Chapter Sixteen
Lunch at the Foster table worked on a principle Grace had come to think of as organized violence.
