Page 56 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
Not actual violence, of course; nobody threw punches over cornbread.
But the sheer volume of elbows and reaching and chewing and talking with mouths full of food created a kind of chaos that would’ve horrified every etiquette teacher east of the Mississippi and most of the ones west of it, too.
Logan ate the potatoes with a fork, so he could eat the broth separately. Thomas ate with his knife in the wrong hand. Rafe cut his bread with the same knife he used to whittle, on which Logan had opinions and complained to Grace about, but didn’t really bother voicing because the old man simply ignored him.
And in the middle of all of it, Grace held Miriam against her chest at the table, and the baby was doing the thing she’d just started doing, that small, unfocused smile that wasn’t aimed at anything in particular and somehow landed on everyone at once.
What an insane difference from what her life had been.
Six weeks ago, she’d eaten rice and beans in a kitchen with a rat problem, and the distance between that table and this onestill made her dizzy if she looked at it straight on. So, she sat in the middle of the noise and let it wash over her, spooning mashed potato into Miriam’s mouth between bites of her own stew.
The front door banged open.
Mason and Jonah tumbled into the house carrying the particular energy of two men who’d found something exciting and couldn’t wait to make it everybody else’s problem.
Jonah had road dust up to his knees and a sunburn across the bridge of his nose that’d peel by tomorrow. Mason held a folded piece of paper in one fist and waved it like a flag.
“You willnotbelieve what they got posted at the general store.” Mason slapped the paper down on the table between the bread basket and the butter dish.
“If it’s another notice about Mr. Henley’s escaped goat, I don’t wanna hear it.” Thomas leaned back in his chair. “That animal’s ‘escaped’ six times this year. At some point, you gotta accept the goat don’t want to live with you no more.”
“It ain’t about the goat.” Mason smoothed the paper flat and turned it toward Grace. “Read it.”
Grace wiped Miriam’s chin and leaned forward.
The flier had that smudgy quality of something printed fast and cheap on a hand press, bleeding ink at the edges, where the type had worn down. Across the top, it said PITKIN COUNTY FALL HARVEST FAIR. Below that, a list of competitions. Pies. Preserves. Livestock judging. Quilting. Horseshoe throwing—which sounded like something Mason would enter and Thomas would refuse on principle because it involved physical effort.
And at the bottom, circled in pencil, Vegetable Growing Competition. First Prize: $50.
Fifty dollars.
Grace’s brain snagged on that number and stuck.
Back in New York, fifty dollars covered six months of rent on the hut. A year’s worth of flour and salt pork. The kind of money that separated getting by from gettingahead. Jonah had never managed to bring home more than thirty in a month, working whatever jobs he worked, which he never told Grace much about.
“Fifty dollars forvegetables?” Thomas craned his neck to read over her shoulder. “Who’s payin’ fifty dollars for a turnip?”
“It ain’t just a turnip, you dunce.” Mason jabbed the flier. “It’s the best vegetables in the county. Judges come out from Gunnison, real agricultural types with spectacles and clipboards.”
Thomas snorted. “Ain’t no way it’sthatserious.”
“Is too. Whole big to-do. Ribbons and trophies and a cash prize that’d buy, oh, I don’t know, a new roof for that chicken coopsomeone’sbeen lettin’ leak since March.”
Logan sighed. “Thomas, just... please.”
“I’m just sayin’...”
“Or new tack for the horses,” Jonah pulled out his chair and dropped into it.
Poor Jonah sat like a man who’d spent the morning on a horse and planned to spend the afternoon recovering from it. He still rode like a sack of potatoes balanced on a fence rail, though he’d stopped falling off entirely, which Grace counted as progress.
“Or fabric.” Mason raised both eyebrows at Grace. “Enough to make curtains for every window in this house, plus new clothes for the baby, plus whatever else a person might want.”
The sales pitch landed exactly where Mason had aimed.
Grace ran her thumb over the edge of the flier. Fifty dollars. She could buy seeds for an entire season with fifty dollars. Stock a pantry. Put something away for winter—the kind of cushionshe’d never had, the kind that meant you could lose a week’s income and still eat on Saturday.
Not that she needed to think in those terms anymore. The ranch provided. Logan provided. But old math lived hard in the bones of a person who’d spent a decade doing it, and fifty dollars still shimmered in Grace’s mind like water in the desert.
