Chapter Sixteen
Lunch at the Foster table worked on a principle Grace had come to think of as organized violence.
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 one still 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 will not believe 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 getting ahead.
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 for vegetables?” 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’s that serious.”
“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 coop someone’s been 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 cushion she’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.
“When’s the fair?”
“End of September.” Jonah stole a piece of cornbread off Thomas’s plate quickly enough that Thomas only caught the tail end of the theft and smacked the table a full second too late. “That gives you, what, four months? Five? Plenty of time to get a patch goin’.”
“You kept a garden back in New York, right?” Mason leaned forward on both elbows. “You told me about it. Herbs and such.”
“Herbs. In a window box.” Grace set down her spoon. “On a windowsill in a hut by the docks. That’s a whole different thing than growin’ competition vegetables in Colorado dirt at five thousand feet.”
“Dirt’s dirt, Gracie.” Jonah shrugged.
“Dirt is absolutely not just dirt, and the fact that you think so explains why every plant you’ve ever touched has died.”
“Name—”
“The cactus.”
“That was one time!”
“It’s a cactus, Jonah. You killed a plant whose entire purpose in life is not dyin’.”
Across the table, Logan set his coffee cup down. He’d stayed quiet through the whole exchange, eating in that methodical way of his, where every bite got chewed the same number of times, his napkin sat folded on his knee, and his elbows never once touched the table.
“Where would you put the patch?”
Grace blinked. “What?”
“The vegetable garden. Where would you want it?”
“I... well, I wouldn’t. I mean, I’d love to, but I can’t tear up the flower beds. Your mother’s roses just started bloomin’ again, and I’m not gonna rip them out for a bunch of squash.”
“I ain’t talkin’ about the flower beds.” Logan swiped a crumb off the table and put it on the edge of his plate, because even crumbs had a designated place in Logan Foster’s universe.
“There’s a stretch of open ground behind the chicken coop.
South-facin’, gets full sun most of the day.
Creek runs about fifty yards downhill, so you’d have water close. Soil’s decent if we turn it proper.”
“You’d till up new land? Just for a garden?”
“It ain’t just a garden.” He met her eyes across the table. “It’s yours. Whatever you wanna grow, however you wanna use it. Your patch.”
Something in the way he said your patch caught like a fishhook.
The word ‘your’ had caused plenty of damage the last time he’d used it, in that fight about the ranch, the property, and the places she did and didn’t fit.
But the meaning behind it had flipped. That day in the yard, yours had drawn a line between them.
Today, at this table, it opened a door. Her own piece of this place.
It wasn’t borrowed, conditional, or dependent on any arrangement or agreement. Just hers. Dirt and seeds and whatever she could coax out of the ground with her own two hands.
And the look on his face when he’d said it.
Steady. Level. The same expression he wore when he mended a fence rail or fitted a hinge, like something had gone out of true and he aimed to set it right.
Except, this time, the thing out of true lived between them, in the place where yours and mine had drawn all those lines, and he’d just picked up the eraser.
Miriam banged her spoon twice and shrieked at the cornbread basket.
Grace spooned another bite of potato into the baby’s mouth without looking because six weeks of practice had given her the ability to feed an infant while having an emotional crisis at a kitchen table, which she had never before expected to be one of her life skills.
“I’d need manure.” She frowned. “Good manure, aged at least a season. And compost. And somebody to help me haul rocks for a border, because you can’t just till open ground without a border or the chickens’ll scratch it all to hell before the first sprout breaks soil.”
“Language.” Rafe pointed his whittling knife at her from the head of the table.
“Sorry. Scratch it all to heck.”
“Better.”
“I can haul rocks.” Jonah raised his hand like a schoolboy volunteer. “I’m terrible at pitchforks and worse at horses, but I can carry a rock from one place to another without injurin’ myself or anyone nearby.”
“That’s a low bar, brother.” Mason grinned.
“It’s the only bar I got. I’m workin’ with what the Lord gave me.”
Thomas pushed back from the table and stood. “The stretch behind the coop, you said? I know the spot. Good ground. We could get the first till done this afternoon if we start now.”
“You?” Logan raised an eyebrow. “Volunteerin’ for manual labor? Without bein’ asked?”
“Don’t make a thing of it.”
“I’m just sayin’, this—”
“I said don’t make a thing of it.” Thomas grabbed his hat off the hook by the door. “You comin’, Mason? Jonah? Let’s go look at the ground before Logan assigns us chores we actually don’t want to do.”
Mason jumped up so fast, his chair rocked on its back legs. Jonah followed, cramming the stolen cornbread into his mouth whole, and the three of them jostled through the kitchen door in a tangle of shoulders and elbows.
“Don’t forget to—”
The front door slammed.
“—feed the horses.” Rafe sighed and looked at Grace. Then at Logan. Then at the door. Then at the ceiling. “Every time. Every single time they leave this house in a group, they forget the horses. You’d think I raised a pack of dogs instead of boys.”
Logan stood and collected his plate. “I’ll remind ’em when I go out.”
He paused behind Grace’s chair on his way to the basin, and his hand landed on her shoulder for a beat.
Just a beat. His palm pressed through the cotton of her dress and into the muscle beneath it, and his thumb brushed the spot where her neck met her shoulder.
Light enough to be accidental. Deliberate enough to send a current straight down her spine.
Then he lifted his hand, crossed to the basin, and set his plate in the water Grace had heated that morning.
“I’ll get the till fork from the shed.” He grabbed his hat. “Have a look at what you want to grow, and we’ll talk seeds at supper.”
The door opened and closed behind him.
Tomatoes.
The big ones, not the sad little marbles she’d nursed along on the fire escape in New York, but real tomatoes; the kind that split the skin when they ripened and stained your hands red when you picked them.
Squash, the yellow crookneck variety, her mother had grown in the old country. Pole beans climbing a trellis. Cucumbers. Carrots, maybe. Beets, if the altitude allowed it.
Pumpkins, come fall, the big round kind she could set on the porch for decoration, assuming Miriam didn’t try to eat them first, which, based on the baby’s current approach to anything within arm’s reach, ranked as a near certainty.
Ma would’ve loved this.
Her mother, who’d packed seeds in cloth pouches for the crossing from Scandinavia. Who’d kept a garden in every place they’d lived, even the hut, even when the soil amounted to nothing but a strip of dirt between the back wall and the alley where the neighbors dumped wash water.
Ma had knelt in that strip every spring and coaxed green out of gray, and Grace had sat beside her, pressing seeds into the ground with fingers too small to do much but trying anyway.
Twelve years since then. Twelve years, and the feel of dirt under her nails still carried the shape of her mother’s hands guiding hers.
Her own garden.
A real, proper, in-the-ground garden with space to spread out and sun to soak up and soil deep enough to put down roots.
Roots.
Funny word to snag on. But it snagged all the same, pulling something loose in her chest that she’d cinched tight since childhood.
Because roots meant staying. Roots meant the ground you stood on planned to keep you, and the people on it planned to keep you, and you could dig your fingers into the dirt and trust it to hold.
Miriam slammed the spoon against the tray one final time and let out a squeal that could’ve cracked glass.
“All right, little bird.” Grace lifted her out of the high chair and settled her on one hip. “Let’s go see about our garden.”
Then, she grabbed the flier off the table, folded it into her apron pocket, right next to the handkerchief that still smelled faintly of brandy from last week, and made her way outside.
Two keepsakes now.
Both earned.
From inside, Rafe’s voice carried through the open front door. “Grace! Feed them horses!”