Elizabeth Lowell: Fire and Rain

"This is my brother’s shirt," she said indignantly, holding up a black shirttail in her hand.

Luke shook his head. "I got oil on it working on Cash’s balky Jeep, so he loaned me a clean one for your birthday party."

"Figures," she muttered. "It’s so comfortable I’ve been tempted to use it as a nightgown. Nylon is too cold or too hot. Your shirt was all soft and perfect."

Abruptly Carla’s mouth went dry. The thought that the cloth draped so intimately around her body had once been wrapped just as intimately around Luke’s sent an arrow of sensation glittering from her breastbone to the pit of her stomach. She swallowed and looked away from his clear, penetrating eyes.

"Don’t worry," she said huskily. "I’ll give it back to you as soon as it’s washed."

"No hurry. I’ve still got Cash’s shirt"

Silence stretched and then stretched some more, leaving Carla feeling breathless, uncertain. She looked back at Luke, only to find him watching her with unnerving intensity, as though he were measuring precisely where the disputed shirt fit her differently than it fit him.

"How do you want to arrange your time off?" he asked.

"What?"

Slowly Luke lifted his eyes to Carla’s face.

"Your time off. Do you want to work six days and have one off, or do you want to work right through, or do you want to save up some days and take a little vacation?"

"I’ll save them up," Carla said promptly.

"That’s what the women all say at first, but after a few weeks they can’t get to West Fork fast enough."

"Cash will be coming up in early August I’ll wait"

Luke’s smile told Carla that he didn’t believe it.

He turned toward the back door. "If you need anything, holler. I’ll be in the barn."

With a mixture of relief and disappointment, Carla watched Luke leave. The relief she understood; the disappointment she ignored. She looked around the kitchen, wondering where to begin. Everywhere she looked, a task cried out to be done. Fortunately she had the ability to organize her time. She didn’t always use that ability, but she had it just the same.

"The cleaning will have to wait," Carla muttered, looking at the clock. "In two hours, twelve hungry hands will descend. Thirteen, counting Luke. Call it fourteen. Luke is big enough for two men. Then there’s me. Dinner for fifteen, coming right up."

The number she had to feed seemed to echo in the silent kitchen. Fifteen. My God. No wonder all the pots and pans are so big.

The thought of feeding that many people was daunting. Carla had never cooked whole meals for more than herself, her brother and, when she was on the ranch, for Luke. The three of them had eaten in the old ranch house, whose small rooms were famous for mice, drafts and dust in equal measure.

Looking around, Carla gave each black sleeve another turn upward to make sure the cloth didn’t get in the way. Then she went to the refrigerator and began taking a fast inventory of what was available.

The refrigerator held beer, apple juice, horseradish, ketchup, a chunk of butter, four eggs, a slab of unsliced bacon and an open package of baloney that had quietly curled up and died. The big freezer opposite the stove was more rewarding. It held enough meat, mostly beef, to feed half the state of Colorado. As long as the propane held out, they wouldn’t starve. All she had to do was thaw a few roasts in the microwave.

"Oops," Carla said, glancing around. "No microwave. Not enough time to cook frozen roasts, either."

She went to the pantry, hoping for inspiration. "Canned stew, canned chili, canned chicken…yuck. No wonder Luke is short-tempered. Eating out of cans is enough to sour the disposition of a saint" The other side of the pantry was no better. She was confronted by a solid wall of cans as big as buckets – tomatoes, peas, green beans, corn, pitted cherries and coffee. There were also half-empty fifty-pound sacks of flour, sugar, rice, cornmeal and dried apples. The bread bin held four wizened crusts.

"So much for hamburgers," she said unhappily, "and I doubt if anyone delivers pizza this far out"

A burlap bag bulged with potatoes. Another bag was full of onions. Pinto beans dribbled out of a third bag. She grabbed that bag with both hands and lifted. It weighed at least ten pounds. That was enough beans to make real chili or frijoles refritos or any number of dishes. She could feed an army – but not in the next two hours.

Behind the bag of beans Carla spotted a cardboard box that had been shoved aside and forgotten. Inside the box was package after package of spaghetti. Each package held two pounds of the slender, dried pasta. The fragile sticks had been broken but were perfectly edible otherwise.

"I sense a spaghetti dinner on the horizon," Carla said.

She grabbed two packages, hesitated, and grabbed two more. When she cooked for Cash and herself, a pound of dried pasta fed both of them with enough left over for several of her lunches. But then, she always served fresh salad, garlic bread and dessert with the spaghetti. Bread and salad were out of the question, so she grabbed an extra package of pasta, bringing the total to ten pounds.

"My God, it will take an army to eat this much. I’ll be making cold spaghetti sandwiches for weeks and the hands will riot and Luke will tear a strip off me big enough to cover the south pasture."

Carla frowned at the last package of pasta, then decided she could always take the leftovers to the bunkhouse for the hands who wanted a midnight snack. Arms bulging with packages of spaghetti, she went back into the kitchen. There she dumped the pasta on the counter and went back to the freezer. The hamburger came in five-pound freezer packages that were frozen as solid as a stone.

She unwrapped a brick of ground meat and dropped it into a cast-iron frying pan that was so big and heavy it took both hands for her to lift it up onto the stove. A box of wooden matches sat on the stove itself. She lit the burner beneath the frozen meat, covered the pan and went to work on the sauce. Several forays to the pantry resulted in a can of tomato sauce the size of a bathroom sink, an equally intimidating can of whole tomatoes, and ten fat onions.

After rummaging in the cupboards near the stove, Carla found a kettle the size of a laundry tub. She set it aside for cooking the noodles and found a slightly smaller cousin to hold the sauce. She nearly had to turn the kitchen inside out to find a handheld can opener that worked. As she wrestled with the awkward can and poured a river of tomato sauce into a big pot – too quickly – she discovered how the kitchen walls had gotten their splatter patterns. She wiped up what she could reach, lit the burner under the sauce and went to work peeling and chopping onions. Between bouts of crying she prodded the hamburger, prying off bits of meat as the frozen block slowly loosened.

By the time the hamburger had thawed and was browning with the onions in the huge pan, nearly an hour had passed. A determined search of the kitchen had turned up no oregano and no whole garlic. A geriatric bottle of garlic granules was available, but she had to hammer the plastic container on the counter to knock loose a little of the contents.

"What on earth have the cooks been feeding everyone?" Carla asked in exasperation. "No herbs, no spices, no – " The clock caught her eye. "Uh-oh. I’d better get dessert going or there won’t be any of that, either."

Carla ran up to her bedroom suite, tore through four boxes until she found her cookbooks, and raced back downstairs. The recipe for cherry cobbler said it fed eight She doubled it, spread it into the smallest baking pan she could find – which was half the size of a card table – and discovered that the pan was way too big for the contents.