Lynna Banning - Western Spring Weddings

“Just a few more minutes, Emily. Why don’t you set plates on the table, and then we’ll have dinner?” In the pantry off the kitchen she found a mason jar of green beans and the remains of a stale loaf of bread in the bread box. Tomorrow she must think about learning how to bake bread, even though she could not imagine herself in the kitchen with floury hands. Still, it could not possibly be worse than cleaning a chicken, could it? She gave an involuntary shudder.

Promptly at noon, Gray tramped through the back kitchen door and sniffed the air. “Mmm, somethin’ sure smells good!”

“It’s a chicken!” Emily shouted. “All baked ’n’ everything. Maria showed me chickens are nice.”

Clarissa set the platter holding the roasted bird on the table next to his elbow and handed him a sharp knife. “Would you please carve it?” she pleaded. “This chicken and I are not exactly friends.”

“Oh, yeah?” It did look kinda odd, the skin over-brown and stiff as parchment. When he stuck in the knife, he heard a crackling sound. Still, roast chicken was roast chicken, and he was plenty hungry. When he slid the knife in to slice off a drumstick, it was so dry it was like sawing through wood.

He set the knife down and shot a look at Clarissa’s tense face. “What happened to it?”

She worried her bottom lip between her teeth in a way that made him uneasy in an unexpected way. “Maria brought it over this morning. I did everything she said, but...” Her voice choked off and she swiped a sheen of tears off her cheek.

Emily stared at her mother with round blue eyes. “Mama, are you crying?”

“Of course not,” she said quickly. “It’s quite warm in here.”

Gray studied her face, then looked down at the platter. “Looks pretty well overdone,” he said. “But heck, it’s only a chicken, Clarissa. Nothin’ to cry about.”

“Oh, y-yes it is. You hired me to be your c-cook, and I can’t!”

“Can’t what?”

“Can’t cook.”

“At all?”

“No,” she sobbed. She looked so heartbroken, he wanted to laugh, but he figured that would just make it worse, so he clamped his jaws together. “Listen, there’s worse things than overcooking one chicken.”

“Oh?” Her lips were still quivery, which made him feel downright funny inside.

“Yeah. You could be overcooking a chicken in Caleb Arness’s kitchen.”

She gave a strangled cry and buried her face in her hands. Emily scrambled out of her chair and smoothed her small hand over Clarissa’s dark hair. “You could learn, Mama. You learned lots of things before we got on the train, remember? How to iron my dresses and pack up all our stuff in one suitcase. Lots of things.”

Gray wanted to hug the little girl. “Listen, I have to ride into town this afternoon. How about I bring you back a cookbook from the mercantile?”

Clarissa’s face lit up like Christmas. “Oh, c-could you? You can deduct it from my earnings.”

Gray studied the woman across the table. “What did you do before you learned to iron?”

“We— My brother had servants. He was gone at sea for months at a time, so his wife and I always had servants and plenty of—”

“Money,” he supplied. “Maria told me about your sister-in-law dying. And then your brother didn’t come home, and you lost it all.”

“Yes, I lost everything—the house, the bank account, even the furniture. The lawyer said we had nothing left and we had to move.”

“Didn’t your brother have a will? Some way to provide for you and Emily?”

“Apparently not. At least they could never find one.”

He spooned some green beans out of the blue ceramic bowl, but he was fast losing his appetite. How could a man just forget about something as important as providing for his sister and his child?

“That why you agreed to come out to Oregon and marry Arness? You had no money and no home?”

She was quiet for a long minute. “Emily, why don’t you go upstairs and bring me my shawl.”

When the girl’s footsteps faded, Clarissa leaned toward him. “Part of being, well, overprotected all one’s life is that it makes one naive. I realize now how foolish I was to accept Mr. Arness’s offer of marriage. All I could think about was making a home for Emily.”

“Even if it meant marrying someone you’d never met? Clarissa, seems to me that’s more than foolish—that’s downright stupid.”

Her face changed. “But thousands of women travel out West every year as mail-order brides. Surely you are not saying that all of them are—”

“Stupid. Yeah, I am sayin’ that. Marryin’ anybody, even someone you’ve known all your life, is—”

Her eyes got big. “Stupid?”

“Yeah. Why tie yourself down to someone whose guts you’re gonna hate in a few years?”

She bit her lip. “Did that happen to you?”

At that moment Emily clattered down the stairs. “Here’s your shawl, Mama. Are we havin’ any dessert?”

Clarissa looked blank. “Oh. Dessert. How about we have, uh, some cookies with our tea later? After I consult a cookbook,” she added under her breath.

“Okay. Can I go play with Maria? She has a dolly.”

“That’s news to me,” Gray said when Emily had streaked out the front door. “Well, it’s turning out to be a real interesting day, wouldn’t you say?”

He rose, gave Clarissa a grin and strode out the back door.

* * *

“Señor!” Ramon waylaid him on his way to the barn. “Where you go?”

“Town.”

“Why because? We need to fix all that fence that was broke last night.”

“Later,” Gray said.

Ramon caught his reins. “But, boss, cows will get out.”

“Yeah, I know. We’ll chase ’em in the morning.”

Ramon shook his dark head. “You do things your way, always. Not always best way, señor.”

Gray chuckled. Ramon was right most of the time, but he’d always done things his own way, and Ramon or no Ramon, Clarissa needed that cookbook. He started to rein away.

“Señor, why you not listen to Ramon?”

“Because I like to do things my way.”

“I think you are wrong.” Ramon doggedly pursued him.

Gray leaned over the saddle horn and stared down at him. His foreman had a point. Over the years of struggle to keep this ranch going, maybe he’d become too convinced he was the only person who knew best. Or maybe he was just stubborn. But he wasn’t wrong about riding into town. He hadn’t been able to stomach the chicken Clarissa had roasted to within an inch of its life, but he’d liked even less the bereft expression on her face. A woman in tears made his belly hurt.

He spurred Rowdy forward and trotted over the cattle guard and through the Bar H gate.

Chapter Seven

Now, Clarissa reflected some days later, how difficult could it be to bake a cake? Some flour, a little sugar, an egg or two and...what? She could ask Maria, but after her roast chicken disaster she was hesitant to admit to an even greater lack of knowledge about what she’d been hired to do.

She studied the woodstove in the kitchen and let out a deep sigh. She prayed that Emily was right—she could learn to cook, couldn’t she? And she must do it as quickly as possible.

She flipped over the page of Mrs. Beeton’s Household Hints. Aha! A recipe for something called Plain Yellow Cake. “Take two good handfuls of flour...” What, exactly, was a handful? Would it be a large hand, like Gray’s? Or a small one, like hers? What if Emily wanted to bake a cake with her tiny little hands?

She gazed out the window over the kitchen sink into the grove of willow trees behind the house. In the clear spring sunshine the new leaves looked like green glass, but now the light was fading. Face it, Clarissa, you don’t belong out here on a ranch in the West. She felt inept. Foolish. Out of place in this godforsaken land, and what was even worse, she felt a kinship with no one. At least she didn’t feel at odds with the man who had rescued her from Caleb Arness, or with down-to-earth, understanding Maria. But everything else out here was like being on a different planet.