Nathan's Big Sky

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2Julie dreamt of clowns.

Small ones. Tall ones. Wide and narrow. All driving teeny, tiny cars and brandishing teeny, tiny steel bars at one of the gentlest cows on the range.

And all making her want to smile. Not at their ludicrous gestures and overblown reactions, but because they all smiled at her as if she was something special.

The only clowns she was used to were the ones at the county rodeos to distract the bulls after the rider was thrown. On this cold April morning, the summer rodeos were still too far off for even dreaming. She hadn’t decided if she’d sign up this year or just go and watch from the stands.

She rolled out of bed in time to help Ma with the cooking. Dad and her three older brothers came in from the barn as they were finishing up, with Dad handing out orders like usual.

“Matthew, get that bale stacker greased and going by noon. The cows aren’t going to feed themselves for another month yet. Mark and Luke, check the Poplar Creek pasture. They’re dropping their calves like hotcakes right now; bound to be a couple in trouble out that way. Julie—”

She always wondered how much it irritated her father that he’d had a girl instead of a boy that he could name John, but he was such a stern man that she’d never dared ask. At least he’d resisted naming her Johanna. That would have made it even more of a slap in the face.

“—finish riding the spring pasture fence line today.”

“Already done. I fixed a lot of little things yesterday. I’ll take the F-150 and some posts. I’ll have the whole spring pasture clean and tight by midday.”

“Good girl.”

“Then I’m switching over.”

That just earned her a grunt.

She had her own business to run, no matter how busy the spring season was on a cattle ranch. Frankly, if she never saw a birthing cow again, it would be too soon. It was freezing April and they were as likely to drop their newborns on a wind-torn snowbank as a soft bed of winter grass in a sheltered hollow. Cows started out dumber than most sheep, but the more trouble they were having, the dumber they became. The twins, Mark and Luke, were likely to find a hard birth in the middle of a stream where the cow could also fight the battle of hypothermia and drowning, as if giving birth weren’t a challenge enough for a woman.

“Don’t forget we’ve got a party tonight. I expect you all to be clean and presentable,” her father rode over her reminder that J. L. Building was launching its second year tomorrow—its first full year if she could find the contracts.

Wait. “What party?”

Her father’s scowl said she should have kept her mouth shut and asked Ma.

But May Larson saved her only daughter, something she didn’t do much for the boys. “Hendersons. Mark and your friend Emily are moving back to the ranch.”

“Oh, that’s tonight?” She barely remembered it as news at all. She didn’t know Mac and Ama’s son particularly except that he was ex-military of some sort. Julie had met him a few times, but the guys tended to cluster around the “military man” so she’d had little contact with him.

She knew Emily a little better and liked her well enough. She was a stern, taciturn blonde—an incredibly striking one. On the rare occasions they were together, they drew puzzled looks. Other than her white blond to Emily’s golden, folks who didn’t know them seemed split on asking if they were mother-daughter or sisters. Probably because she was an Easterner, it was impossible to tell what Emily was thinking and Julie had always been a little uncomfortable around her. Julie would never label her as a friend.

Dad’s scowl said exactly what he thought of Julie not keeping up on such things. And probably a hundred other things wrong with her, like her still being single rather than bringing another man into the family to work the ranch. Oh! Which was exactly why her father wanted her to be excited about tonight’s party. It would be the first gathering after the hard winter snows and hands would be coming from all the ranches around. The place would be packed with eligible bachelors.

Someone please shoot her now. She’d rather spend the night with Lucy out in a cold camp.

Then the last piece connected.

J. L. Building’s one contract for work was at Henderson’s, enough to last her through the first month or more. And that’s where that guy in the tiny clown car had been headed. With the way her luck ran with men, he’d be on the ranch the whole time she was working there, underfoot and in the way.

The local boys had learned not to mess with her. A hand on her a*s was likely to earn a slicing swing with the short end of a hard lariat rope across theirs. That settled most of them quick enough.

But city boys were like puppy dogs—she never quite had the heart to shoo them away so harshly that they’d actually remember it.

She suspected that she’d have to make it extra clear this time.

Nathan hadn’t thought to close the curtains so he woke when the sunrise pounded into his face. He could have slept a dozen more hours. He’d barely slept in his final week in New York—being a chef at a high-end restaurant like Vite, sleep wasn’t a big part of his life. Then the two-day mad dash across the country.

He tried pulling the covers over his head, but the room was freezing. He peeked out and saw a thermostat on the wall. He hadn’t noticed it last night. With the bowl of warm stew inside him and twenty-two hundred miles behind him, he hadn’t noticed much of anything. The thermostat’s little handle was slid all the way to the left.

He bolted from the barely warm covers and into icy clothes that had him rushing into the kitchen praying for a cup of hot coffee. At sunrise he expected to be alone. It was an hour he was wholly unfamiliar with except as the time of day for that brief excursion to do the day’s shopping for the restaurant at the fresh markets.

His normal day started in late afternoon, ran through dinner service, a couple of bars, half a night’s sleep, a few hours of shopping if he couldn’t palm it off on some other chef, more sleep, and waking in time for a late lunch before prep began for the next dinner service.

He stepped into the gorgeous farm kitchen now flooded with early morning sunlight. The dark granite warmed. The rich oak glowed and the burnished steel did some other welcoming adjective that he’d think up after he had some caffeine flowing through his system.

Ama Henderson was at one of the counters greasing up a pair of big waffle irons.

Nathan found a mug, filled it from the round glass pot on the commercial dual-bay coffee maker. A brief search turned up cream and sugar.

He didn’t see any batter going yet.

She made no comment as he pulled out a steel bowl and a basket of eggs. They were dirty, like they’d been rolled in mud. He carried the basket to one of the sinks and began to wash them off. “Do your store your eggs in mud puddles?”

“Chicken s**t,” she didn’t look up.

For a moment he wondered why they would do that. When the obvious reason registered—because that was the other thing besides eggs that was under chickens—he lost control of the egg he’d been washing and it hit the bottom of the sink with a sickening splat. In his world eggs came from clean little cardboard cartons, not from…chickens.

Ama might have been smiling as she passed him carrying a large plastic container filled with sausage meat. It didn’t look as if her sausage meat came from neat little Styrofoam trays covered in plastic wrap either.

Once the rest of the eggs were clean, he began cracking them into the bowl. “How many?”

“A dozen eggs should do.”

From that scant clue as to how many they were feeding, he began building a waffle mix. She didn’t tell him where things were, leaving him to discover that milk was in the steel jug in the dairy fridge, and which cupboard held the baking powder and flour. When he didn’t have enough flour, she pointed him toward another door.

“Oh. My. God.” This time he could feel her smiling at his back, though he didn’t turn to see.

The door led to a pantry that could feed an army. There were walls of staples. Lidded plastic buckets on the floor were labeled: rice, lentils, red beans, black beans, and more. There was an entire wall of shelves dedicated to canned goods. Not canned like from a store, but canned like the glass jars that cost him ten or fifteen dollars apiece at Dean and DeLuca’s in SoHo. Asparagus, beans, corn…the whole alphabet of vegetables was represented. Jam jars nudged up against quarts of cherries and tomatoes—maybe he’d died and gone to heaven. A massive chest freezer was packed solid with bags of frozen fruit. Another with cuts of meat wrapped in brown butcher paper.

It was so overwhelming that he had to look at the empty container in his hands to remember what he’d come in to find. Flour. Right. He dipped a couple of scoops from a fifty-pound bag into the container and wandered back into the kitchen completely dazed.

Ama had taken over the waffle mixing. His delay would have put the meal out of sync if she hadn’t.

Rather than switching back, he handed off the flour and took over the sausage. She’d made patties and dropped them on the griddle. He knocked off a cooked bit and tasted it. Pork, heavy on the salt and light on the pepper.

Nathan ducked back into the pantry and grabbed an onion and a jar of roasted red peppers in oil. He diced both down quickly and got them running on the griddle. Thyme and a shot of Tabasco. More pepper, but no more salt. Soon the kitchen was thick with the smell of good sausage, fresh butter sizzling on the griddle, and hot waffles.

People started coming into the kitchen through the back door. They brought a wash of cold air and the smell of dry grass and sunshine in with them. Wow. He wasn’t first up, he was last. Minutes past sunrise and they’d all been outside working. That explained the two pots of coffee that had been going.

As each person came in, Nathan dropped an extra egg on the hot grill. Another taste of pepper-onion mix, then he added a touch more hot sauce and a pinch of tarragon.

No one spoke to him—they’d all know who he was by this point—but he could hear them chatting about the morning’s work. Horses, farm equipment he’d never heard of, and cabins under construction—a lot of discussion on that last point. But he was too busy cooking to let it be more than a wash over him.

Ama began handing him plates with a trio of giant waffles on each. Big appetites here.

With a broad spatula, he dropped a sausage patty beside the waffles, smothered it with the onion-pepper mix, slipped an over-easy egg on top of it, then handed off the plate. Finally, no one arrived to take the next plate.

In confusion he slipped out of the zone and discovered that he had no more eggs to serve either—the last one was crowned over the sausage on the plate he was holding.

He turned and everyone was sitting at the kitchen table. They all had plates before them and were busy dressing the waffles with butter and syrup.

The transition was always hard, but this one was stranger than most. He generally made a point of cooking the staff meal himself. Before the day’s dinner service began, he would serve everyone a plate, and himself last. They always ate together before the night’s mayhem began. Even Chef Guevarre, despite all of his control freak madness, always sat and ate with the crew—though he’d never cooked for them as that would be a “waste of his time and talent.”

But this was no table with hungover chefs, predatory sous chefs, and waitresses dressed far more to please with their bodies than their personalities.

Mac and Ama sat at either end. Six others sat scattered along the length. A striking redhead was leaning in to tease a guy with brown hair down to his collar. There was a huge guy with a buzz cut and paired steel hooks sticking out of one cuff, a sharp contrast to his other big powerful hand of flesh and blood. Two of the men, both sandy blond and rancher solid—and alike enough to be twins—rounded out the crowd.