"Why?"
Edmund gave him the kind of shrug that wasn't really an answer. "Festival's next week. I'm running the food again." He looked at Jonas sideways. "There'll be more cornbread than you can eat."
Jonas looked at him. Edmund said it like a man who meant nothing more by it and went back to his whiskey.
The festival filled the square with bunting strung between the feed store and the bank, fiddle music, and townsfolk turned out in clothes Jonas hadn't seen them wear since Christmas. Lanterns hung from the porch posts, though the sun hadn't gone down yet, ready for when it did.
Edmund had tables set end to end along the boardwalk, loaded with food enough for twice the town. Lucy worked them in her boarding house apron, hair coming loose at her collar, sweat at her temple, while around her people danced and laughed in their good boots. Nobody thought to ask if she wanted to.
Jonas watched her a while from the edge of the crowd before he crossed over. "Dance with me."
Lucy looked at him like he'd asked her to fly. She looked past him to Edmund, who was watching from the drink table with his arms crossed. Edmund gave one nod, small enough that most wouldn't have caught it.
She untied her apron and laid it over the table. She was stiff at first, counting her steps, watching her own feet instead of him. Then the fiddle changed tunes, and she wasn't anymore. Partway through the second song, she smiled at nothing in particular, at the lantern light, or the noise of the crowd, or just at having both hands free for once in an evening.
Jonas decided he liked the sight of it more than he had any business deciding so fast. When the song ended, he asked if he could speak with her a moment, off to the side, away from where the crowd could make something of it.
"I need a cook out at the ranch. Good wage and a cabin of your own."
Lucy glanced past him to where Edmund stood watching from the drink table. "Mr. Hollis needs me here."
"I'll talk to Hollis."
She studied him the way a person studies a fence line before deciding whether it'll hold a horse. "I'll come look. That's not a yes."
"That's fair." Jonas touched the brim of his hat.
She rode out the next morning alone in a wagon Edmund lent her without being asked twice. Jonas walked her through the kitchen, a long room with a good stove, a window over the sink that looked out on the corral, and a flour bin built into the counter that had clearly been put there by someone who knew what a cook needed and not what looked handsome.
He showed her the cabin out back with its own door and its own stove, the two maids who helped with the wash, the hands working cattle in the near pasture, dust rising soft over the herd. The maids were sisters, Hattie and Lily, daughters of a homesteader two miles off, and they looked Lucy over the way young women look over anyone new who might outrank them in the kitchen. Lucy looked back without apology, and something settled between the three of them before a word was spoken, the kind of understanding that didn't need one.
He told her supper was at 6:00 and breakfast before sunup, and that beyond that the kitchen was hers to run as she saw fit. He didn't tell her how to do her work. She noticed that and didn't say so. Lucy looked at the cabin a long moment, then at the flour bin, then out at the corral.
"I'll come on a trial. We'll see if it suits."
"It'll suit." Then, before she could turn back toward the kitchen, Jonas added, "I have one condition."
She waited.
"I need you to smile more," he said.
Something in her face gave way before she decided to let it. She smiled, small but real, and let it sit there a moment before she spoke. "I'll see what I can do."
She came two weeks later with one bag and no complaint about the cabin being smaller than the boarding house kitchen. It was the first room she'd ever had that locked from the inside with her own key, and she took some private satisfaction in that fact without ever saying so aloud to anyone. The hands took to her cooking fast. She fed eight men like she'd been doing it her whole life, which in a way she had. She kept the kitchen the way Edmund kept his ledger, exact and uncomplaining, and within a month the two maids had taken to calling her "Mrs. Harland" in jest, though nobody corrected them for it.