Page 32 of His First Baby Rodeo

“Will you just do the vegetables and let me prove it to you?” he asked. “I can handle this dish. I’m not totally helpless when you’re not here, you know. I do manage to feed myself.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised you’ve stayed alive as long as you have,” she murmured, smiling.

“I heard that,” he said.

She got a bag of frozen vegetables out of the freezer. “Mixed veggies okay?”

“Yeah, that’s fine. You can just pop it in the microwave.”

“I mean, if you’re going to all the trouble to make a meat loaf, I’m at least going to sauté these in some olive oil and herbs,” she said.

“Good luck with that. I don’t think I have olive oil or herbs.”

“That’s right, youdidn’t, but I bought some the first week I was here,” she said. “Honestly, Mac, you haven’t noticed that your food has flavor these days?”

“It does taste better than what I usually make,” he admitted. “I thought it was just that you were a better cook than me.”

“Well, because I use more ingredients!” She pulled out the olive oil and some of the herbs she’d purchased. “You’re welcome to any of this stuff at any time, by the way.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do with it,” Mac said.

El laughed. “Smell the herbs, and if you smell something you like, you put it in your food while you’re cooking to make your food taste like it. It isn’t all that complicated.”

“And you don’t mind if I use it? I don’t want to use up the stuff you paid for.”

“First of all,” she said, holding up a canister of basil, “this cost about ninety-nine cents. I can get more if we run out. And secondly, we aren’t going to run out, because you’re not supposed to use big scoops of it. A little bit will work.” She went over to the meat loaf and sprinkled a bit of basil on top. “There we go. Let’s see what that does.”

“Really? It’s that simple?”

“Experimenting with herbs and spices is one of the best parts of cooking,” she told him. “And there’s really no way you canruina dish, unless you add too much of something. The secret is to keep tasting as you go most of the time — but we can’t really do that with the raw meat, so we’ll just bake this and see how we like it, and then next time we’ll know whether to include more or less basil.”

“I’ve got to hand it to you,” Mac admitted as he slid the loaf into the oven. “I never would have thought I could do any of this stuff. I wouldn’t have even tried it.”

“Aw, sure you would. You make this meat loaf all the time,” El reminded him. “You said so yourself.”

“Yeah, but I never deviate from my mother’s recipe,” he said. “This is already wildly adventurous for me.”

“Well, if you like that, you’re going to love what I’m doing with the vegetables,” she said, getting out the garlic salt. “Why don’t you set the table while we wait for the food to be ready? I have a feeling this is going to be one of the best dinners we’ve ever had.”

Mac laughed. “Do you know that you say that almost every night?”

“Hey, it’s not my fault we keep outdoing ourselves,” she said with a grin. “You should probably keep me around long-term. I don’t know what you’re going to do about feeding yourself once I leave. You’ll have to go back to eating cereal out of the box.”

Jokes like that were the closest either one of them ever came to acknowledging out loud the fact that their situation was temporary — that one day, in the not-too-distant future, El would be leaving the ranch for good.

* * *

“That’s the third marshmallow you’ve set on fire,” Mac observed as El withdrew her stick from their little bonfire. “I thought you took pride in your cooking skills.”

“Well, for one thing, roasting marshmallows isn’t cooking,” El said.

“Presumably it’s easier than cooking,” Mac said. “I wouldn’t have expected you to have so much trouble with it.”

“Secondly,” El pressed on as if he hadn’t spoken, “they’re better when they’re burnt.”

“What?”

“I can’t believe you don’t know this. Jeff taught me when I was a kid. I would’ve thought he would have told you — or maybe even that he learned it from you.”

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