“I shouldn’t have eaten so fast,” Jamie said. Without another word, he turned and went out of the dining hall through the double doors at one end.
Quickly, Leland followed him, ignoring the startled looks of the staff in the serving line.
Just as Leland stepped through the double doors, he found Jamie by an open trash can, bending over it, retching. All of Leland’s sympathies rose in a way he’d not expected. Moving close, he patted Jamie’s back and stayed near as he threw up. There was nothing more lonely than being sick in a new place, and there was just so much he didn’t understand about Jamie’s situation.
“Easy now, easy,” he said, sympathy rising inside of him in waves.
Jamie finished throwing up and groaned low in his chest, resting his head on his arm along the rim of the trash can. His dark hair trailed about his head, threatening to get dragged through the vomit.
“C’mon, now,” Leland said, tugging on his t-shirt, noting the heat of Jamie’s body beneath the cotton. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Get you some ginger ale and crackers.”
Jamie looked up, his eyes full of a kind of low surprise, as though he couldn’t believe anybody cared enough to look after him in this way. His body shivered in the cool air that came through the breezeway off the dining hall, where shipments came in and where the dumpsters were stored. Guests never came back here, so it was a little more workaday than most parts of the ranch. It was also not the place to linger if you’d just been sick.
“Come with me,” Leland said, quite gently. “We’ll use the staff restroom.”
Jamie seemed a little resistant to this, as though he thought he was about to be tricked and led into an even more dismal situation.
“I was hungry,” he said in a quiet voice as Leland guided him back inside.
It was easy to see that Jamie’s mind was whirling with ways to explain his behavior without giving too much away. His life before coming to the ranch had obviously made him cautious. Any upbeat smiles from earlier had now worn away to nothing. He was exhausted, through and through, building in Leland more of those same feelings from earlier, that of wanting to help.
“Don’t worry about that now,” Leland said. He led Jamie back through the dining hall to the service area, where staff was cleaning up from the lunchtime meal. “Here’s the restroom. Go get cleaned up.”
As Leland watched Jamie go into the restroom, he knew that had Jamie been anybody else, whether a new ranch hand or an experienced trail boss, he would have left it at that, a direction to wash up and instructions for one of the kitchen staff to fetch him that ginger ale.
It was not his style to linger like this. He trusted his staff to look after these kinds of small details. His job as a foreman was to delegate, and to expect that his more experienced employees would then, in turn, run their departments.
It was not his job to fetch and carry for a newly hired hand who didn’t know the size of his own belly. So why was he doing exactly that? Why did he have the ginger ale poured and ready when Jamie came out of the restroom, the ends of his dark hair dripping as though he’d stuck his face beneath the tap with the water running at full blast?
The center of his t-shirt was damp, etching the lines of his ribs and sternum. He was on the thin side, still growing, still on his way to becoming a man.
Leland jerked his eyes away and focused on handing over the can of ginger ale and the glass of ice.
“You can drink that,” he said, nodding as one of the white-aproned kitchen staff came over with a small bowl of salted crackers. “And eat those, slowly.”
He was used to being obeyed, but as Jamie looked up at him, ready to follow orders, something bright shone in his green eyes, as though he trusted anything that Leland might tell him to do would be the right thing.
There was a pile of accounting and other paperwork waiting for Leland in his cabin, and he needed to make a few phone calls about delayed orders before finally calling it a day. He didn’t have the luxury of lingering, yet he lingered. Lingered and watched Jamie while he nibbled on the crackers and sipped on the ginger ale.
“I’ll take you around for a bit. A walk in the fresh air will do you good. Then I’ll hand you over to Clay,” said Leland, smiling, as he knew how good Clay would be at this task. “We’ll find out what you’re good at. Do you need a clean shirt?”
Jamie lifted his can of ginger ale, holding it high as though he was afraid of spilling it on himself.
“I think I’m okay,” he said, looking up at Leland again. “I’m sorry to be so much trouble after you gave me the job without sending me to Chugwater first.”
Again, Leland wanted to know how Jamie had come to such a state, with worn out sneakers and an about-to-expire driver’s license. Sure, he’d worked in a meat packing plant, which was a rough way to live, no matter how you looked at it. But that didn’t explain everything else.
“You sure you’re up for this tour?” Leland asked, gently.
“Yeah, I’m up for it.” Jamie swallowed the rest of the ginger ale in one gulp, too fast for Leland’s comfort, then put the can and the now-empty bowl on a nearby metal counter. He wiped cracker crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand. He finished the gesture with an exhausted nod as his dark hair fell over his eyes. “Just show me the way.”
For a long, terrible instant, Leland had to stifle the impulse to brush away the last bit of crumb that still clung to Jamie’s mouth, but this was hardly the time and, in the breezeway of a common work area, hardly the place. Besides, what was he having such tender instincts like that for?
“Let’s get to it,” Leland said.
He was tempted to pat Jamie on the shoulder as a kind of reassurance that things would look better in the morning, and to say something encouraging, but he wasn’t a small talk kind of man. He explained how things worked, gave orders, received information, and ran one of the sweetest ranches in Wyoming.
His world was the Farthingdale Guest Ranch, just as he wanted it to be. Only now someone had stepped inside that space, creating a small ripple effect that even if it had only just started, didn’t look like it was going to stop.
