Which was the kind of forward thinking Gideon found, in a moment alone, quietly relieving.
She'd done it without being asked and without mentioning it.
Which meant she'd been watching the sky the same way he had.
The storm came in around midnight Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning it was the kind of serious that Wyoming reserved for reminding people they were small.
The boys woke up to white in every window and went briefly insane with the kind of joy that only made sense if you were under 14 and had never had to actually work in it.
Even Ethan, who maintained his dignity with considerable effort most of the time, pressed his face to the window in the kitchen and said, "That's a lot," with an appreciation that was as close to wonder as he permitted himself.
"That's Wyoming," Gideon said, pulling on his coat.
"You're going out in that?" Clara said.
"Animals don't stop needing water because the weather's bad."
She looked at him with the expression she used when she thought something was either admirable or deeply impractical and hadn't decided which.
Then she said, "Ethan, go get your coat."
Gideon looked at her.
"He's been going out with you for three weeks," she said. "He's not going to melt."
Ethan was already at the hook where his coat hung.
"The thick gloves," Gideon said to him. "Dermit's, not yours."
"I know," Ethan said.
They went out into the white together.
The work in a storm like that was the kind that took everything you had and gave nothing back except the knowledge that you'd done it.
Gideon had worked through bad storms alone for three years.
A miserable mechanical process of getting from one necessary task to the next with your head down and your hands functioning.
Having Ethan there didn't make it faster.
The boy was 13 and still learning.
Some things took longer with an inexperienced second set of hands than they would have with no second set at all.
But it was different.
Gideon couldn't have explained it completely.
Having someone next to him in the wind, in the cold, who was working alongside him and not just near him, there was a quality to that that the efficiency argument couldn't account for.
Ethan broke through the ice on the water troughs without being asked, having watched Gideon do it enough times to know when it needed doing.
He dropped a feed bucket.
Cursed under his breath, a word Clara would have had views about.
Picked it up and kept going without any drama about it.
When one of the younger cattle pressed toward the wrong section of the barn in the chaos of the storm noise, Ethan moved to redirect her with a steadiness that the animal responded to.
Coming back from the far water trough, leaning into a wind that was taking the snow sideways, Ethan said loudly enough to be heard, but not by much, "Is it always like this?"
"No," Gideon said. "Sometimes it's worse."
A pause.
The wind filling it.
"Does it bother you?" Ethan asked.
"Being out in it alone, I mean. Before, when you didn't have..."
He stopped.
Edited himself.
"When you were doing this by yourself."
Gideon walked another 10 yards thinking about how to answer that honestly.
"Yes," he said.
Ethan nodded like he'd expected that answer and it had confirmed something.
"My mom does that," he said. "Does everything alone and then says it's fine and doesn't say it bothers her, but it does."
He was looking ahead into the snow, not at Gideon.
"I've been trying to help her since my dad died, but I'm not... I'm 13."
He said it with a kind of exhausted accuracy.