4. Chapter Four
Chapter Four
BEN
Blue Ridge Ranch is exactly how I pictured it and nothing like it at all. Carla showed me photos, and Ella sat at the table with us once, out at Carla’s daddy’s place, writing everything down in a notebook while Carla talked. I built a picture out of that. None of it prepared me for the real thing.
The Smoky Mountains are living up to their name.
I weave down through a town that’s managed the balance most places lose, enough polish for the tourists without selling out the people who actually live here.
Cedar Ridge. Main Street is one long run of storefronts with the mountains stacked behind them like a backdrop nobody had the nerve to paint that pretty on purpose.
There’s a bakery with a line out the door and a smell coming off it that makes my stomach growl even after the Callahans fed me enough for three men.
A white clapboard church with a hand-lettered board out front.
A bar called Bootleggers with the blinds still down.
A feed store. A vet’s office. A barber pole turning slow.
People lift a hand off the wheel when they pass, the way they do in places where a stranger’s truck gets noticed and forgiven in the same second.
Then it’s just the road and a creek running alongside it, a wooden sign burned with BLUE RIDGE RANCH and an arrow pointing up a gravel track.
I turn in.
The track climbs, and the whole place opens up in front of me.
Green pasture running up into the tree line.
Black cattle scattered across it like somebody spilled them out of a jar.
A couple of horses at a rail fence, heads up, watching the truck come.
Wildflowers running loose and wild along the ditches, that I know Carla will want in every photo.
And off to the left, down by the creek with a little timber bridge crossing it, a big old tobacco barn with a hand-painted sign that reads SOMETHING BLUE.
There’s a stack of fresh lumber out front that says, plainer than words, the venue isn’t finished.
I slow the truck without meaning to. Fixing things is what I do, and I can’t stop running through a checklist in my head. Shit, my fingers are literally tapping the steering wheel, itching to be put to work.
The decking’s half torn up. There’s a run of guttering hanging loose off the near corner, and a stretch of cladding gone soft that needs cutting out before the rot walks any further into the good wood. Two men and one long weekend, and you’d have it right.
But it isn’t my barn, isn’t my job, isn’t my anything. I’m the groom. Grooms stand where they’re put and sign where they’re pointed.
So that’s the venue. That’s where I’m getting married in three days.
I pull up outside what must be the main house, switch off the engine, and take it all in.
Every window along the porch has a rocking chair under it and a fern hanging over it.
There are coffee cups left out on the rail like people come and go from this porch all day, and nobody bothers carrying anything back inside.
It’s the home I used to build in my head as a kid.
The one where the door stays unlocked because there’s always somebody inside it.
I’ve been invited in for a weekend. That’s not the same as belonging, and I know the difference too well to go forgetting it now.
A big man comes down the porch steps before I’ve got my door open. Silver at the temples, forearms like fence posts, a face that’s spent sixty years outdoors and is happy about it.
“You’ll be Ben.” He puts out a hand and near about swallows mine whole. “Silas Lockhart. We are real glad to welcome you to Blue Ridge Ranch.”
“Thank you, sir. Appreciate you having me.”
“Sir.” He snorts. “It’s Silas. Sir was my daddy, and he’s been gone twenty years.” He claps me on the shoulder and steers me toward the house like I’m already one of his, and it does something to me, how easy he makes it look. “Coffee’s on. May’s got biscuits in. You make good time?”
“Left early.”
“Knew I’d like you,” he says. I decide the feeling’s mutual.
That’s when I see her.
She comes around the side of the house with a stack of boxes up past her chin, walking blind, feeling for the porch steps with the toe of one boot.
Ella. I remember her properly now. At that table, she was the one who barely said a word and still walked out with the entire wedding written down while the rest of us only talked about it.
She’s smaller than the boxes she’s carrying. The load is too big for her. My body reacts before my brain’s caught up.
“Ella, honey, let the man get his bearings before you put him to work,” Silas calls, but I’m already moving.
I lift the top two boxes off her stack before she’s done telling me she’s fine.
“I’ve got it,” she says, to the gap where the boxes just were.
“I know you do.” I settle them against my chest. “Where do you want them?”
She looks at me then. Hazel eyes with a little green in them, a smudge of something across her jaw, hair coming loose from whatever she tied it back with at dawn.
For a second she just watches me like nobody’s lifted a thing out of her arms in a long, long while and she can’t work out where the catch is.
I clock her features before I can stop myself. Curves a work shirt was never going to hide. Damp at the collarbone. A mouth built for arguing. Then I close the book on it hard, because in three days I’m a married man, and I shouldn’t be noticing any of that on anyone but my fiancée.
“Cabin porch,” she says finally. “This way. Thank you.”
The guest cabin sits off a way from the main house, its own porch, its own square of mountain.
“Welcome,” Ella says, kicking open the door and nodding for me to go inside as she sets down her own boxes.
Inside it’s small and clean, and somebody’s plainly been in here making it right.
There’s a basket set out on the table. Biscuits wrapped in a checked cloth, a jar of honey, a bar of soap that smells like the woods after rain, and a mason jar full of ditch wildflowers, cut and set on the sill where the morning light will find them.
Nobody’s made a fuss over me like this in longer than I can remember.
“Mom made the biscuits.” Ella’s already moving, squaring the basket to the table edge, straightening a towel that was already straight.
“Coffee and the good creamer are in the fridge. Extra quilts in the chest at the foot of the bed. Water runs hot if you give it a minute. And as you know, the main house is right there, so if you need a single thing, day or night, somebody’s always awake. ”
“Ella.”
She stops.
“It’s real nice. All of it. Thank you.”
Something moves across her face, there and gone before I can read it. “You’re welcome,” she says.
“When did you last sleep?”
That stops her flat. She blinks at me. “Excuse me?”
“You’ve got the look.” I tip my head at her. “My cousin gets it. The one who does everything for everybody and swears up and down he’s fine.”
For a second, I figure I’ve overstepped. Then the corner of her mouth tips up, barely.
“I’ll sleep in September,” she says, and then she’s off again, twitching a curtain, testing the window latch, her hand drifting up to the loose hair and tucking it back inside its clip.
A horn blows down by the barn. Her head comes up like a doe’s.
“That’s the lumber. Or the linens. Or the man about the decking, who swore he’d be here Tuesday.” She’s already at the door. “I’m so sorry, I have to see to it.”
“Go,” I tell her. “I’m good here.”
She goes.
Through the cabin window, she crosses the yard at something close to a run.
A man in a tool belt starts in on her before she’s halfway to him.
Somebody else is waving a clipboard from the barn door.
Her phone’s already up at her ear. She’s answering three people at once and moving the whole time, and not one of them thinks to take a thing off her.
I stand in a room full of somebody else’s kindness and watch Ella Lockhart carry the entire place on her back like she was built for the job and nobody ever once thought to ask if she wanted it.
Three days from now I marry Carla in that half-built barn and start the quiet, steady life I drove two hours to get to. It’s all arranged. It’s all in the folder. There is not one thing left for me to want.
I’ve got no earthly business still standing at this window.
I stay at it anyway.