5. Chapter Five
Chapter Five
ELLA
By the time the rest of the house surfaces, I’ve been up since before the sun and I’ve already got the day wrestled into a list.
The Main House kitchen fills one Lockhart at a time, each of them drawn by the smell of coffee steaming on the counter and the smell of Mom’s cooking.
Out the window, the mountains are smoking over the top pasture, cattle strung along the fence line waiting on Daddy, and somewhere down by the barn a truck is already backing up to deliver something I’ll have to sign for.
Two days until the wedding. My first wedding.
I run the list again in my head, because running it is the only thing that keeps my hands from shaking.
Grandma Evelyn’s notebook is open on the counter by my elbow, where I left it last night. I don’t move it. Some mornings I just like it there, in the middle of things, the way she used to be.
Cassie’s down first because the animals don’t care what time she went to bed. She’s got a lamb tucked inside her flannel shirt like a papoose, a bottle in her free hand, and she pours her coffee one-handed without spilling a drop.
“Bottle baby,” she says before I can ask. “Mama wouldn’t take him. He’s fine. He’s just rude.”
The lamb bleats as if it objects to the character assessment.
Rose slides in next, sunglasses on, indoors, still smelling faintly of the bar.
She closed at Bootleggers last night and got in past three, which explains the sunglasses.
She takes a black coffee to her chair in the corner, back to the window, and says nothing to anybody. For Rose, that is good morning.
“Late night?” I ask.
“Early morning,” she says into the mug. “Bachelor party from Gatlinburg. Twelve grown men, one credit card, zero sense.”
Faith comes in from outside, pink from the cold and smelling of horse, her braid already half undone. She’s been out on the trails since first light again, and Mom clocks it the second she’s through the door.
“Just a gentle one,” Faith says before Mom can get her mouth open. “Flat ground. I promise.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“You were about to.” Faith kisses Mom’s cheek to take the sting out of it and steals a strip of bacon straight from the pan. Everybody in this family has spent so long being careful with Faith that she’s had to grow twice as stubborn just to breathe.
Mom’s at the stove turning out eggs and bacon and a skillet of biscuits that could end wars, flour to her elbows even here, at home, like the bakery follows her around. She points the spatula at me the way she always does.
“Eat something before you do one more thing.”
“I’ll eat when the linen’s signed for.”
“You’ll eat now.” She sets a plate down in front of me. “Evelyn didn’t leave you that barn so you could starve to death finishing it.”
The back door bangs open and Beth comes in wearing half the arena.
She’s mud to the knee, mud on one cheek, and a grin on her like she just robbed a bank and got clean away with it. Beth ropes before breakfast most days, and lately most days means hauling her mare over to Sam Whitaker’s pens and coming home smelling of calf and glory.
“Two-four!” Beth announces to the room. “Two point four seconds, clean catch, and Sam said that in all his years of training breakaway ropers, he’s never seen hands that fast on a woman or a man.”
“Sam said that,” Rose says, not lifting the sunglasses.
“He did.”
“Sam.”
“Shut up, Rose.” Beth’s ears go pink under the mud, which is interesting. I store it away for a day when I have the spare attention to spend on it. This is not that day.
Then it’s Daddy on the porch, talking away to someone with a lower voice than his. My stomach flips in a way I can’t think about right now.
“Found this one fixing to eat cold cereal by himself in the guest cabin like a stray,” Daddy says, holding the door open, and there is Ben Callahan on my mother’s threshold with his hat in his hands.
“I don’t want to put anybody out.”
The entire table looks at him like he’s crazy.
“Sit,” says Mom.
He takes the chair with its back to the wall, the one nobody else ever wants. He says please and thank you to my mother in a way that softens her a full degree, and when Cassie’s lamb hollers, he reaches over without a word and holds the bottle steady so she can eat with both hands.
I catch myself looking at his hands. Big, scarred across two knuckles, steady under a lamb bottle like it weighs nothing, and a completely unauthorized thought walks through my head wearing muddy boots.
I escort it out. The man’s a groom. My groom, professionally speaking, which is the only speaking there is.
He fits. That’s the trouble with the man.
He fits at my mother’s table like a chair that was always in the set and just got carried in from another room.
Faith finds out he’s horse people and that’s it, she’s got him trapped in a conversation about trail gaits, and he answers her like her questions are worth answering.
When Rose says something sideways and mean, he laughs, and Rose is so pleased with herself she takes the sunglasses off. Even the lamb likes him.
I sit at the end of the table with Evelyn’s notebook under my hand and watch a man who is marrying somebody else in two days make my whole family glad. I think about what I know, and the biscuit turns to sand in my mouth.
“What’s that?” Ben nods at the notebook, and the table goes a little quiet, the way it always does around Evelyn.
“It was my grandmother’s.” I open it before I can talk myself out of it.
Her handwriting. Her sketches. A tobacco barn with its doors thrown wide, string lights drawn in with a yellow pencil, and beside it, in her looping hand, the words Something Blue, underlined twice.
“She had this whole idea. That the old barn didn’t have to just stand there falling down, being useless.
That people could get married in it. She used to walk me down and point up at the rafters and tell me exactly where the lights would hang. ”
“She left it to Ella,” Mom says quietly. “The barn. The dream. All of it.”
“I looked after her at the end. Five years.” I say it because somebody always has to fill that silence, and around here it’s usually me. “She spent about four of them making me promise I’d finish it. So I’m finishing it.”
Ben doesn’t tell me he’s sorry, which is the first thing most people say and the least useful. He looks at the notebook. Then he looks at me.
“She’d have liked seeing it full,” he says.
It’s such a small thing. It has no business doing what it does to me.
The linen truck pulls in, and the morning breaks apart the way mornings do around here, into signatures and deliveries and Faith and Beth arguing over whose turn it is on dishes. I’m grateful for it. I don’t know how much longer I can sit in a warm kitchen holding a secret.
I take the delivery slip out to sign it, and walk the long way back, down past the paddock, because I need one single minute where nobody needs anything from me.
That’s when I see the gate.
The top paddock gate has hung crooked on a busted hinge since March. Daddy keeps meaning to get to it. I keep meaning to remind him. We propped it with a cinder block so long ago that the block has grown into the grass.
It’s hanging straight.
New hinge, the bolts still bright. Somebody’s planed the bottom rail so it swings clean instead of dragging, and when I push it, it shuts with a small tidy click.
Ben must have fixed it. Nobody asked him. Nobody so much as mentioned it. He must have gotten up at first light and fixed our broken gate before he even thought about breakfast.
I stand in the wet grass with a delivery slip in my hand, my chest tightening.
He is going to be somebody’s husband in two days.
And I’m the one who knows he shouldn’t be.