6. Chapter Six
Chapter Six
BEN
The morning before my wedding, I get up in the dark, make the bed so fucking tight you could bounce a quarter off it, and go looking for something to fix.
The plan, if anybody asks, is a walk. But my boots take me down past the paddock, over the little timber bridge with the creek running loud underneath it, and stop me square in front of Something Blue. My hands have been itching since the second I saw that torn-up decking from the truck.
The lumber’s already here, stacked and tarped. Whoever her builders were, they left their lines chalked before the company folded, and the lines are good. All the thinking’s been done. All that’s missing is someone to swing the hammer.
The sky’s gone from black to gray to a thin, cold pink over the mountains, and the mist is lifting off the pasture in ropes. There’s nobody awake in the world but me and the cattle. I find a pry bar in the site box and start pulling the rotten boards.
It’s the best I’ve felt in a week. Getting married is the right thing to do, but my gut is a tangle of nerves and my mind needs occupying away from whatever shit-storm’s going on in there.
I don’t look up till the sun’s properly over the ridge, and when I do, Ella’s standing at the end of the decking with two mugs of coffee and an expression I can’t read.
“You can’t do this,” she says.
“Somebody has to.”
“You’re a guest.”
“I’m a guest with a pry bar.” I set the next board on the pile. “A man on a mission. Near impossible to stop.”
“Ben…” She says my name like the start of a longer speech, then seems to lose the rest of it.
She looks at the stripped joists, the stacked rot, the chalk lines waiting.
Her free hand comes up against her throat.
“You’re getting married tomorrow. You cannot spend today doing demolition on my decking. ”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s your wedding.”
“It’s Carla’s wedding.” It comes out before I’ve checked it, and sounds worse in the morning air than it ever sounded in my head.
I roll it back. “What I mean is, she’s got it handled.
All of it. Has for months. My job is to show up clean and stand where I’m told, and that takes about an hour.
Which leaves me the rest of today to either sit in that cabin counting my own fingers, or be useful. ”
“You’re supposed to relax.”
“This is me relaxing.” I hold my hand out for the mug. “That coffee’s getting cold.”
She looks at the mug like she’s forgotten she’s carrying it. Then she crosses the new-bare joists, balanced easy as a cat, hands it over, and doesn’t leave.
“You fixed the gate,” she says.
“What gate?”
“Don’t.” She points the rim of her own mug at me. “The top paddock gate. I found it yesterday, swinging like new. There’s only one person on this ranch I didn’t already know the whereabouts of at six in the morning.”
“Might’ve been elves.”
“Ben.”
“It was a twenty-minute job, Ella. The hinge was sitting right there in the barn with the price sticker still on it. Somebody bought the part and then never got the time.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what’s the point?”
She opens her mouth. Closes it. And she runs into the same wall I’ve been running into my whole life, trying to say something without saying too much.
“Thank you,” she says finally, like the words are in a foreign language she’s only just learning. “For the gate.”
“You’re welcome for the gate.”
“The frames on the west side are spongy,” she says, after a minute, quieter, like a confession.
“And there’s a run of cladding that wants cutting out.
I’ve been lying awake doing the math on whether the deposit money stretches to a new contractor before tomorrow, and it doesn’t. It doesn’t stretch to a pizza.”
“I know. I saw the frames yesterday.”
“You saw the frames?”
“I notice things. I can’t help it.” I drink the coffee. It’s good. “Two of us, one day. Decking and the worst of the cladding. Frames’ll hold through a wedding, they just can’t hold through a winter. We can get you to Saturday looking right.”
“We,” she says.
“You any good with a drill?”
Over the next four hours, I learn Ella Lockhart is better than good.
She doesn’t hover, doesn’t perform, and doesn’t fill the quiet with talk for its own sake.
I set a board, she’s got the next one turned and ready before I reach for it.
She reads the chalk lines once and never asks twice.
When a cut goes wrong, she says “fucking fuck sticks” and moves on, ignoring my laugh.
Working with most people is slower than working alone. Working with her is like finding out the tool you’ve been missing was a person.
It’d be easier if she weren’t also distracting as hell. She’s down to a tank top by ten, hair stuck to her neck, sawdust across her front, and every time she leans over the chalk line I find urgent business at the far end of the board. I’m not proud of noticing her. Can’t make myself stop.
Somewhere in the middle of it, the talk starts on its own, the way it does when your hands are busy and nobody’s looking at anybody.
She tells me about the grandmother. Five years of lifting and medicines and long nights, her sisters too young or too busy to share it, a college she walked out of in second year and never walked back into.
“Everybody says it must have been so hard.” She lines up a screw, drives it clean. “It was. The part nobody understands is that I miss it. Being needed like that. When she died, I didn’t just lose her, I lost my purpose.”
She goes still for a second, surprised to hear it out loud.
“Then you brought her barn back to life,” I say.
“Then I brought her barn back.” She laughs, small and self-conscious. “Cheaper than therapy.”
“Louder, anyway.”
She laughs again, head back, and something in my chest turns over like an engine catching on a cold morning. I put my eyes back on the work where they belong.
She’s no trouble to be next to. That’s all. Some people grate on you, and some people you can stand beside, and she’s the second one. Tomorrow I’m marrying Carla, but there’s no law against noticing a person is easy to be around.
We break at noon on the tailgate of my truck.
She produces sandwiches from somewhere, because, being Ella, she made sandwiches for a job she spent the morning telling me not to do.
Ham and mustard. We eat looking down the pasture, cattle drifting, the mountains stacked up blue on bluer, and neither of us says a word for ten minutes.
It’s the least alone I’ve felt in years.
“Can I say something?” she says at last.
“Floor’s yours.”
She turns the mug she’s refilled twice, watching her own hands. Whatever it is, it’s heavy. Her mouth opens.
“Carla,” she starts.
And then a good ten seconds of nothing, while she goes hunting for a word and comes back empty-handed.
“Carla’s got good taste in barns,” she settles on. “She picked the right one.”
It isn’t what she was going to say. She knows and I know it. She takes a bite of a sandwich she doesn’t want and drops her eyes to the ground.
My phone rings.
Carla’s face lights up the screen where it sits on the tailgate between us.
The photo from the engagement shoot, gold dress, gold light, her laugh frozen at its brightest. The ringtone is one she programmed in herself as a joke, some pop song I never learned the words to, tinny and endless against the quiet of the pasture.
Beside me, Ella’s already moving. Up off the tailgate, half-eaten sandwich stacked back in the foil, hand going to her back pocket for the list.
“Take it,” she says. “I’ll see you later.”
The phone rings on.
“Ella.”
“Take the call, Ben.” She smiles at me, and it’s the venue smile, the one she gives the clipboard men and the delivery drivers. “It’s bad luck to keep a bride waiting.”
She walks up the track toward the house, shoulders squared as if she’s carrying boxes I can’t see.
I look at the phone a second longer.
Then I answer it.