7. Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
ELLA
Lockharts don’t do small dinners, and the night before my first wedding, nobody was ever going to let the groom eat alone in a cabin.
By six the long table’s carried out to Firepit Meadow, the way it always is when the weather allows and half the time when it doesn’t.
Daddy’s got the fire going in the ring. Mom’s bossing everyone around.
Cassie hauls the benches, Rose strings the camp lights through the low branches because Rose pretends to hate everything, but she’ll spend forty minutes getting the lights right.
Faith sets out plates while telling anyone who’ll listen about a hawk she saw on the north trail.
The mountains turn purple. The creek babbles down the hill. First fireflies come up out of the long grass like sparks off a struck flint, one, then ten, then more than a person could count.
I run the wedding list in my head twice and then make myself put it away. Tonight there’s nothing left to do but this.
Ben comes across the meadow, showered, wearing a clean shirt, his hair still damp at the collar. He’s carrying a tin under one arm.
The shirt fits him in a way I have no professional reason to notice. Shoulders, then the forearms under the rolled sleeves, then the damp curl at his collar. I get very busy with a stack of napkins. Tomorrow I hand this man to his bride. My eyes can stand down anytime now.
“I was sent with dessert,” he says. “Muffins. My cousin Luke’s wife makes them. I’m instructed to tell you the recipe’s a secret and she’ll deny the ingredients under oath.”
“What kind?” Faith’s already reaching.
“Peach. There’s a second tin back at the cabin I’m under strict orders not to open till tomorrow. My cousin Maeve packed it. I don’t know what’s in it. I’ve been threatened.”
“Threatened how?” Rose asks, interested for the first time all day.
“She said if I open it early she’ll know. That’s all. She’ll know.” Ben sets the muffins down. “I believe her.”
“I like her,” says Rose, and strings the last of the lights.
Dinner is loud. Brisket and beans and Mom’s cornbread, plates passed left because Daddy insists left is correct, and nobody remembers why.
Ben gets wedged between Cassie and Faith, which is the deep end of this family, and he doesn’t drown.
Cassie quizzes him on colic and hoof abscesses and everything else a vet-to-be wants to argue about, and I watch her decide he’s competent, which from Cassie is huge.
Faith gets him talking about trail routes in the Smokies.
Rose tests him twice with that flat stare she does, and both times he passes by not flinching.
“So, Ben.” Daddy leans back with his coffee. “Your family’s got a place up in Wild Briar Creek.”
“My cousins run it. Horses, mostly, and a trekking outfit my cousin Noah’s building up. I help where I’m needed. Ethan’s the one with his name on it, but there’s always more work than hands.” He turns his mug. “It’s good work. Quiet.”
“Quiet.” Daddy nods slow. “Man learns a lot about himself, working quiet.”
“Learns whether he can stand his own company, anyway.”
“And can you?”
Ben considers it while the fire pops. “Most days.”
Daddy laughs from the chest, and that’s that. He’s in.
“Shame Carla couldn’t come down tonight,” Mom says, in the voice she uses when she means the opposite of shame and is being Christian about it.
“Her folks are throwing a party at the club. Old friends, neighbors, that crowd.” Ben says it without bitterness, which somehow makes it worse. “They don’t hold with rehearsal dinners. Carla’s mama says they’re for people who expect something to go wrong.”
Rose snorts into her sweet tea.
“They said there wasn’t any need for me to make the drive.” He shrugs, as if it’s reasonable to be excluded from a party the night before your wedding. “Everybody there already met me at the engagement party. Tonight’s for their people. I’ll see them all tomorrow when it counts.”
There’s a small silence where my family works very hard not to look at each other. The night before this man’s wedding, the bride’s family threw a party and told the groom he wasn’t needed. And he drove down early to a ranch full of strangers and got told, inside of two days, that he was.
“Well,” Mom says, and passes him the cornbread like a medal. “Their loss is our gain.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’d call it a trade-up. The brisket alone.”
The table laughs, and I look at my plate. He’d rather be here. He is here, borrowed into belonging at a plank table in a cow pasture, while the woman he’s marrying is drinking cocktails with the best man. I’m the only person in this meadow who knows what that means.
Every time I think about what I know, I reach for the serving dishes and make myself useful, because it’s easier than thinking.
The plates come to me out of habit. I’m stacking before Mom’s fork is down. Nobody notices. Nobody ever notices, it’s just Ella clearing the way the creek’s just the creek.
Except when I get to the wash station Daddy rigged by the pump house, there’s already a man standing at it with his sleeves rolled, running the water hot.
“You wash or dry?” Ben says.
“You’re the guest of honor. Go sit down.”
“Can’t. Your mother tried to give me a third helping. Only safe place on this ranch is standing at a sink.” He hands me the towel, decision made. “I’ll wash. You know where everything lives.”
So that’s how the night goes. Ben washing, me drying, the fire and the family noise at our backs, fireflies working the meadow, and the two of us in that easy shoulder-to-shoulder quiet we found on the decking.
“Your family,” he says, partway through the platters. “This is a regular weeknight for them, huh?”
I stack a serving bowl and smile. “You’ll get used to it.”
The words are out before I hear what’s in them. You’ll get used to it. Like there’s a string of these nights ahead of him, like he’s ours now, like tomorrow he isn’t marrying a woman who’ll want him at her daddy’s ranch for holidays, in that big glass house with the caterers.
Ben says nothing. He runs the next plate under the tap and passes it over. His fingers brush mine on the handoff, wet and warm, nothing meant by it. My body disagrees.
“She used to sit right there.” I nod at the flat rock on the far side of the fire ring, because I need somewhere else to look.
“Evelyn. That was her spot. She’d have a blanket and her notebook, and she’d make everybody come to her like a queen holding court.
Last summer she was out here, she couldn’t walk the hill anymore, so Daddy drove her down in the truck.
We set her chair by the fire, and she looked at the barn and told me, ‘Next summer, baby, that barn’ll be full of dancing. ’”
The water runs. He waits. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who waits like your silence is worth the same as your talk.
“She missed it by eight months,” I say. “Tomorrow’s the first dance that barn’s ever going to hold. And it’s yours.”
“And it’s an honor,” Ben says. “To be the first. You did it, Ella. A promise kept is a promise kept. Your grandmamma might not be here to see it, but I’m sure she’ll know.”
I look up at him. The fire’s behind him so I can’t read his face, just the shape of him, sleeves rolled, my grandmother’s serving platter small in his big careful hands.
Carla Vaughn doesn’t deserve to be danced with by this man.
I dry the platter so hard it’s a wonder it doesn’t crack.
The family drifts home in stages, Faith asleep on a bench before she’ll admit it, Rose and Cassie carrying the table between them, Daddy banking the fire.
Ben says his goodnights, then sets off across the dark meadow toward the guest cabin with the empty muffin tin under his arm.
The fireflies close behind him like water behind a boat.
I’m folding the last towel when Mom comes to stand beside me. She’s watching him go, arms crossed over her apron, her face soft in the firelight.
“He’s a good man,” she says.
“Yeah, he is.”
And the secret turns over in my chest like a live coal, because Carla swore he’d know before the wedding, she swore it with her hand on my arm, and the wedding is tomorrow at three o’clock.
If she doesn’t find her nerve tonight, I’m going to stand at the back of my grandmother’s barn in my best dress and watch a good man walk into an ambush.