13. Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Thirteen
ELLA
He doesn’t tell me to leave twice.
Maybe he hasn’t got a second one in him.
Maybe he doesn’t mean the first one. Either way I stay, a few feet off his shoulder, in the cool shadow where the mown grass gives up and the ordinary weeds take over.
In front of us the land drops away toward the creek.
The pasture runs gold to the fence line. The cattle graze on, unbothered.
Every instinct I own wants to fix, fetch, schedule, and soothe. I could bring him water. I could bring him whiskey. I could bring him a chair, a plan, a speech.
I bite it all back and stand there. Some things you don’t organize.
The silence stretches. A minute. Three. Behind the wall at my back, the murmur of two hundred people rises and falls like surf. Underneath it I can hear Naomi’s voice working the room.
“Sixty seconds,” Ben says.
I wait.
“That’s what I keep coming back to.” He’s still watching the mountains.
His voice is quiet and terribly even. “The girls knocked on her door and she didn’t answer.
Nerves, everybody said. And the whole time she was in your equipment barn with his hands in the laces of her dress.
Rings were sitting right there on the workbench.
He fucked my fiancée while the rings sat a few feet away.
” A breath. “Sixty more seconds and I’d have married her.
I was ready to. I’d have stood up there, meaning every word.
She’d have stood there fresh out of his hands, meaning…
” He stops. “I don’t know what she’d have meant.
I’ve quit fucking guessing what anything meant. ”
“Ben.”
“They were laughing.” He says it like the rest finally makes sense, and that’s the piece that doesn’t. “Not even… It wasn’t torrid. It was easy. Like they’d done it a hundred times.”
His arms uncross. For one second there’s real heat in him, a current hunting for ground. I brace for the shout or the swing at the wall, and I’d welcome either. He looks at his right hand as if it belongs to someone else. Then he crosses his arms again and packs it all back down, and that’s worse.
I know, I don’t say. I saw the hundred times in one look through a cabin door. The words pile up behind my teeth.
“I’m sorry about your barn,” he says.
Of all the things. I turn and stare at him.
“My barn?”
“Your first wedding.” He looks down at his hands.
“You rebuilt that place board by board. Five years, your grandmother’s notebook, and every dime you had.
All you needed from me was to stand still for twenty minutes, and instead I torched your opening day in front of the entire town.
That’s what they’ll say now, you know how towns work.
Not the venue where the flowers were perfect.
The venue where the groom walked out.” He rubs the back of his neck.
“You did everything right, and you’re going to pay for what she did.
I couldn’t fix it. I stood there doing the math at the altar and there was no way through it that didn’t cost you. ”
I can’t speak.
He just watched his life burn down. He found out the woman he loved was a lie in a white dress.
And he’s sitting in the weeds behind my barn, apologizing to me.
Carrying my mess in the middle of his own house fire, because that’s the only way this man knows how to hold pain, to find whose load got heavier and put himself under it.
Nobody has ever taken care of Ben. It’s the one true thing Carla ever told me.
“Stop,” I manage. “You don’t get to be sorry. Not to me. You’re the only person in that barn who did nothing wrong.”
He huffs. Not a laugh. “That so?”
“That’s so.”
And here it is. The cliff edge, right under my feet, closer than it’s ever come.
Because he’s wrong, and I’m the proof. He thinks he’s the only one who knew for those sixty seconds.
He believes his shame is that he found out too late, and the truth is somebody found out three days early and let him walk into a wedding.
Set the tables for it. Pinned the flower on him. Handed him sunscreen.
Tell him. Now, while it’s all already broken, while one more truth could just fall in with the wreckage. Tell him, because in a week the wreck will be settled, and the truth will be a second wreck all its own.
“Ben, I…” My voice comes out thin. He turns his head. Those steady eyes land on me, flat and patient. “There’s something…”
A door bangs. Voices spill into the yard, hushed and busy. The guests are being managed. Somewhere my mother is feeding people, because grief and scandal get fed in Tennessee the same as joy.
He waits. He’d wait an hour. That’s the worst of it, he’d wait.
I look at a man with rubble where his wedding was, and I can’t do it. Not today. It’s mercy, I tell myself. I almost believe it.
“There’s food,” I say. “Whenever you want it. Nobody will make you talk.”
Something in his face settles back down, unsurprised. He nods at the mountains.
I step out of my venue heels, set them in the weeds, and sit down in the grass beside him. Close. Not touching. His shoulder half an inch from mine, warm through the shirt.
He doesn’t tell me to leave. He doesn’t say anything.
But after a while, some of the tension goes out of the way he’s sitting.
At some point, Caleb comes around the corner of the barn.
Quiet, for a big man. Five minutes, I told him, and it’s been more.
He’s held a whole family off on my say-so.
He stops when he sees us. Ben’s eyes are closed.
Caleb looks at the grass, the shoes in the weeds, his brother’s unclenched shoulders, and then me.
I give him the smallest shake of my head. Not yet. Almost.
He nods once. Something passes over his face, and he steps back around the corner without a sound. A minute later he’s in the yard. Standing sentry.
We watch the light change. The shadows walk out from the fence posts. The cattle drift. Behind us the barn has gone quieter, engines starting far off in the lot, the guests taking themselves home to talk. Let them. Walls make good backrests. That’s a thing I know now.
Then, from the meadow, comes the sound of a guitar.
Two notes, tuning. A pause. A fiddle answers it, finding its feet. A voice I half recognize says something too far away to catch. Low laughter follows, tired and gentle.
Ben’s head comes up.
“That’s Luke,” he says quietly. “And Noah’s fiddle.”
The guitar settles into something slow and old, and more instruments find their way in.
Somebody keeps time on a tailgate. The sound drifts up the hill, over the wall, down into our patch of weeds.
Nobody sent for music. They just went to their trucks and got it, because that’s what that family does with a day that can’t be fixed.
They can’t come back here. He can’t look at them yet. So they’re doing the only thing left.
They’re playing him home.
Beside me, in the ruins of his wedding day, Ben Callahan closes his eyes and listens.