14. Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fourteen
BEN
The music doesn’t stop and I can’t make sense of it.
A wedding died in that barn an hour ago. By rights, the whole place should be engines and taillights, guests draining away down the track to go talk about us over supper. Some of it is. But the music keeps coming across the fields, guitar and fiddle, tune after tune, patient.
The light’s going long. Dusk gathers in the fence lines first, shadows pooling under the rails while the ridges still burn. First fireflies drift up out of the weeds around us.
Ella’s still beside me. She hasn’t said a word in half an hour. Her shoes are in the grass, her dress is getting grass-stained, and she’s left the clipboard and headset inside so she could hold up a wall with me. I quit telling her to go in. I quit wanting her to.
“Why are they still playing?” My voice comes out rusty.
She’s quiet a second, listening.
“Because two hundred people drove out here and your family wasn’t about to let the last thing they saw be a man’s worst moment.
” She pulls a blade of grass, winds it around one finger.
“Mom’s feeding everyone. Naomi will be going from table to table smoothing things over.
Rose texted to say all your family’s still down there.
Not gawking. Just…” She hunts for it. “Staying. You can’t send a casserole to a thing like this the same day. So they’re staying.”
“They should fucking hate this place. All of them. They drove two hours to watch me get… get…”
“Don’t finish that. Nobody watched you do anything except walk away from someone who deserved it.
That’s what they saw. That’s what half of them are saying down there, in those words, over my mother’s brisket.
” A pause. “The other half are saying the flowers were beautiful because people are people.”
The tune changes. Noah’s fiddle carries it up the hill and lays it down over the pasture.
The cattle don’t even lift their heads. I know it.
One of the few memories I have of my father is him playing that tune out on the porch.
My chest tightens, my eyes sting, and it’s suddenly fucking hard to breathe.
Ella watches the side of my face. Whatever she sees decides her.
“I’m going to go check on the food,” she says, which is the first lie she’s told me all day. She gathers her shoes and stands, brushing grass off her dress. At the corner of the barn, she stops. “Ben. When it gets dark, come down or don’t. Either is okay.”
Then she’s gone around the wall, and I hear her voice briefly in the yard, low, and another voice answering.
I know who’s coming before I hear his boots.
Caleb comes around the corner with two bottles of beer. He hands me one, settles down into the grass where Ella was sitting, back against the boards, legs out. He doesn’t look at me. He looks at the mountains, same as I’ve been doing, like there’s work out there we’re both supervising.
He doesn’t say sorry. He doesn’t say how are you? He knows better than anybody alive that I’ve got no answer for that.
We drink the beer. The fiddle tune ends, and another starts.
“Vaughns cleared out,” Caleb says to the mountains.
“Whole convoy, maybe an hour ago. Garrett’s car went first, going fast. Her mama was on the phone before they cleared the cattle guard, doing damage control loud enough to hear from the porch.
” He picks at the bottle label. “Nobody’s seen Carla.
One of the bridesmaids drove her dress back.
Just the dress, in the back seat, on its own, like a body going home. ”
The information registers about a mile off, like everything today.
“The kids.” My voice comes up rough. “Mason. Grace. Do they know why I walked?”
“They saw the aisle part. Josie had them out the side door before the whispering got going. Told them the wedding got postponed on account of the flowers being wrong.” He tips his bottle.
“Mason renegotiated. He gets to wear the clip-on to the next one, and he’s not wearing the church shoes. Drove a hard bargain over it.”
Something that’s nearly a laugh moves through me and dies on the way out. Even now. Even today, some floor-level part of me needed to know the small ones were covered. Caleb knew I’d need it and had the report ready. That’s what we are. Two men raised by a checklist we wrote ourselves.
The fireflies come up in earnest now, the meadow filling with them, slow gold sparks over the dark grass. Evelyn’s lights must be on because the barn glows at the seams the way it did last night, a hundred years ago, when the worst thing in my life was a splinter in my thumb.
Caleb turns the bottle in his hands.
“Tie survive?”
“Tie’s fine.”
“Shame.”
That’s all. Ten minutes of dusk, two swallows of beer, and one joke about a tie.
My brother is a rough, unfinished man who bottle-fed a dog back to life and still won’t call it love.
He’s by my side on the worst day I’ve had since I was six.
There’s nowhere on earth I’d rather have him. There’s nothing I want him to say.
The dark settles around us. The ridge line goes from fire to ember to gone.
Then Caleb reaches over and takes hold of the back of my neck. Firm. Steady. Not a pat, not a squeeze. A hold.
I taught him that. Six years old at a funeral in a borrowed suit, my hand on the back of his little neck to keep him upright through the prayers.
Sixteen, his hand shaking on a hospital form, my hand on his neck.
Every bad night in that quiet house, every school hallway, every time the ground moved under us, that was the grip.
It meant I’m here. It meant I’ve got the weight.
It meant you can put it down now, nobody’s watching but me.
Twenty years I’ve been the hand.
Nobody has ever put it on me.
It comes up out of me with no warning at all.
No sound. Just my chest breaking open like ground under a plow.
Tears coming hot, stupid, fucking endless, dripping off my chin into the grass.
My shoulders shaking. The bottle hanging forgotten between my fingers.
I cry for the marriage that was a lie and the life I had packed in a folder.
I cry for a six-year-old packing lunches.
I cry because the fiddle is playing a song from a porch we lost, because the fireflies don’t care, because a woman I’ve known four days sat in the dirt so I wouldn’t be alone, because my little brother’s hand is on my neck and it turns out I’ve been waiting twenty years for somebody to put one there.
Caleb doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t let go, either. He holds on and looks out at the dark and lets me fall apart like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world.
When it’s done, I feel scraped out and lighter, hollowed the way a creek bed is hollowed, shaped by what went through it.
I wipe my face on my sleeve. Drink the warm beer. Down the hill the music has softened to almost nothing, one guitar, somebody humming.
“Don’t—” I don’t even know what I’m asking him not to do. Tell it. Look at me. Mind.
“Never happened,” Caleb says. Then he smiles. “Your tie’s a mess, though.”
Caleb takes his hand back. Turns his bottle once more in the dark.
“Come home,” he says quietly.