16. Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Sixteen
BEN
Monday morning, first light, I sit on the guest cabin porch with coffee and a notebook, because this is how I’ve survived everything since I was six years old.
The world comes apart. People lie. Houses go quiet the wrong way. So you take a pencil, you put the wreckage in columns, and figure it out from there. It’s the one thing I know that’s never once let me down.
The mountains are doing their slow reveal, ridge behind ridge coming up out of the dark like a tide going out. Mist on the pasture. The creek talking. Somewhere behind the main house a screen door claps, and the first smell of bacon finds its way across the yard.
I open the notebook to a clean page. Draw a line down the middle.
GO HOME, I write on the left. STAY, on the right.
Left column first, because the left column’s easy.
Caleb. The family. My own bed. Work I can do without thinking. Distance from every inch of Blue Ridge Ranch that has a memory stitched to it. The Gazette can’t follow me two hours north.
I look at the list. Every item true. My brother’s voice Saturday night, asking me to come home. A man could do a lot worse than a family that plays fiddle at your shit show of a wedding and means it kindly.
There’s a third column I don’t draw. The one with Carla’s name in it, and his, and the things I’d do if I were a different man. Anger’s a tool I never got issued. It’s in the fucking box now, though. I can hear it rattle.
Right column.
The decking’s done, but the cladding isn’t. Then there’s the west frames, the soft run of boards, the gutter on the near corner. Work I said I’d help finish. A promise is a promise, whether or not the wedding it was for is dead.
A month’s honeymoon leave already cleared.
I laugh at the thought of the European tour I should be heading off on right about now.
The laugh comes out ugly, and I quit it.
Nobody expects me anywhere on this earth until the fourteenth of next month.
Ethan’s covering my work at the ranch, and Ethan doesn’t half-cover anything.
There is no hole in the world shaped like me right now. There’s freedom in that.
If I go home, I’m the story. Wild Briar’s smaller than Cedar Ridge.
Every casserole on the porch, every soft look at the feed store, every conversation that changes key when I walk in.
My family would guard me, and I’d stand in the middle of all that love, feeling like a man in a display case.
Here, the story belongs to the Vaughns as much as me.
Here, half the town’s already decided I hung the moon, which is its own embarrassment, but one I can live with.
I sit with the pencil a moment.
Then, because a list only works if it’s honest, I write: Ella.
I look at the name sitting there in the right-hand column, four letters in my own blunt handwriting, then I strike it out.
One line, firm. A man forty-eight hours out of the wreck of his wedding doesn’t get to put a woman’s name in a column.
That’s not what this is. That’s not what I’m for right now.
I finish the coffee. The light comes up and lies itself across the porch boards.
Down the hill, Something Blue stands in it, bare, swept, patient, the way she left it yesterday.
I think about her taking that wedding apart, chair by chair, with her mouth set.
I think about stunned silence in a barn.
A woman who sat down in the wet grass in her good dress.
Sandwiches on a tailgate. I’ll sleep in September.
I write it again. Ella. Under the strike-through, smaller.
If I’m here anyway, working anyway, then some of what she hauls is going to end up on my shoulders. I don’t know how to stand next to a load and not take it. That’s all the name means, I tell myself. I’m a man putting facts into columns.
Some facts you write twice. That’s all.
I close the notebook and walk up to the main house.
Silas is where I figured he’d be, in the porch rocker with his coffee, watching the mountains, one boot keeping the chair in slow time. He nods at the rail. There’s a second mug sitting on it. Full. Steam still coming off it.
I look at the mug. Then at him.
“May saw your light on,” he says.
I take the mug and stand at the rail. For a while neither of us says anything. The cattle are strung out along the creek. A hawk works the far tree line.
“I’d like to stay a while,” I say. “If you’d have me.”
The rocker keeps its time. Silas takes a sip of coffee.
“Finish it out,” I say when he doesn’t answer right away.
“The cladding, the frames, the gutters. Whatever else wants doing, and there’s plenty, I’ve seen your equipment barn.
” The words come easier once they’re moving.
“I’ve got a month nobody’s expecting me anywhere.
I’m not asking for the guest cabin, I’ll take the bunkhouse if there’s a corner, and I’ll work for my keep.
And if it’s strange, me here, after what happened in your barn, then you say so and I’m gone by noon, no hard feelings on any side. ”
Silas sets his mug down on the rail with a small wooden knock.
“Son, sit down. You’re spilling your coffee.”
I sit in the other rocker.
“May and I talked on it last night,” he says, unhurried.
“Figured you’d either be gone this morning or up on this porch.
May said porch, and I’ve quit betting against May, it’s a fool’s market.
” He rocks. “You’ll stay in the guest cabin, not the bunkhouse, the bunkhouse is full of Rose’s band posters and a smell nobody’s solved.
You’ll eat at our table. And you’ll work, because I can see you’ll die if you don’t. But you won’t be working for me.”
I close my mouth.
“The cattle and I get along the way we always have,” he says.
“It’s not the ranch that’s short-handed.
It’s that barn.” He tips his mug down the hill, to where Something Blue stands bare in the morning light.
“Evelyn dreamed it. Ella built it. And since Saturday, Cedar Ridge is full of people judging and gossiping, and one girl standing in front of all that with a clipboard and no crew.
“She won’t ask for help. You’ve been here long enough to see that much. She’ll carry a piano up a hill before she’ll ask a soul to take a corner. So I’m not waiting for her to ask.” The rocker keeps its time. “I’m going to send her a partner.”
Partner.
“Her barn. Her plans. Her say,” Silas goes on. “Your back, your level, your truck. You work for Ella till that venue stands on its own feet. I’ll pay you a fair day, and don’t argue with me about it.”
“I’ll take it.” It’s the first thing I’ve decided since Saturday that didn’t need a pencil.
“As for strange…” He looks over at me for the first time, and his eyes have May’s softness hiding in them.
“What happened in that barn Saturday was a man getting told the truth in the worst way there is, standing up under it, and doing no harm on his way out the door. That’s not a mark against you in this house. ”
The hawk folds and drops. Somewhere inside, May’s radio plays. I drink my coffee because I can’t talk yet. Silas lets that be, rocking. The sun clears the fence line and lands on both of us at once, warm as a hand.
“Fence is down in the north forty,” he says, after a while. “Storm before last. I’ve been leaving it for a younger back. Consider it your last morning working for me.”
“I’ll take a look this morning.”
“Figured.”
Before I head out, I stand at the north forty gate and call my brother.
He picks up on the second ring. I tell him.
A month, the barn, work for keep, maybe a little extra.
Silas’s terms, that I work for Ella, her say-so start to finish.
I keep it to logistics because logistics is a language we both trust, and he listens all the way through without a word.
“Okay,” he says at last. There’s a long silence before he speaks again. “It’s a good place. They’re good people.” He lets out a sigh. “You know the difference between staying somewhere and hiding somewhere?”
“I know the difference.”
“Then, okay.” A smile arrives in his voice. “Bear’s taken your side of the porch. Don’t hurry back on his account.”
I lean on a gate that isn’t mine, drinking coffee I didn’t pour, with a day’s work ahead of me.
I thought the hardest part of my life was behind me. I was wrong about which part.
But I wasn’t wrong that it was close.