17. Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Seventeen
ELLA
Tuesday morning I spread the whole disaster out on a trestle table in the middle of the barn, because if I’m going to be buried, I want to see the dirt coming.
My list runs to two pages. The west window frames are spongy.
The cladding on the north face is soft in three runs.
The near corner gutter is hanging like a drunk.
Paint everywhere, eventually. The loft stairs I’ve been calling charming because condemned costs more.
Plumbing to the catering annex that Dwayne quoted four thousand for before his firm went under and took my deposit with it.
And underneath all of it, in red, the real list: one booking canceled by voicemail Sunday night, two inquiries gone silent, and a headline doing my marketing for me.
I hear boots on the new decking. Ben comes in with two coffees and hands me one like it’s a shift change.
“Morning. That the list?”
“That’s the list.”
He picks up page one and reads it like he’s revising for a test. Then page two. Then he squares them both on the table, sips his coffee, and says, “Your handwriting gets angrier in the plumbing section.”
“Dwayne had it coming.”
“You’ve written his name three times. Once underlined.”
“It’s underlined twice.”
“My mistake.” He sets the pages down. “It’s a good list. Thorough.
Genuinely alarming in places.” He turns and looks at me instead of the paper.
There’s something different in his face this morning, lighter around the eyes, like whatever he settled on Daddy’s porch yesterday has calmed him.
“But I don’t want the list. Show me what you actually see. ”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the list is useful, but it’s not the whole picture.
” He tips his coffee at the barn around us.
“You didn’t drag a dead building back to life for two pages of Dwayne.
Somewhere there’s the version you see when you look at this place.
I’ve watched you look at it. Whatever you’re seeing, that’s what I want.
Show me the vision, then we’ll let it argue with the list.”
Nobody’s ever asked for that. People ask, how’s it coming and when’s it done and what did it cost? My sisters humor me. Daddy nods along.
Show me the vision.
“Okay,” I say, and go to the loft office for the box.
The box is a peach crate with MOOD written on the side in marker, and if he laughs, I will kill him and the county will acquit me.
He reads the side of the crate. His face gives nothing away.
“Not one word,” I tell him.
“I didn’t say a word.”
“You were about to.”
“I was going to observe that my tools are alphabetized, so whatever this is,” he nods at the crate, “we’re the same disease, different symptoms.” He clears the trestle like he’s prepping a work surface, which I suppose he is. “Proceed. Show me the mood.”
I lay it out. The boards first, big cork ones.
Weddings in every season: the summer one with the doors flung wide, the fall one all copper and smoke, the winter one lit by candles down a cedar-garland aisle.
Fabric swatches stapled in ranks. Paint cards.
The photo of a Wendell County barn wedding from a magazine in 2011 that started the whole fire in my head, gone soft at the corners from handling.
Ben picks that one up and squints at it. “This barn’s worse than yours.”
“It is not.”
“Their loft rail’s pressure-treated lumber. That’s a porch, not a barn. You clipped this out and carried it all these years, and your own building is better.” He sets it down with the verdict face. “You’ve been mood-boarding beneath your station.”
I open my mouth to defend the Wendell County barn and find, fatally, that I can’t. “The lighting was good.”
“The lighting was good,” he allows, gracious in victory. “Walk me through it.” The corner of his mouth curls. “Slow. Pretend I’m Dwayne.”
“Dwayne never listened.”
“Pretend I’m a better Dwayne.”
So I walk him through my barn the way I’ve only ever walked myself through it, three in the morning, ceiling-staring.
The bar built from the old stall doors. The ceremony floor sanded but never stained, because the boards should look worked, not decorated.
The loft rail rebuilt so the photographer can shoot down the aisle.
In spring, the doors frame the dogwoods.
In June, you cut the lights and let the fireflies do the last dance.
Evelyn’s plan for the creek path, lanterns in paper bags, walking every guest down to the water like a procession.
Ben follows me with his eyes, to each corner as I build it out of air. He doesn’t nod along. He asks questions. What’s under the loft stairs? Where does water want to go when it rains? Whether the stall doors are oak or pine, and when I say oak, he makes a small, satisfied sound.
“And this page.” He turns the notebook toward me. Evelyn’s sketch of the outside, the north face, with vines drawn up one corner and a bench under the big window. “This bench.”
“Grandma’s bench. She wanted to sit there and watch the comings and goings. Charge admission, she said.” My thumb finds her ring on its chain. “That’s the one thing on every board and every page we never started. It felt wrong to build her seat with nobody to sit in it.”
Ben studies the sketch for a long moment.
“We’ll get there,” he says.
Not you’ll get there. We’ll.
He doesn’t notice. He’s already moved on, pulling my two-page list back across the table, hunting the plumbing section, no idea he’s just committed himself to the future of this place.
I look into my coffee. Then I dust off my professional tone.
“You know this isn’t in your arrangement with Daddy. You signed on for cladding and gutters. The vision board barn is a separate lunacy.”
“I’ve read my contract. There’s a lunacy clause.
” He’s writing on my list now, tidy block capitals next to my angry cursive, numbering.
“Everything on here is carpentry, weather, or Dwayne. Carpentry, I’ve got.
Weather we’ll schedule around. Dwayne…” he draws one line, “we’re not paying a man four thousand fucking dollars for forty feet of pipe.
I’ve plumbed a horse barn. Your sinks don’t scare me. ”
“You’re going to fight my plumbing?”
“I’m going to win against your plumbing.” He caps my pen and hands it back. There it is again, that same loosening around his eyes. I’m watching a man come back to life through a to-do list. “One condition.”
“Name it.”
“The bench goes last.” He taps Evelyn’s sketch. “On purpose, when my hands have learned this building and there’s nothing left pulling at them. I can take it slow and get it right. The important things get built last.” He shrugs, a little stiff. “My rule. Wherever I work.”
The barn is quiet around us. Dust hangs in the light from the high boards.
Somewhere outside, Daddy’s tractor is complaining about a hill.
The creek is running. My grandmother’s notebook lies open between two coffee cups on a trestle table, vines, a bench, forty years of believing drawn in soft pencil.
“Deal,” I say, when I can.
“Deal.” He rolls the sleeve back off his watch, all business, but the light’s still there in his eyes and now there’s a smile pulling at his lips. He moves the list toward him and sets his pen at the top.
“So, boss,” Ben says. “Where do we start?”
And God help me, boss, in that gravelly voice does something to me I wish it wouldn’t. I hand him the pry bar and keep my face professional.
It’s going to be a long rebuild.