20. Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty
BEN
Ella Lockhart shows up at the flatbed at five fifty-eight, carrying two travel mugs, a thermos, and a look that tells me she’s deep in thought.
“I checked the map,” she says, climbing in. “If we take the valley road, we save ten minutes.”
“Valley road’s got a one-lane bridge with a weight limit older than Silas. We’re hauling two tons of oak home.”
“Empty going out, though.”
“And full coming back, which is when the minutes matter.” I pull out down the track into the dark. “Drink your tea. Both halves.”
“One comment about the tea per day. You’ve spent it.”
The dawn comes up, the ridges going from ink to iron to blue, mist lying in the low fields like spilled milk.
Ella’s quiet, hands around her mug, watching the mountains.
Then the light’s up, the flask is open, and she starts on my list, which she has taken out of my shirt pocket without asking, an act of war I find I don’t mind.
“You’ve got the strings pickup at two. Gatlinburg’s forty minutes from Hollis. What’s this gap at eleven?”
“Lunch.”
“You scheduled lunch?”
“I schedule everything. You’d have written eat somewhere in the margin and ignored it.”
She doesn’t argue, which from Ella is a signed confession.
Hollis’s yard opens at seven, and we’re on the gate at one minute past. Hollis comes out of his office with a grin that tells me he’s been looking forward to this. Sixty-some, overalls, a beard down to his chest. He takes one look at Ella and his grin grows wider.
“You brought the flower lady.”
“I brought my quantity surveyor.”
“Lord help me.”
The oak’s stacked under the east shelter, and it’s better than he described.
Hollis knows, which is why the tarp comes off like a magic trick.
Full-dimension boards, grain like poured syrup.
Ella’s up on the stack before he’s finished his speech, pulling boards, sighting down their length, sorting into piles with a speed that shuts Hollis’s mouth mid-sentence.
“That pile’s cupped,” she says. “That one’s got beetle. This one we’ll talk about.”
“The beetle’s character.”
“The beetle’s a discount.”
I leave them to it and get under the flatbed with my grease gun, because a deal’s a deal.
Both hubs packed, brakes checked, and one belt I don’t like the look of, that I tell him about for free.
By the time I’m wiping my hands, Ella and Hollis have gone three rounds and wound up somewhere that leaves Hollis winded, respectful, or both.
I watch the whole bout from under the flatbed, grease to the elbow, and there’s no polite name for what watching her win does to me. Competence on that woman is a lit match. I bang my head on the axle and count it fair.
“Your surveyor,” he tells me, helping load, “argues like my first wife.”
“She underlines things twice.”
“Shit.” He shakes his head at her, delighted. “Come back anytime, girl. I mean the opposite.”
The strings man in Gatlinburg turns out to be a retired Navy cook named Otto who insists on testing every run before it leaves.
We stand in his warehouse at two in the afternoon under three hundred feet of lit bistro bulbs, while Otto tells us about the restaurant that closed and Ella sketches the creek path on the back of his invoice to show him where they’re going.
Otto studies the sketch. Then he goes into the back and comes out with two boxes of solar path lanterns, dented stock, and won’t take money.
“For the walk down to the water,” he says. “Send a picture.”
The flatbed rides home heavy and slow, oak strapped in Ella’s sorted order, string boxes wedged, the cab smelling of coffee and cut wood.
Cedar Ridge appears around four, and Ella sits up.
“Can we stop at Mom’s? She’s got a cooler of dinner for us. If I don’t collect it, she’ll drive it up, inspect the venue, and we’ll lose the evening.”
I park the flatbed in front of May’s Mountain Bakery, and this is where the day goes sideways in the best way, because it turns out I can’t get thirty feet down this street anymore.
Earl Fisk is out front of the Gazette office and wants my opinion on his awning bracket, which is shot.
Maggie’s Jeep idles past, and she leans out to report that Hollis called her sister already and told her to spread the word we’re lethal negotiators to be steered clear of.
The man from the feed store, whose name I learn is Deke, crosses the street to ask whether we’re pouring footings for the annex and volunteers his cousin’s mixer.
Two church ladies I’ve never met tell me they’re praying for the venue.
One of them squeezes my forearm, says, “better to know before than after, son,” then pats me twice and goes.
Six days ago, I was a headline. Today I’m a man who knows about brackets.
I’m still standing in the sun with Deke’s cousin’s number in my pocket when I see the cart.
It’s parked in the alley beside the hardware store, a garden trailer, with a hand-painted sign: WILSON’S PLANTS, PERENNIALS, ASK ABOUT NATIVES.
An old man in a lawn chair sits beside it, hat down, radio on low.
And banked up the trailer’s sides, in trays and coffee cans and cut-down feed sacks, wildflowers.
Larkspur. Black-eyed Susans. Coneflower, bee balm, and a purple one I recognize from the ditches.
Evelyn drew vines up the corner of the north face. Ella said the wildflowers should be in everything. And every bed around that venue is builder’s dirt and regret.
The old man tips his hat back. “Help you, son?”
“How much for all of it?”
He looks at me. Looks at the trailer. Turns his radio down. “All of it?”
“Everything native you’ve got, and whatever you’d plant along a creek path that comes back every June without being asked.
There’s a bench going in under a window.
I want it buried in the things that grow in the ditches around here.
” I hear myself and slow down. “It’s for Something Blue. The venue out at the Lockhart place.”
The old man studies me a long moment.
“Evelyn Lockhart bought her seed off my daddy forty years,” he says. “Swore the ditch flowers were the best around.” He gets up out of the lawn chair with the sound of a man unfolding a ruler. “You’ll want the asters too. She always wanted the asters.”
We load until the flatbed hasn’t got an inch to spare, trays wedged between oak and string boxes, cans of coneflower riding in the footwell, the purple ones, which he tells me are ironweed, standing up over the tailgate like passengers.
He charges me a number that’s more than fair, and shakes my hand with both of his.
That’s when the bakery door opens.
Ella comes out backward, cooler in both arms, calling something to her mother over her shoulder, laughing at the answer. She turns around on the sidewalk.
And stops.
The cooler goes down onto the sidewalk. She looks at the truck.
Two tons of oak in her own sorted piles.
Three hundred feet of light. And over all of it, around all of it, spilling out of every gap we could pack, a meadow on wheels.
The whole flatbed sitting there on Main Street like June came early and needed a ride.
Her mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
“The ditch ones,” I say, because somebody has to say something and my heart is going like a hammer. “They come back every year. Fella said your grandmother—”
“I know.” Her voice has gone to pieces, and she’s smiling. Behind her in the bakery window, her mother has stopped pretending to wipe the counter entirely.
Ella looks at the truck for a long time.
“You scheduled lunch,” she says finally, wobbling, wiping her cheek with the heel of one hand, “and you bought a meadow.”
“It was on the list.”
“It was not on the list. I’ve read the list.”
“It was on the other list,” I say, picking up her cooler and opening her door.