21. Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-One
ELLA
Planting day starts with a scream.
A Faith scream, pitched to carry from the kennel run to the county line, and translating roughly as everyone come look what happened while also somehow not my fault.
“The dogs are out!”
I’m on the porch with my second tea. Ben’s already crossing the yard with a flat of coneflowers. We look at each other over the trays with the same thought arriving at the same time.
The wildflowers. Two hundred plants, staged in their cans and sacks along the venue beds since last night. A dog paradise.
“Gate was latched,” Faith hollers, jogging up, red-faced. “I latched it. Dolly did the thing with her nose again. I’ve seen her do it.”
Dolly is our heeler, three years old, smarter than lots of humans I know.
Where Dolly goes, Boone follows, because Boone is a lab-shaped yes-man with no ideas of his own.
And where those two go, Duke follows. He’s eleven, dignified, should know better, yet off he hauls himself from his porch cushion to attend, like a retired judge with a gambling problem.
“Where?” Ben says.
Faith points down the meadow.
Three shapes are streaking through the morning mist toward Something Blue. The little one in front has something white and rectangular in her mouth.
Ben’s hand goes to his shirt pocket. Finds it empty.
“She’s got the list,” he says. “I left it on the step and it seems Dolly found it.”
I put down my tea. “Faith, guard the flowers. We’ll bring back the criminals.”
What follows is the least dignified ninety minutes of my adult life.
We try strategy first because we’re both list people.
Ben proposes a pincer, him swinging wide by the equipment barn, me walking up the creek line, calm voices, treats in pockets.
It’s a good plan. It fails in five seconds because Dolly thinks it’s a game of chase, and there is nothing on this earth Dolly wants more than a game of chase.
She goes through the venue beds, mercifully empty. She squeezes under the fence I’d have bet money she couldn’t fit under. Boone goes over it, proud of himself. Duke takes the gate, which is standing open, because Duke is a professional.
“Your dogs have a command structure,” Ben pants, coming level with me at the fence.
“She’s the brains, Boone’s the muscle.”
“What’s Duke?”
Duke has stopped forty feet away to sit down in the wet grass and watch us, tail sweeping, the picture of a dog who knows nobody’s mad at him specifically.
“Bored,” I say, and Ben makes a sound I’ve never heard from him, a short, cracked bark of a laugh.
We lose them in the willows. We find them by the noise, which is Boone, baying at a heron with undeserved confidence, given he’s never caught anything before.
The heron complains with a raspy squawk and leaves.
Dolly breaks cover along the far bank, the list still flying like a flag.
Ben goes down the bank after her at a speed I would not have predicted from a man who alphabetizes his tools.
The creek is running spring-full.
He almost makes it. He’s got one boot on the flat rock and one hand touching the list when Dolly spins around and capable Ben Callahan, keeper of schedules, goes into Blue Ridge Creek to his waist with a sound like a baptism going wrong.
The list floats past me downstream, pursued by Boone.
I am laughing so hard I have to sit down on the bank.
I laugh the way I haven’t laughed since before Evelyn got sick.
It’s an ugly, wheezing, broken sound with tears in it, my whole body given over.
Ben stands up out of the creek streaming like something raised from the deep, wipes his face with one dripping forearm, and looks at me.
“You could help.”
“I am helping. I’m bearing witness.”
“She planned that. The turn. She waited till I was fucking committed.”
“She’s done it to Daddy twice.”
“Twice.” He wades ashore, boots squelching, a smile fighting to get out. “And nobody thought to brief me. I did a pincer plan. I had treats in my pockets.” He pulls a sodden biscuit from his shirt pocket and considers it.
And then he’s gone too. Laughing, head back, hands on his knees, soaked to the ribs in a creek in Tennessee.
It goes through me like current because I’ve never heard it before.
A week of half-smiles, and underneath it all this whole time there was this big, unguarded, ridiculous laugh, rusty at the edges like a gate nobody’s opened in years.
I’d do a lot of stupid things to hear it again.
Eventually the dogs surrender. Duke first, falling in at Ben’s heel like he’s been his dog for a decade, which is a betrayal I’ll be discussing with him later.
Boone is apprehended in the shallows, having cornered the list against a rock and then been afraid of it.
The list is a casualty. Ben peels it off the rock in one translucent piece, and we observe a moment of silence.
“The lumber numbers,” he says.
“I know them by heart.”
“Course you do.” He folds the wet ghost of it into his pocket.
Dolly comes in on her own terms, twenty minutes later, when the game officially bores her. She trots out of the willows, sits in front of the two of us, mud to the shoulders, and offers her paw like a woman concluding a successful meeting.
“I want to be furious,” Ben tells her, taking the paw. “You’re the best-organized creature on this ranch.”
“Excuse me.”
“Present company,” he says, “included.”
We walk through the meadow with three dogs at heel like the world’s worst parade.
We’re a mess. I’ve got creek mud from hip to hem where I sat in the wrong spot on the bank.
He’s wet through, one sleeve torn at the shoulder seam from the willows, hat lost, recovered and lost again.
Halfway up, he reaches over without breaking stride and picks a willow leaf out of my hair, flicking it away like this is a thing we do.
At the venue fence, we stop to let the dogs drink at the trough, and the morning gathers around us. Mist burned off. Mountains stacked up blue on bluer. The wildflower flats wait in their rows. The meadow smells of creek and crushed grass.
“Your face,” Ben says.
“What about my face?”
“You’ve got mud.” He reaches out and wipes my cheekbone with his thumb, one slow pass, and doesn’t take his hand back.
The laughing fades. His eyes fix on mine. I can feel my heartbeat in the roots of my hair. We’re both leaning. When did we start leaning?
“Ella,” he says, his voice low.
“Did you get the list back?” Faith comes over the fence rail like a thrown cat. “Because Dolly ate a whole invoice in March. Daddy had to call the man and ask him what was on it. It was the most embarrassing phone call of, oh.”
She stops.
She looks at Ben’s hand, airborne, an inch off my cheek.
“The list didn’t make it,” Ben says to the trough.
“Water damage,” I tell the fence.
“Uh huh.” Faith looks between us one more time, and a grin starts up at the corner of her mouth that I will be paying for at every family dinner until one of us dies. “I’ll go tell Daddy the dogs are fine.”
She goes. Slowly. Looking back twice.
We plant flowers the rest of the day, the two of us and eventually the sisters. Ironweed, asters, larkspur going into the beds Evelyn drew. It’s easy again, or a new version of easy with a hum under it. By the time the light starts to fade, the venue has a meadow growing up around it.
I stand at the fence at dusk, filthy, aching, happier than I’ve been in years, watching Ben walk the beds with a watering can and Dolly at his heel like she’s adopted him.
And I catch myself bargaining with the dark to come slower.
Not for the venue. Not for the schedule.
I just don’t want this day to be over.