23. Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Three
ELLA
I change the flowers on the trestle table three times before nine o’clock, and Ben watches me do it from the ladder without one word.
“It’s a viewing,” I tell him. “People view. They say lovely things. Then they go home and book a hotel ballroom with air conditioning and a liability policy.”
“Mm.”
“Don’t you mm me.”
“First arrangement was better,” he says. I switch it back and hate that he’s right.
Naomi’s sedan comes up the track at ten sharp. And she’s not alone, which I knew, but not officially, because Cedar Ridge has spent thirty years politely not knowing it.
Miss Dinah Fairchild gets out of the passenger side the way she does everything, precisely, in a cardigan the color of good sherry, all five foot nothing of her.
She taught piano to half the residents of Cedar Ridge, including me, including my mother.
She has played the organ at Naomi’s church for as long as Naomi’s had a church.
They have sat in the corner booth at Bootleggers with two lemonades every Friday since before I was old enough to notice, and the town has described them as dear friends with the diligent blindness small towns keep for the things they love and can’t quite name.
“Ella Grace,” Miss Dinah says. “Your posture’s improved since the recital.”
“I was nine, Miss Dinah.”
“I have a long memory.” Her eyes go past me to the venue and stop.
I make myself turn and look at the thing we’ve built while I was too deep in it to see.
New decking, silvered and square. The north face, half-dressed in Wendell County oak, gone honey-gold where the sun’s on it, the rest chalked and waiting.
Evelyn’s beds running the whole foundation line, ironweed and asters and larkspur settling in like they’ve always been there.
The doors thrown wide, with the barn breathing morning light through it.
Otto’s strings looped down the loft rail, and the mountains standing behind all of it, showing off, the way they do.
Naomi says nothing for a moment. Then, quietly: “Well, Evelyn.”
I ignore the tears welling in my eyes and start the tour with my heart going like a two-four run.
Miss Dinah walks it all with her hands folded, asking exacting questions, where does the afternoon light fall in October, how many steps from the door to the head of the aisle, will there be somewhere for an old woman to sit that isn’t a hay bale with delusions?
“There will,” I say. “Under the big window. There’s a bench going in. Last of everything, on purpose. The important things get built last.”
Ben, materializing to hand Naomi a glass of tea, says nothing, but the back of his neck goes faintly red on his way past. Miss Dinah watches him go with narrowed eyes and what could well be a smirk she’s trying to hide.
She’s not the only one who notices him. He’s walking off in a work shirt with the sleeves rolled and sawdust on his forearms, and my thoughts are considerably less respectable than hers.
We end on the new decking with the valley laid out below, creek sparkling, cattle drifting through the far pasture. Naomi stands at the rail for a long time.
“I’ve done forty years of weddings,” she says. “Gymnasiums. Country clubs. One on a houseboat that I still discuss with the Lord.” She turns around. “I have never once stood in a venue that felt like it was rooting for the couple. This place is rooting. You can feel it in the boards.”
“Thank you. That means—”
“I’m not finished. I came out here telling myself I was scouting for my flock. Brides ask me where, I like to have answers.” She sets down the tea and takes Miss Dinah’s hand. “That was a lie I told myself in the car. Ella. We’d like the second Saturday of September. If you’ll have us?”
The question hangs in the air.
“You,” I manage. “You want…”
“To book Something Blue,” Naomi says. “For our wedding. Mine and Dinah’s. Thirty-one years engaged, if you count from when I asked, which Dinah does not.”
“I count from when you asked properly,” says Miss Dinah.
“She said it herself, the woman has a long memory.”
I look at their hands, folded together on decades of Fridays and lemonade. I have to put my own hand flat on the rail Ben rebuilt, because the morning has gone bright and unsteady at the edges.
“Naomi. I have to ask.” It comes out croaky.
“Are you sure? You know what happened here. You were standing at the front of it. If this is you being kind to me, throwing your approval over my scandal, I’ll love you for it till I die and I’ll say no.
I won’t build Grandma Evelyn’s barn back on charity. ”
Miss Dinah makes a small sound, like a piano lid closing.
“Child,” Naomi says, “sit down.”
I sit on a sawhorse because you do what Naomi says in that voice.
“Forty years I have married other people,” she says.
“I have stood at the front of every hall in this county holding other people’s happiness.
Then I’ve gone home, taken off my collar, and said nothing.
Not because of God, whom I squared it with long ago, but because I could not find the room that would hold us kindly.
Do you understand me? Forty years of rooms, and I never once found ours.
” She looks down the aisle of the barn, doors open at the far end, light pouring through.
“Then I stood in this one at a rehearsal in June, and I thought, there it is. I went home and told Dinah there’s a barn out at the Lockhart place that would welcome us. ”
“She did,” says Miss Dinah. “Over supper. I said book it before somebody’s cousin does.”
“So no, Ella Grace. This is not charity.” Naomi takes an envelope out of her handbag and puts it in my hands.
It has the weight of a deposit check in it.
Her two hands close around mine over the top of it.
“This is two old women who found their room. You built it. Now say yes and take our money, because Dinah’s already chosen the music, and God help the venue that cancels on an organist.”
“Yes,” I say. It comes out in pieces. “Yes. Of course, yes.”
The rest is Naomi laughing, Miss Dinah asking more questions about September light, dates in my diary in ink, a deposit folded in the back like a heartbeat, and September second Saturday circled twice. Underlined once.
It’s only when I look up to find him I see Ben’s gone.
Down the meadow, halfway to the equipment barn with his toolbox, walking away with Dolly at his heel.
He must have slipped out the moment the envelope appeared.
No handshake to collect, no corner of the moment claimed, so that when I stood in my grandmother’s barn with my business coming back to life, every eye that mattered was on me.
Miss Dinah follows my eyeline and says nothing, but her lips curl into a smile.
When they’ve gone, dust standing gold down the track, I walk into the middle of my barn and stand on the worked floor under the waiting lights, holding a diary with a wedding in it.
“Second Saturday of September,” I tell the rafters, in case she’s up there. “We got there, Grandma.”
Something Blue has its second wedding.
The first that’s going to happen.