24. Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Four
BEN
May hears about the booking at noon. By six there’s a celebration on the porch that could feed a hay crew, and I learn something new about the Lockharts, which is that they don’t do restraint, they do brisket.
The long table’s out. Bakery boxes stacked three deep, cinnamon rolls, lemon pound cake, and a pie made from a secret recipe.
Silas has produced a bottle of something older than Faith and is pouring it into jelly jars with ceremony.
Rose brought limes from the bar and is building drinks like a chemist. The sun’s going down in about nine shades of showing off, and in the middle of all of it is Ella.
She’s wearing a green sundress with little buttons all the way down the front.
Her hair’s loose for the first time since I’ve known her.
When Rose hands her a drink, she laughs with her head tipped back, throat bare, freckles going down into that neckline like a trail a man could lose a whole day on, and I have to turn around and find something to do with my hands.
Fuck.
I’ve been calling it noticing. Mugs, boards, and cattle.
That was a lie the size of the barn. What I do is watch her, all day, every day, like some fucking obsessive.
I know the exact sound she makes when a plan comes together, and I know it’s different from the sound she makes when Dolly does something criminal.
Two weeks of standing close enough to smell the almond in her hair while we argue about lumber.
Two weeks of her hip checking the ladder to tell me dinner’s on, thinking nothing of it, while I stand up there rearranging my nervous system.
I want to know what that mouth tastes like mid-argument. I want my hands inside her clothes. I’m wanting enough that a churchgoing man should be grateful nobody reads minds.
I wanted Carla the way you want the house in a magazine. Tidy. Planned. This is not that. This is wanting to undo one fucking button with my teeth. It’s wrong and inconvenient. She’s my unofficial business partner, my landlord’s daughter, and the finest person I know.
My head is so full of her that soon it’ll show in my body in ways I can’t hide, so I do what I always do. Find something for my hands.
The kitchen drawer’s been sticking all week.
May fights it every time she needs a serving spoon, does a little wrestle-and-curse she thinks nobody catches.
While the porch fills up, I slip inside, pull the drawer, and get down to it with a candle stub and a block plane.
Ten minutes of quiet work in a warm kitchen with the party coming through the screen door.
My hands settle, and the wanting backs down to a simmer I can live with.
“You’re hiding,” Rose says, coming through for more limes.
“I’m fixing.”
“With you, those are the same picture.” She collects her limes and a knife, points it at me on the way out, friendly. “Drawer’s been sticking since Easter.” The screen door bangs behind her, and then, through it, to the porch at large: “He’s fixing things again.”
The porch cheers.
I come back out with the drawer gliding easy, and the table’s moved on to business, because a Lockhart celebration is a planning meeting with brisket. Silas asks what Naomi’s caterer is going to need out of the annex come the day.
So I have to say it out loud at a full table.
“Power. Which as of this week I can’t get.
” It costs me to say, after two weeks of this family cheering every drawer I plane.
“The electrician pulled out. Kowalski’s booked past Thanksgiving, and I’ve burned every favor between here and Maryville.
I’m still working it, but I’m out of names, and I don’t know what to try next. ”
Nobody makes it a big deal. May says something about extension cords. But Ella’s gone quiet at the end of the table, and then she’s gone, phone in hand, down the porch steps into the dusk with Dolly trailing her like a deputy.
She’s back before the pie. Sits, sets the phone by her plate, spears a piece of brisket like nothing happened.
“Otto’s man is coming Tuesday,” she says. “Licensed, insured, wires every commercial install Otto hangs. Half a day is all he needs.”
“What did it cost?” Silas asks, because Silas knows nothing is free.
“The future.” She says it like a price she’s pleased with.
“Every wedding Something Blue ever hosts hangs Otto’s lights, his name goes in the program, and his crew gets first call on our installs.
His lights, Evelyn’s rafters, every wedding photographer in Tennessee shooting both.
He did the math faster than I could finish the pitch.
” She picks her fork back up, and only then looks down the table at me, level, a little smug.
“Also Mom’s sending his crew cinnamon rolls, which is what actually closed it. ”
The table cheers her the way it cheered my drawer, and the talk rolls on.
I sit there with my jelly jar getting an education.
I fix with my hands, a board at a time, a favor at a time.
She just fixed the thing I couldn’t, with a phone and twenty minutes, selling the future of a barn like it’s already famous.
Because to her it already is. It always was.
Dinner is loud and long, and I’m in the middle of it.
I’m not at the end of the table anymore, I’m in the thick, Faith on one side interrogating me about barrel horses, Silas on the other refilling my jelly jar without asking.
Beth’s telling the Gatlinburg entry story again, with the times getting faster each round.
Cassie’s lamb is under the table, wearing a bandana, against several stated house rules.
When May brings out the nameless pie and the table fights over it, somebody hands me the serving spoon first, from the drawer that now glides.
Contentment. That’s the word for it. Ten days ago, I told Silas I couldn’t locate my own grief.
Tonight I can’t locate the man who packed a folder for a whole different life.
He feels like a fella I used to know. Decent man.
Tired. No idea what a two-four run was, or that triangles taste better, or that a woman saying I’ll sleep in September could rewire a person.
Across the table, Ella catches me looking. I don’t look away. She holds it a second too long before Rose says something that saves us both. I watch the color come up her throat in the sunset light. I am in so much trouble.
After, when the table’s broken up into porch chairs and coffee, I take my notebook down to the venue rail to get my head right, and that’s where she finds me an hour later.
I don’t hear her come. First thing I know is her voice at my shoulder, warm with the evening in it.
“What’s this?”
Too late to close it. The notebook’s open flat on the rail under the last of the light, and it isn’t lumber numbers.
It’s sketches. The catering annex, drawn out proper with a real kitchen line.
The loft, framed for a bridal suite, dormer window looking west because a bride should get that ridge line while she dresses.
A pole barn sited past the equipment shed for equipment overflow, so the good barn never has to hold anything ugly again.
Winter garland plans. A second bathroom block.
The creek path in four phases with costs roughed against each one.
Expansion plans. For next year. For five years. For a future at a place I came to for one weekend, drawn in the careful block hand of a man who has apparently already moved in, in his head, without discussing it with himself.
Ella turns the notebook toward her. Reads it like she read Evelyn’s pages, missing nothing. The bridal suite dormer gets a small breath out of her. The pole barn gets a slower one.
“Ben.” Her voice is careful. “This is years of work.”
“It’s just sketches.”
“This is my venue in five years.” She looks up at me, and we’re close. Close enough to see the sunset dying in her eyes, to smell almond and lime on her breath. Close enough to feel the heat from her skin. Her voice drops like we’re in church or in trouble. “You drew my venue in five years.”
I shrug. “I fix things. It’s a condition.”
She laughs, but it comes out low and cracked at the edges.
It hits somewhere south of my sternum with a thud I feel in my boot heels.
Her shoulder’s against my arm now. Her little finger is one inch off mine on the rail, and moving that inch is the loudest thing a man could do on this whole quiet ranch.
“Ella,” I say, and my voice comes out gravel.
“Ben!” Faith, from the porch, at rodeo volume. “Mom says come get more pie before Rose takes it to the bar!”
The inch stays uncrossed. Ella steps back, letting out a laugh that’s mostly exhale. I close the notebook.
“Pie,” she says, uneven.
“Pie,” I agree.
She heads up the meadow ahead of me, and I stand one more second at the rail, watching her go in that green dress.
Sketches, fuck. There’s a five-year plan in that notebook, and she’s on every page of it.
I go get my pie.