34. Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Four
BEN
May’s Mountain Bakery at seven on a Saturday is a contact sport.
I’m here for the venue’s pastry order, a tasting box for a bride coming Monday, and I’ve been drafted before the door’s shut behind me.
May spots me over the case, points at the proofing drawer with a flour-white hand, and says, “It’s doing the thing,” and that’s my morning spoken for.
She’s been bumping it closed with her hip for months, a little wrestle she thinks nobody catches, same as the kitchen drawer up at the house, and I’ve been waiting on an invitation because you don’t just walk into a woman’s bakery and start planing her fixtures.
So I work on the drawer behind the counter while the town pours through, and the town, it turns out, has things to say to me.
Deke wants to know when I’m coming to look at his mother’s porch step, no hurry, except his mother’s asked twice.
One of the church ladies from the pharmacy, whose name I now know is Miss Ida, pats my arm on her way past and tells me the arbor’s the talk of the flower committee.
A man I’ve never met asks if I’m “the Blue Ridge fella” and, on confirmation, describes his gutter situation to me in full while I’m under the counter.
Two tourists ask May what’s good, and Rose’s friend behind the register says everything, but the cinnamon rolls are famous, and honey, ask the big fella to tell you about the barn if you want the whole story, he built half of it.
The whole story. Like it’s a town possession now. Like I am.
Near nine, one tourist leans over the counter while I’m testing the drawer glide and asks me, confidential, “Is this place family-run? It feels family-run.”
I open my mouth to explain that I’m the venue’s carpenter from three ridgelines north, here on a pastry errand, no relation.
“It is,” May says from the ovens without turning around. “Now quit distracting my son-in-law before he mis-measures.”
The tourist nods, satisfied. I stand there with the block plane and my ears going hot. Behind the register, Rose’s friend grins into the pastry case. Nobody corrects the record.
Maggie arrives at the counter mid-morning with the mail and her opinion, which travel together.
“Well, look at it.” She surveys me, wedged behind May’s counter with a block plane. “You know what you are now, don’t you?”
“Behind on my actual job?”
“You’re furniture.” She says it with enormous satisfaction, sorting envelopes.
“Took about six weeks. That’s a record, for reference.
The Hendersons were here six years before anybody let them sponsor a Little League team.
” She licks a thumb, keeps sorting. “I’ll tell you what I hear on my route, since you won’t ask.
Miss Ida’s crowd calls you our Ben. The feed store’s holding a belt sander for you that you haven’t ordered yet, because Deke figures you’ll need it and wants first crack.
And Hollis, who has never in living memory said a kind word about anybody, told my sister you were, quote, ‘less useless than most.’” She slaps the mail bundle on the counter.
“Son, in this town, that’s a naturalization ceremony. ”
“I’ve been here six weeks, Maggie.”
“And the town’s decided. That’s how it works around here.
” She collects May’s outgoing mail, then pauses, and her voice drops out of broadcast register.
“You came here to marry the wrong woman and stayed to build the right thing. Whole valley watched you do it. Nobody around here thinks you’re the Gazette groom anymore, Ben.
You’re Blue Ridge’s Ben. Have been since about the flowers.
” She hoists her bag. “The town knew where you belonged before you did. We usually do.”
She’s gone in her Jeep before I’ve got a reply built, which I suspect is a habit of hers, leaving before the other party can argue.
The drawer glides easy by ten. May tests it three times, gives me the nod she gives a good bake, and loads me up with the pastry order plus a box she won’t let me pay for. I drive back up the valley with the windows down and Maggie’s sentence riding along. Have been since about the flowers.
Which is maybe why, unloading at the venue, I finally let myself look at the thing Ella’s been avoiding.
The honeymoon cabin.
The beds around it were Evelyn’s first plantings, older than anything we put in this summer, and they’re struggling.
Late July’s been hard on them. Leggy, gone over, the larkspur collapsed and browning, deadheads nobody’s pinched.
Every other bed on this place gets walked and watered daily, because Ella tends this ranch like a congregation.
But not those. The path to that porch hasn’t had a boot on it since the morning we stripped the rooms. The curtains are still drawn, and the flowers are dying of the same avoidance, whatever it is.
I don’t know what that cabin did to her. I know there’s a why with weight to it, because Ella Lockhart doesn’t neglect things without a reason.
But a man can tend the outside of a door.
I’ve still got flats from Wilson’s in the equipment barn, held back from the June planting, hardened off and root-bound and glad of the work.
I spend the early afternoon at it. Pull the collapsed larkspur.
Pinch the deadheads. Work compost into the tired dirt, set new ironweed and asters where the gaps are, water everything out of the can, not the hose, so the roots get it.
Bees find the fresh asters before I’ve finished the row.
The cabin sits behind me the whole time with its curtains shut, keeping whatever it keeps.
I’m not doing it for the cabin. I’m doing it because they’re Evelyn’s beds, and because the woman I love walks past this corner of her kingdom with her head turned.
The woman I love.
I’m gathering the tools when I feel watched.
May’s on the main house porch, a dish towel over her shoulder. She’s got one shoulder against the post and her arms crossed easy. She’s looking at me the way she did when I asked for biscuit ingredients, the way she did over the flour that first morning.
I straighten up with the watering can, a man alone in the afternoon heat, replanting flowers outside a building nobody uses, for a woman who isn’t here.
May doesn’t say a word about it.
“Supper’s at six,” she calls across the yard. “Bring your appetite. And leave the can by the pump, I’ll do the porch ferns after.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She pushes off the post to go in. Then she stops and looks at the new asters standing up in the worked dirt where the dead ones were.
And May Lockhart smiles.
It says everything she’s not saying, plain as print. I saw you. I know what that was. I know what you are.
She goes in, and the screen door claps behind her. I stand in the yard with the watering can, thinking about what’s been said to me today.
Furniture, Maggie said.
I can live with that.