38. Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Eight
ELLA
I wake at five with the speech ready.
It doesn’t excuse anything. It ends with I understand if this changes things, which is the bravest sentence I’ve ever constructed. I hate it, but it stays.
Ben’s at the corral by six, coffee in one hand, the yard between us.
I’m about to cross it when my phone rings, and it’s Mom. Mom does not call. Mom texts in full sentences with punctuation. A call at six in the morning is a barn fire.
“Baby.” Behind her voice, there’s a sound I can’t place at first, and then I can.
It’s the bakery. Roaring. At six in the morning.
“Whatever you had planned today, I need you. Some travel website put us on a list last night. Best bakery in the Smokies, number three, there’s a picture of my cinnamon rolls with nine hundred comments.
Darlene’s got the flu, Faith’s at 4-H regionals, and there is a line, Ella.
There’s a line to the vet’s office. Deke just called asking if we’re giving something away. ”
Across the yard, Ben lifts a hand and smiles.
“I’m coming,” I tell her.
Beneath the worry for my mother lies relief. Something in me sits down and puts its feet up. A whole day. Handed to me by a travel website.
“Got to run and help Mom at the bakery,” I shout over to Ben. “But we’ll talk tonight.”
Ben blows me a kiss and I hate myself.
No matter what. It has to happen tonight.
The Smoky Mountain Traveler published its Twelve Bakeries Worth the Detour at eight o’clock last night, and by dawn half of Tennessee decided to take the detour simultaneously.
I’ve worked that counter since I was tall enough to see over it, but I’ve seen nothing like this.
The line wraps the porch by seven. We sell out of cinnamon rolls by eight, bake more, sell out again.
Mom runs the ovens like a woman possessed.
I run the register, boxes, coffee, crowd control, and diplomacy in that order.
Maggie comes through at ten, surveys the line, and doesn’t even pretend to have mail.
“Number three,” she announces to the room.
“Robbed. I’ve written to the website.” Earl arrives at eleven wanting a quote for the paper, and I give him, “We’re grateful and we’re out of cinnamon rolls,” which he writes with a huff.
At noon, mid-transaction, I look up and Ben’s at the counter.
My heart does its stupid lift, then slams down hard. Please, not here, not with a line to the door and my mother eight feet away with her hands in the oven.
He’s not here for that. Of course he isn’t. The relief that comes up through me is so fast and so complete that I have to set a pie box down on the counter and pretend it needed straightening.
“Flour,” he says.
“What?”
“Your mama’s message an hour ago said flour, so I called the supplier.
They can’t run a delivery till Tuesday, but they’ll load me at the Knoxville depot if I’m there by two.
” He’s already backing toward the door, keys spinning on his finger.
“Butter too, and the good yeast, according to the list. Anything else, text it before one.” A grin, thrown across the chaos like a rope.
“Tonight still stands. My place. I’m cooking. ”
“Ben.”
“Tonight,” he says, and the door swings.
The next customer would like to know if the rolls in the picture are available. “No, ma’am, they are not.” They haven’t been available since civilization collapsed at seven a.m.
Naomi phones at three, while I’m boxing the last of everything for a man buying “one of each, whatever’s left.
” Wedding call, a week out. The Chattanooga cousins have multiplied.
Two more chairs, one folding, one regular, Dinah’s niece is now doing a reading, is that fine?
It’s fine. Everything’s fine. I run wedding logistics with the phone clamped to my shoulder and my hands full of pie boxes, and Naomi, who misses nothing even down a phone line, goes quiet for a second.
“You sound stretched thin as a communion wafer, child.”
“Big day at the bakery.”
“Mm,” she says. “Whatever’s sitting on you lately, and something is sitting on you, take it to somebody before it takes you somewhere. That’s free. The chairs I’m paying for.”
Ben’s flour run saves the afternoon. He’s back by four, hauls fifty-pound bags like paperbacks while the line applauds.
Then Daddy appears in the doorway, needing him.
Half the herd’s found a downed fence into the Pruitt place, cattle wandering across a road.
Through the window, the two most important men in my life peel out of the lot to go argue cows out of a ditch.
I box pies. The speech sits in my chest, going stale like the display case.
We close at six, two hours late, sold to the walls. Mom locks the door, leans her back against it, and slides down it laughing until she’s sitting on her own bakery floor, apron gray, victorious.
“Best day in this store’s history,” she says. “Go home, baby. You gave me your Sunday, and you had that look all day like you’d left an iron on somewhere. Go turn off your iron.”
I drive back up the valley in the last light. Every bone I own has resigned.
Ben’s cabin windows are orange. Inside, it smells like chili and cornbread. The table’s set for two. There’s one candle, lit and flickering gently.
“Last time was overkill, so I’m tapering,” he says. He takes one look at me and his face changes. He crosses the room, takes my bag off my shoulder, and presses a kiss to my forehead, his hand cradling the back of my head. “You’re gray, sweetheart. Fifty miles past tired.”
“I’m fine. Ben, tonight I need to—”
“I know. You need to talk. I’m yours, all evening, no interruptions, I turned my phone off and everything.
” He steers me toward the couch with both hands on my shoulders.
“But you’re eating first, and that’s not negotiable, and the chili’s almost done.
Sit. Close your eyes while I finish the cornbread. Two minutes. I’ll wake you when it’s…”
The couch takes me like a creek takes a leaf.
I sit on Ben Callahan’s couch with the speech still balled up tight and the smell of cornbread in the air, and I fight sleep like it owes me money. Sleep, fresh off a fourteen-hour bakery shift, wins in approximately ninety seconds.
I surface once, half up out of the dark, to the sensation of being moved. My boots coming off. My legs lifted onto the cushions. A quilt settling over me, tucked at the shoulder with a carpenter’s precision, a hand smoothing my hair back, and his voice, low, from a long way off.
“There she goes. Talk’s not going anywhere, Ella. Neither am I.”
When I wake properly, it’s dark, and it’s late.
The cabin’s still. The candle’s out, the chili’s put away, there’s a glass of water on the floor by the couch where my hand would find it. Through the half-open bedroom door, in the spill of moonlight, Ben’s asleep on his back with one arm flung over the space I’d have filled, snoring softly.
The clock on the stove says 1:40.
Tomorrow came and went, and I told him nothing.
I sit up in the quilt in the dark, and the speech is still there, ready, with nowhere to go.
So I deliver it.
Sitting on his couch in the moonlight, in a whisper pitched below the snore, I tell the sleeping shape of Ben Callahan everything.
The cabin. Carla’s hands coming up. The promise I made her.
The sunscreen, the urn, the tailgate, every almost. I get all the way through it, fluent, word-perfect, not one interruption, because nobody’s listening.
“I understand if this changes things,” I finish, to the dark.
Word-perfect. Not one stumble.
Because it costs nothing. You can be as brave as you like at a sleeping man. You can be magnificent.
Ben snores on.
I lie back down on the couch, pull his quilt to my chin, and stare at the ceiling.
Tomorrow.
It has to be tomorrow. Because I’m running out of ways to be a coward.