46. Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Six
ELLA
All remaining items in the binder are completed by ten. The house goes quiet by eleven. And I’m still awake at midnight, sitting on my childhood bed, thinking about tomorrow’s something blue.
I’m walking the processional in my head for the fortieth time when it comes to me.
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.
At a venue called Something Blue, for its first real wedding, the blue should mean something.
I’ve known all along. But I’ve been not knowing it on purpose for a while because I knew it had to wait for the right bride.
Evelyn’s box. Top of my closet, behind the winter quilts, where I put it the week after the funeral and built a wall of bedding in front of it.
It’s not a big box. One boot box held what the hospice called personal effects. I haul it down and lift the lid.
Her reading glasses. The deck of cards worn soft as cloth. The tea tin she read fortunes out of, badly. A photograph of her and Granddad at a barn dance, 1961, her laughing at him as if he were the funniest man in the world.
And the handkerchief. Cornflower blue, edged in her own crooked tatting, the one she carried at her own wedding and got out every year to show me.
This goes to the first bride worth it in my barn, she’d say.
Not the first bride, mind. The first one worth the tatting.
You’ll know her, baby. If you have to ask, it isn’t her.
I remembered this box in June. Three weeks out from Carla’s wedding. But even before I found out about Garrett, I knew she wasn’t the one. The box stayed untouched in the closet.
I lift the handkerchief out, and underneath it there’s an envelope.
Cream paper, soft at the corners. My name in her upright schoolroom cursive, and beneath it, another line of smaller writing.
Open the night before you give away my blue. If you’re not sure it’s time, put me back. I’ll know.
She wrote this and buried it under the blue on purpose.
The blue only leaves this box for a wedding that passes her test, so the letter could sit safe through any number of wrong ones, waiting for the night before a right one.
She mailed a letter into a future she wasn’t attending and trusted me to deliver it.
I open it carefully. There’s one sheet of thick writing paper, both sides covered in pencil, because she said pens lied and pencils could be argued with.
My Ella.
If you’re reading this, you found my blue a bride worth it, which means the barn got finished, and I was right. I’ll be gracious about it, being dead.
I’ve got a nurse who thinks I’m napping, so here it is plain. I’ll number it so you can’t skip any.
One. When I called you my steady one, I meant you told the truth straight. I did not mean you were furniture for this family to stack its troubles on. You got those two mixed up, and I let you, because I was sick and glad of the help. That one’s on me. Quit it anyway.
Two. Stop waiting. Your granddaddy took two years to work up the nerve to ask me, and he was worth every day of it. But there’s waiting and there’s hiding, and you’ve always been able to dress one up as the other. Here’s how you tell them apart. Hiding makes you tired.
Three. Whatever you’re carrying in secret right now, and there’ll be something, there always is, put it on the table in front of the person it belongs to.
Love isn’t hauling things for people behind their backs.
Any mule hauls. Love is dumping the load on the table and sorting it together, ugly pieces included.
Your granddaddy and I sorted plenty. Best thing I ever did, that man, and we did it out loud.
Four. Plant it anyway. You’ve heard me go on about March your whole life, so here’s what it means.
Plant before the last frost, because if you wait for safe weather, you get no blooms. Every good thing I ever grew went in the ground scared.
The ditch flowers never asked anybody’s permission, and look at them. Be a ditch flower.
Five. Give her my blue. And tell her not to cry on it.
All my love, which doesn’t stop just because I did.
Grandma
P.S. If there’s a man by now, he better be a good one, because you deserve the world, my darling girl.
P.P.S. If the wedding’s who I think it is, and I’m generally right, there’ll be two brides, and the wedding’s about thirty years overdue.
Blue goes to Naomi. She’ll be the one crying.
Dinah gets my cards. That woman counted my deck every week for ten years like I couldn’t see her doing it. Tell her it was always fifty-two.
I read it twice. Then I lie back and cry. When it passes, I feel clean.
The postscript sits on my chest like a hand.
You deserve the world. If that’s true for me, it’s true for Ben.
The speech is in the drawer. Three index cards, rehearsed to a sleeping man. As if the right arrangement of words could manage his hurt the way I manage seating charts.
I tear the cards in half and drop them in the basket.
When I go to him, and I am going to him, after Naomi’s day is over, I go with empty hands. I put everything on the table, from the heart, not from a pre-written speech. If he sends me away, he sends me away, but I’ll still be the woman who finally told it straight.
Hiding makes you tired.
For the first time in weeks, I’m not tired.
I fold the blue handkerchief into tomorrow’s kit, and the soft old deck beside it, both of them labeled in my head in her voice. I put the letter under my pillow like a girl.
Tomorrow I give away my grandmother’s blue, and her cards, to the two women she called before any of us had the nerve.
And then I try to fix the mess I’ve made of everything.