Chapter 17 Elsie
ELSIE
Someone’s come knocking like they mean it. It’s not the courtesy two-tap from a delivery person dropping eggs at the back steps, nor Wells’ shorthand rap on the mudroom door. Rather, three solid knuckles that carry through the house and straight into my gut.
Wrapping myself up in a thick sweater, I open to a gust of cold and Bobby Brindle standing on the step with a ball cap in his hands. He smells faintly the citrus oil he must use on the counters at the hardware store.
“We don’t have a meeting tonight, do we?” I ask.
“No, Lil’ Miss,” he says, peering past my shoulder. “I’m after your wassail bowl.”
“My what?”
“Your grandmother’s, I should say,” he clarifies. “We’ll be needing it for Old Twelvey.”
I blink at him. “Old . . . what now?”
“Twelvey,” he repeats, like everyone keeps the date circled on the calendar. “The seventeenth. We go up to Mirabelle Grove after dark. Wake the trees, wish ’em health, soak a little toast in the cider for the robins. Bit of singing, bit of noisemaking to wake the sap.”
“And you need a bowl for that,” I say, slower.
“Not just any bowl.” He lifts his hat and holds it by the brim. “Has to be Elspeth’s. She kept it here between years so it wouldn’t get lost at the grove. Tradition, you know how we are.”
“Wells is around back,” I say, though my stomach sinks. “If anyone knows where it is, it’ll be him.”
“I’m sure his hands are full,” Bobby says. “You’re here, and you know the cupboards. You wouldn’t mind bringing it up to Mirabelle by five o’clock, would you? Isla’s got enough on her plate, and I told her I’d ask.”
“You didn’t have to come all the way out for that,” I protest. “You could’ve just called.”
“Phones make people say no,” he says cheerfully. “Bowl to Mirabelle by five. Ceremony’s at sundown. Isla’ll be waiting.”
He’s halfway down the path before I think of an objection.
It’s not that I mind helping. It’s that every time I say yes, the threads pull tighter. Every errand, every small favor, knots me a little deeper into this place I keep swearing I’ll leave.
With a sigh, I shove my feet into a pair of boots whose laces sulk out the sides and head around back.
Wells is at the long table outside the mudroom, a plank laid across two sawhorses, sanding one of the downstairs treads. His breath turns white in the cold, curling through the scruffy blond hair that refuses to behave.
There’s sawdust on his sweater, too, because of course there is. And God help me, the grittiness of it all looks good on him.
“Do you know anything about a wassail bowl?” I ask.
“Bobby?”
“Yes.”
“Old Twelvey,” he says, like the words themselves are muscle memory. He sets down the sanding block, wipes his hands on a rag. “It’s shallow and wooden, with copper around the rim. Couldn’t tell you where Elspeth kept it, though. Kitchen would make sense. So would the attic.”
“I’ll start there, I guess.”
“Your call.” He glances past my shoulder, toward the stairs that climb through the house. “You want company?”
It’s a fair offer, but after last night, the thought makes something in me twist. We sat up too late, drinking and talking until the candles burned low—about Elspeth, about our childhoods, about things neither of us meant to share.
It was easy. Too easy. The kind of connection that’s dangerous when you know it has an expiration date.
I like his company more than I should. I like the quiet between us, too. It’s the kind that doesn’t demand anything. But I’m leaving, and missing him is one more thing I don’t have room for on my agenda.
“I’m fine,” I tell him. “If I don’t find it, I’ll come back, and we’ll try the kitchen.”
He nods. “There’s a step stool beside the pantry. Take that instead of the red chair.”
My brow furrows. “I wasn’t going to use the red chair.”
He smiles without showing his teeth, dimples cutting in anyway. And I carry that smile upstairs the way you carry a mug that’s just a little too full. Careful. Careful.
Up in the attic, I start with the big things. Trunks labeled in Elspeth’s tidy hand. Guest linens. Winter quilts. Blue Willow crockery wrapped in tissue.
I slide my fingers into the spaces where a bowl might hide—behind the trunk, under the low table with the nick in one leg. There are a thousand little remnants up here, and every one of them hums faintly with her touch.
A spool of thread. A cracked teacup. A map folded so many times the creases shine.
I don’t say the words out loud to the house because it feels needy, but I think them.
Help me, would you? Please.
A lamp flickers to life in the corner, and I whip my head toward it. I know what that means; the house is trying to tell me something. A small rocking chair sits there in a thin spill of dusty light.
Not the bowl, though. Because why would she make things easy on me?
Still, the sight of the chair there makes me jittery. It feels like I’ve stepped over some invisible line, trespassed back into a life that no longer fits. Every trunk, every quilt, every scrap of handwriting seems capable of cutting me open if I touch it wrong.
Last time I was up here, I found a stack of letters that sent me into a weeklong panic spiral. I still have Wells’ tucked in my nightstand. I keep planning to show it to him, but the plan keeps failing to choose a day.
Cupboards. Boxes. Cedar chest. No bowl.
“Fine,” I tell the rafters. “Kitchen it is.”
On the way down, I pause at the landing window. The glass ripples faintly, imperfect and old. I remember Wells saying he loved wavy glass, the way it softens everything beyond it. He was right. The world outside looks like a painting, all blurred edges and muted light.
From here, I can see him in front of the house, bent over the tread again. Sleeves shoved to his elbows, head tipped as he works. The wintry light catches on his hair, and for a second, he looks unreal. A fairy tale wrapped in Carhartt.
I really, really need to stop thinking about how good he looks.
Downstairs, the kitchen greets me with its armful of warmth and antique tile. I drag the red chair to where the light’s best and open the tall cabinet beside the cold pantry. Platters first. Three white with blue rims. One oval with a hairline crack that never gets worse.
The top shelf is deep, shadowed, impossible to see from this angle. I reach up, groping toward a stacked tower of bowls, and the whole thing wobbles dangerously.
“Don’t you dare,” I tell it.
The tower doesn’t care what I want. It wobbles once, twice. It’s gathering momentum for disaster; I can feel it. The chair beneath me shifts, and I grab the cabinet’s edge too late. Everything starts to move at once.
For one horrible second, I can already picture it—the crash, the splintered porcelain, the humiliation of kneeling on tile to pick glass from my palms while Wells stands there watching me apologize for bleeding.
But nothing breaks.
The cascade stops shy of the floor. A platter lands softly against my hip. A small mixing bowl hangs suspended in midair, hums faintly, then lowers itself into my open hands as if the house has decided I’m worth saving today.
I exhale, sore butt planted firmly on the tile.
Thank you, I think, and in the quiet, I can almost hear Elspeth’s two-knuckle tap on the banister.
“You saved the plates,” I tell the room. “But you won’t show me where the goddamn wassail bowl is.”
A boot scuffs behind me. I twist around to find Wells leaning in the doorway, arms crossed. He takes in the red chair, the open cabinet, the floating mess of unbroken dishes. His eyebrow lifts in that slow, smug way that makes me want to throw something breakable after all.
“Don’t,” I say before he can open his mouth.
“Don’t what? Chastise you? Because that seems fair game, considering you nearly died by crockery.”
I huff. “The house knocked me off-balance.”
“Don’t blame her for your poor decision-making—or your complete disregard for basic physics.”
He steps neatly through the scatter of dishes and crouches beside the pie safe, where the winter apples used to sit. His hand disappears behind a stack of linens and comes back holding a wooden bowl the color of dark honey, copper glinting faintly around the rim.
I stare at it like I’ve never seen a bowl before.
Then again, I’ve never seen this one—the fabled wassail bowl. I’ve never been here for Old Twelvey, either. Always left after New Year’s Day, back in time for school, back before Blue Willow could thaw.
Midwinter in this town was always something I missed.
“It was right here under the tea towels,” he says, casual.
“Of course it was.”
Of course, you found it. Of course, I didn’t. The house probably likes you more than me, you infuriating show-off.
He sets the bowl on the table between us, and we both study it. It’s larger than I imagined, worn smooth where countless hands have passed it along. A faint ring glows inside the wood, where cider and honey once pooled and dried. A single crack runs up its belly.
“You could’ve called out for me,” he says. “I would’ve helped with the avalanche.”
“It was more of a controlled descent.”
He moves past me, close enough that I feel the brush of his sleeve. A dish towel appears in his hands. He wets it, wrings it out, and runs it along the rim in slow, deliberate circles.
“What’s so special about it, anyway? It’s just a boring old bowl.”
“It’s not. It’s the bowl.” He tilts it until the lamplight strikes the copper inlay. “If you ask Bobby, it’s practically holy.”
I arch a brow. “So, we’re worshiping tableware now?”
“Many a Blue Willow fool has poured their wishes into this thing,” he says. “Year after year. Spilled half the cider on their boots, too. Call it tableware if you want, but here, tradition’s scripture. You should know that by now.”
I do know that, but knowing it doesn’t mean I understand it. Or feel it the way he does.
His thumb traces the crack up the side, slow and careful, like he’s following the path of an old river. There’s something reverent in the way he touches it. Something I shouldn’t notice.
His hands are too steady, too sure, too. I wonder what they would—God, no. I shake the thought loose before it lands.
“Are you going, then?” I ask, clearing my throat. “To this thing tonight?”
“Hell yeah, I am.”
I fiddle with the towel so I don’t have to look at him looking at me. “Then I guess I should go, too.”
We stand in it for a moment—first one breath, then another. We can be careful when we choose to be. The other night, though—the wine, the blanket, the sound of his laugh low in his chest—left the air between us thick and uncertain. Nothing about it felt simple.
But we have to keep our distance now. Keep our footing.
Because this man unsettles me. He’s steady where I’m restless, rooted where I run. We want different things and come from different worlds. And yet, somehow, that night proved we recognize the same shapes of loneliness.
Still, I’m sure he sees me as fleeting. Feckless. Already half-gone. And yet, there’s something in the way he looks at me, like he hasn’t quite decided whether to let me go.
“I need to check the lantern stakes on the lane,” he says. “Wind tipped a few last week. We can take my truck.”
I blink. “We?”
“If you want.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I want.”
I lean against the counter while he finishes dusting the bowl. A single lamp above the sink keeps us in a pool of golden light. I wonder how many nights my grandmother stood here with him, sharing this same easy quiet.
I’m sure she didn’t look at him the way I do—admiring the shape of his shoulders, the rough grace in his hands. Or hell, maybe she did.
Grandmothers notice things, too.
When he passes the bowl to me, he forgets to let go. Our hands bump, knuckles grazing, and the contact catches like a spark under my skin. I want to say something. To tell him that, for whatever reason, his simplest of touches sets my every nerve alight.
It’s my nature to name what I feel, to call it plain: hot, sharp, too much, too good. My mind races ahead of my mouth, always ready to confess. But years of being told to hold my tongue, to stay small and agreeable, have taught me he wouldn’t want to hear it anyway.
He’s ignoring whatever this is between us. Pretending not to feel it. And I should, too. Anything else would be asking for trouble.