Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
The teasing started at the feed shed.
Hollis got to her before she had the clipboard out of the truck, leaning on the doorframe with the grin of a man who had saved it up all morning.
“Word is you’ve been keeping company with a Bolton man,” he said.
“I keep company with a clipboard,” Elise said. “Move.”
He moved. He whistled, though, the whole time she counted the mineral tubs, which told her the news had crossed both ranches and unpacked its bags for the season.
By afternoon Cody had it. So did Wes, and once Wes got hold of a thing he carried it straight to Midge, and Midge handed it to anybody who came through the Bolton kitchen hungry.
Annie did the most damage, and she did it kindly.
She reported that Stephen had shaved twice in one week, which traveled to the caterer, then to her sister at the bank, who said it to Elise’s face while counting out the ranch deposit.
By the weekend the woman at the hardware counter asked after “her cowboy” as though Elise had ordered him out of a catalog.
Elise had spent years as the one who ran other people’s information. Being the information was a different chair to sit in.
She did not hate it as much as she had braced to.
Robert was the worst of them, and he never said a word.
She set the Henderson invoice and the Abilene buyer’s callback slip on his desk, and he took them over the top of his reading glasses with a look that had a whole paragraph in it.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I didn’t say a thing.”
“You were going to.”
“I was going to ask whether the buyer wants the spring lot or the fall.” He laid the slip down with great care. “Spring, I’d guess. That’s why I keep you.”
His mouth twitched the entire time. She let him have it. A man could grin behind his glasses all he pleased, so long as the grin stayed put.
The rest of it settled into a shape she had not let herself want in a long while.
Dinners most nights. The Wagon Wheel, where Marlene gave up pretending she wasn’t refilling their cups to listen in, and where she started parking them at the corner booth without being asked.
His table the other nights, where he cooked plain and good and apologized for the plain part until Elise told him to hush and ate two helpings to make her point.
Walks after, the slow kind, out past the barn while the light went easy over the pasture and the day let go of its grip. He did not crowd the quiet with talk. That suited her better than any speech a man had ever made her.
One evening he stopped at the gate to the home pasture and held it open for her without a word.
She went through ahead of him and did not race on to organize the rest of the walk.
She let him set the pace. That alone told her how far down the guard had come, the one she had spent years building board by board.
Phone calls that ran long. Longer than she would have admitted to anyone holding a clipboard of her own. He was no talker, and the quiet on his end of the line turned out to be the company, not the words.
Some nights he read her a page out of Earl’s old operations journal, the cattle and the price of feed set down in a dead man’s hand, and she held the phone and let a stranger’s grandfather talk her toward sleep.
She would sit at her own kitchen table, the plain white dishes drying in the rack, the phone warm at her ear, and a whole stretch would pass where neither of them said a thing.
Two people and a quiet line.
The best part of her day, and she had stopped pretending otherwise.
One night at his place, after the plates were cleared and the coffee poured, he unrolled paper across the table and smoothed it flat with the side of his hand.
Not blueprints. Graph paper, soft at the folds, a pencil line drawn and redrawn until the good version stood out from the ghosts of the bad ones beneath it.
“Been working on this a while,” he said.
She leaned in. The house she sat in had a second house drawn over the top of it, the same bones with more room hung on them.
“You’re adding on.”
“Out the back, here.” His pencil tapped the kitchen wall at her shoulder.
“Push the wall out, give it a real pantry. A mud porch off the side, so a man doesn’t track the whole county across Grandma’s good floor.
” A line ran up the margin of the page. “And a second story. Bedrooms up top. The stair would come off the front room, here.”
She leaned closer. He had drawn the railings. A man penciled railings onto a house he had not built yet only when he meant to grow old inside it.
Bedrooms, she noted. Not a bedroom. Rooms enough for a houseful. She kept that to herself and let it warm her where it sat.
“And out here.” He turned the page over.
The yard had squares penciled into it, neat as a quilt top.
“Garden. A big one. The way they always kept it.” His voice changed on the word they.
“Grandma put up beans and tomatoes every summer till the year she couldn’t.
Earl kept it going after, badly, on account of he hated to let her things go.
I let it run to grass once he passed.” He looked at the paper instead of at her. “I want it the way it was.”
His pencil rested on the front of the drawing. “From the new porch you’d look out on the live oak. Pete’s resting under it.” He said no more about the dog. He did not have to. Earl’s chair sat down by the pond where it had always sat, and the porch he was drawing would look after the rest.
Elise wanted the pencil.
Her hand half rose for it before she set it down in her lap and held it there.
Two years of a man’s life she had drawn up once, every line of it, the bills and the color-coded road ahead, until the one at the center of all that planning had no more use for the plan, or for her.
She had taped the boxes herself. She had paid the deposit on the storage unit and driven the key home in her pocket.
Not yours to draw up. His.
So she asked instead. “When?”
“Slow.” He almost smiled. “Paycheck by paycheck. I’ll frame it myself when the season eases off. Earl put up half the outbuildings on this place with his own two hands, and I helped him raise the last of them. The house can wait on mine.”
“It’s a good plan,” she said, and meant the patience as much as the drawing. “The mud porch especially. You’d save Grandma’s floor and your own back in one stroke.”
“You think so.”
“I run a ranch office. I can spot a good system when a man draws me a clean one.”
That earned her the rest of the smile, the one he kept behind his teeth most days and spent on almost no one.
He walked her out to the truck after. The plans stayed on the table, weighted at one corner with the salt cellar so the dream would not roll itself shut overnight.
At the cab he held the door and did not hurry her up into it.
“Drive safe,” he said.
“I always do.”
“Reckon you do.” And there it was, plain as the graph paper between them. He counted on her. It did not spook him, and it did not turn her into a thing he would set on a shelf once the work was through.
He kissed her once, unhurried, and shut the door with care.
She drove the county road home with the window down and the radio off, and the dark kept easy company the whole way.
She made her bed the next morning before the coffee finished brewing, the way she always had, a promise to her future self. The made bed looked less lonely than it had a month ago.
Kelly stood at the office coffee pot with a face on.
Elise had that face cataloged. It was the one Kelly wore over Operation Sweetheart, and over the Great Shingle Crisis of June, the look of a woman whose plan had come in under budget and ahead of schedule.
“Morning,” Kelly sang out.
“Mornin’.”
“You look rested.”
“I am.”
Kelly poured two cups and slid one down the counter, far too pleased with the state of the world, humming under her breath at whatever she would not say out loud.
Elise picked up the cup. Black, the way she took it, since Kelly had it memorized by now.
She was happy. The questions about Annie and Kelly’s matchmaking scheme would keep. It could keep till never, for all the good it would do her. She’d decided it was going to be what it was going to be and she was okay with that.
She topped off Kelly’s cup before she left the pot, and let the older woman go on being pleased with herself.