Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sunday dinner at the Shipley table ran loud and long, the way it always had, and this week a Garrett sat in the chair beside Elise’s for the whole crew to fuss over.
Stephen had come in stiff as a fence post an hour ago, hat literally in hand, and Kelly had taken one look at him and pushed a bowl of mashed potatoes into his arms and told him to make himself useful.
By the time the chicken came around he’d unbent enough to argue cattle prices with Robert and steal the crispy skin off Elise’s plate when she pretended not to mind.
The sight of him fitting in made Elise feel fluttery and warm inside.
Stephen Garrett, who’d spent most of his life being a loner, passing the rolls and laughing low at Annie’s stories as though he’d sat at this table his whole life.
Underneath the discarded loner was a man who had warmed to her.
He’d broken through her defenses, too. And now, somehow, he was hers.
Robert had lost his place halfway through grace, thanking the Lord for a harvest two months off yet, and Elise had fed him the next line under her breath the way she’d done for years.
He patted her hand in thanks and carried right on.
Across the table the corner of Stephen’s mouth had tipped up in a way that did Elise’s heart a world of good.
It was Annie who let the cat out, the way Annie let most things out, by accident and with her whole heart. “I’m just so glad it worked,” she said, beaming down the table at the pair of them. “All that scheming. Kelly and I about wore ourselves to the bone.”
Elise set down her fork and gave Annie her full attention. “Do tell.”
Kelly, who had never met a confession she couldn’t dress up as a victory lap, leaned on her elbows. “Project Cowboy,” she said, proud as a cat with a canary. “Annie and I cooked it up at the June barbecue. And when two women take on a job that size, they delegate. We recruited the menfolk.”
Chad lifted both hands off the table. “I declined,” he said. “On the record. I told these two that grown people find their own way to each other and don’t need a committee voting on it.” He forked a bite of potatoes. “I did hope it’d take, though. For whatever that’s worth.”
“Robert,” Kelly said, “was not so principled.”
Robert, at the head of the table, had the decency to look caught.
“Now hold on. I prefer the word architect.” He aimed his fork at Stephen.
“Whose notion do you reckon it was to send the two of you on that supply run together? Hickory Hollow didn’t need a blessed thing from that store.
I invented an errand. Put you both in one truck on a long road and left the good Lord and bad gravel to do the rest.”
Elise stared at her boss. “You stood in your office and told Kelly to leave me alone. I was right outside the door.”
“Course I did.” Robert grinned, unrepentant. “You’d have spooked at the merest whiff of it. Best way to run a matchmaking is to pass for the one man dead set against it.”
Stephen had set his fork down somewhere in the middle of it and looked from one Shipley to the other, a man who’d had a card trick performed on him with his own wallet. “So the tire was real,” he said, the pieces dropping into place. “The flat on the cut-through. That part wasn’t yours.”
“Now that part was God and gravel, son,” Robert said. “I only built the road to the trouble. The trouble you two made all on your own.”
“And I’d have called the whole business a triumph,” Robert went on, “if it hadn’t left me out fifty dollars.”
Beside her, Stephen had caught the scent of an ambush a half-second too late. “What fifty dollars?” he said.
The whole table lit up.
“Oh, the pool,” Annie said, delighted, on account of Annie had no brakes and never had. “I set up a little pool on how long it’d take you two to quit circling and land. Everybody bought in at ten dollars a guess. I had June, myself. I always was an optimist.”
“I had September,” Kelly said mournfully. “Robert took the Fourth of July, since it’s always fun to add more to an already fantastic celebration.”
“And Chad,” Robert said, sour as week-old coffee, “who wouldn’t lift one finger to help, who sat right there preaching about grown folks finding their own way, that man cleaned us out.”
Chad raised his sweet tea in a lazy salute. “Took the whole pot,” he said. “Fifty dollars. Bought Annie a sunhat with my winnings and kept the change.”
Elise looked at Stephen. Stephen looked at Elise. And then the two of them lost it at the same breath, the helpless kind of laughing that folds a person in half, while the table crowed all around them.
“Fifty dollars,” Stephen got out, wiping his eyes. “Our whole romance, and the house cleared fifty dollars on it.”
“I ought to be furious,” Elise said, and found that she wasn’t, not even a little. These nosy, good-hearted people had taken one look at the two loneliest souls in the county and flat refused to let them stay that way.
“I’m thankful they meddled,” Stephen said, low, and laid his hand over hers on the table in plain view of the whole grinning lot of them. “Every dadgum one of them.”
“Oh!” Annie pressed both hands to her mouth. “I’ve got to tell Midge!”
Chad caught the tail of her shirt as she was going by and hauled her gently down again. “Let the man hold the woman’s hand in peace, Annie.”
“But Midge had August,” Annie said, stricken on the cook’s behalf, and that set the whole table off all over again.
“Now I get it,” Stephen said. “I wondered how the four of you made a fifty-dollar pot.”
Annie got up and went to tell Midge in spite of her husband’s warning.
They slipped out after pie, before Kelly could rope them into a card game. Stephen drove them out to the home place with the windows down, and they walked the long way to the pond in the last of the evening, his hand wrapped around hers, neither one of them in a hurry.
The lease money would do it, he told her.
A back addition first, then the second story, the big kitchen with her deep farm sink and a window set over it to catch the morning.
He talked about a garden off the south side the way his grandmother had kept one, and room for a dog again one of these days.
And talk he did. That was the marvel of it.
The man who’d once doled out words as though they cost him blood stood at the edge of his own pond and spent them free.
“You’re already drawing it, aren’t you,” he said, not looking over. “The kitchen. You’ve got it laid out behind your eyes down to the drawer pulls.”
“Cabinet pulls, the brushed kind,” she admitted. “And the farmhouse sink. There was a list once.”
“You mean this list,” he said, pulling a post it note out of his pocket.
That stopped her cold. He’d kept the to-do list? “Of course you did,” she said, when she trusted her voice again.
They settled by Earl’s mended chair, him in it and her in the grass against his knee, and for a while neither said a word. Then Stephen drew a breath the way a man steps off a high place. “There’s a piece I haven’t told you,” he said.
“You don’t have to,” she said.
“I know. That’s how I’m sure I want to.” He turned his hat once, then set it down in the grass.
And he told her. The wreck, and the relatives who’d wanted the insurance money. The basis for his belief that most people only wanted to take from him.
None of it came out easy and Elise didn’t rush him. She’d learned that much. A man who’d measured his words for so many years didn’t find his voice overnight.
Elise took it all in without once offering her thoughts. When he ran out of words she folded his rough hand into both of hers.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said. “Not for the explanation. I’d already made up my mind about us.” She pressed his knuckles. “For sharing the locked-up part. That’s all I ever wanted. Not the land or the lease or any pretty words. All I want is the real you.”
“I spent most of my life believing anyone I opened up to would take whatever they could,” he said. “Thank you for waiting on me to tell you my story.”
“It makes sense now and I’m so glad we’re moving forward together.”
“I finally learned how to trust you. Took me long enough, but…” He brushed a thumb over her wrist. “I’m thankful for you.”
The light had gone gold and low over the water, and a whippoorwill called out somewhere in the trees. Elise leaned into his side and a thought caught her sideways and she laughed out loud.
“Fifty dollars, though,” she said. “I can’t get over it. Those two men own most of this county. And your little secret puts you in their orbit.” She tipped her head up at him. “Some of the richest people in around ran a pool on our hearts, and the entire pot came to fifty dollars.”
“Ten dollars a guess,” Stephen said, grave as a banker.
“It’s insulting, is what it is.” She was laughing now. “You’d think men with that kind of money could have thrown in more than ten dollars apiece. Our great romance, and they bet on it without real stakes.”
“Cheapest matchmakers in Texas,” Stephen agreed, and kissed the top of her head. “I’ll thank every tightfisted one of them anyhow.”
She turned her face up to kiss him in the gold light, warm and certain, the whole quiet evening as a witness.