20. Ellie
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Ellie
Mrs. Bellinger won’t hear of me eating in the guest room again.
“Two nights you’ve been up there picking at sandwiches.
” She’s pulling a chicken out of the refrigerator, already planning, already taking charge the way she does with everything.
“You need a real meal and some company, and you’re going to help me make it so you don’t sit up there thinking yourself into circles. ”
I don’t argue. I’m too tired to argue. I’ve been running on coffee and adrenaline for two days and my body is starting to remind me that’s not sustainable. My hands shake when I pick up the knife she hands me. My eyes burn every time I blink.
“Zeke’s coming for dinner,” she adds, casual, and it isn’t nothing and she knows it. “He’s been worried about you.”
“You called Zeke?”
“His mother called him. I called his mother.” She starts seasoning the chicken with quick, practiced hands. “Small town, honey. Word travels whether you want it to or not.”
She talks while she works, the way she always has, and she doesn’t need me to answer.
The roofers are booked out three weeks. The church is holding services in the fellowship hall.
Somebody’s cow ended up in somebody else’s pond and both men are pretending it didn’t happen.
She doesn’t say Jacob’s name once, and she doesn’t say Daphne’s, and I know that’s on purpose, and I know it’s costing her.
I focus on the onion in front of me. The familiar burn in my eyes feels better than the other kind, the one that’s been there since I walked out of my house with a suitcase in my hand.
Zeke comes in the back door at six without knocking, the way he’s come into this house since we were nine years old and he was a skinny kid with too many freckles and a chipped front tooth from falling off his bike.
The tooth got fixed eventually, and the freckles faded into a tan, and he grew into his shoulders and his jaw, but he’s still Zeke.
Still the boy who used to catch frogs with me in the creek behind the church.
Still the friend who sat with me in the back pew at my aunt’s funeral because I couldn’t stop shaking and he didn’t know what else to do.
He looks at me once, quick, the way he looked at me in the office the Monday after my birthday, and then he doesn’t look at me that way again all night, and I understand he’s decided that too.
He kisses Mrs. Bellinger on the cheek and steals a green bean off the cutting board and drops into the chair across from me at the kitchen table.
“Hey, Ellie.” His voice is easy, no pressure, no expectation. “Heard you were staying here.”
“Who told you?”
“Everybody.” He grins, and it’s the same grin he’s had since we were kids, wide and warm and completely uncomplicated. “You okay?”
“Not really.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Your cowboy’s parked across the road, you know that?”
“I know that.”
He nods, and that’s the answer he expected, and he gets up and starts setting the table without being asked.
Plates from the cabinet, silverware from the drawer, napkins folded the way Mrs. Bellinger taught us both when we were ten.
That’s Zeke, though. He knows when to push and when to leave alone.
He knows how to fill a silence without making it awkward.
“Did I ever tell you about the raccoon in that tractor out on the county road?” he asks, pulling out glasses.
“What?”
“Tuesday. Day before the storm.” He’s grinning again, already enjoying the story before he’s told it.
“Old man out there calls me at six in the morning, says his tractor won’t start, can I come take a look.
I drive out, pop the hood, and this fat raccoon is just sitting on the engine block staring at me, and I’ve interrupted his breakfast.”
Mrs. Bellinger snorts from the stove. “I heard about that. Didn’t it bite you?”
“Tried to. I jumped back so fast I fell in the mud. Ruined my good boots.” He shakes his head. “The old man’s standing there laughing so hard he can’t breathe, and the raccoon just waddles off into the corn. Didn’t even run. Just walked. He knew I wasn’t going to do anything about it.”
I smile despite myself. It’s a small smile, barely there, but it’s the first time my face has done anything but frown or cry in two days.
“Wash your hands before you touch my table,” Mrs. Bellinger says, and he does, and she watches him do it the way she’s watched him do it since he was nine.
I’m stirring the potatoes, watching the steam rise, thinking about nothing and everything at once, when I feel it. That prickle at the back of my neck. The feeling you get when someone’s watching you, when eyes are on you from somewhere you can’t see.
I look up, out the window over the sink, and my stomach drops.
His truck. Across the road, lights off, nose pointed at the house. I can see the shape of him behind the wheel, a shadow against the darker shadow of the cab, not moving.
“Ellie?” Mrs. Bellinger follows my eyes and sighs. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
“How long has he been there?”
“I saw him pull up a few minutes ago, when I put the rolls in. Didn’t want to say anything.”
I should be angry. I should walk out there and tell him to go home, to leave me alone, to stop sitting outside my borrowed window waiting to be let in. I told him not to follow me. I told him I needed space.
But he’s not following me. He’s not knocking on the door or calling my phone or showing up at my work with more things I don’t want. He’s just sitting there. Watching. Waiting.
I saw him sit in that truck yesterday, outside the office, both hands on the wheel and the engine off.
I know what he looks like when he’s making himself stay put.
His shoulders come up around his ears and his jaw works and he holds the wheel the way he held the rail at the pens that first morning, and he’s doing it right now, across the road, in the dark, and I’m the reason.
I turn back to the stove and I keep stirring the potatoes and I don’t look at the window again.
Dinner is pot roast and mashed potatoes and green beans from somebody’s garden, served on Mrs. Bellinger’s good plates because she believes every meal should feel like it matters.
Mr. Bellinger comes down from his study and takes his place at the head of the table and says grace the way he has every night for forty years, and then we eat.
I eat. I didn’t think I could and I do, half a plate and then the other half, and Mrs. Bellinger sees it and doesn’t say a word about it and puts another spoon of potatoes on my plate while she’s talking about the church.
Mrs. Bellinger keeps the conversation light, carrying most of it herself when the rest of us don’t pick up the slack.
She talks about who’s dating who in town, the postmaster’s son and the girl from the bakery, apparently, and isn’t that a surprise.
She talks about which roofs are getting fixed first after the storm, and how the church is managing without its steeple.
“Came down right on the preacher’s car,” Zeke adds. “He was standing in the parking lot watching it happen. Said he took it as a sign from God that he needed a new car anyway.”
I almost smile at that. Almost.
Mr. Bellinger says one gruff thing about “that boy sitting out there like a lost dog waiting for scraps” and Mrs. Bellinger kicks him under the table hard enough that I hear it, and he goes back to his plate without another word.
After dinner, when Mrs. Bellinger is at the sink with her hands in soapy water and Mr. Bellinger has retreated to his study with the paper, Zeke walks me out to the back porch.
The night is warm and the stars are out in full, more than you can see in the city, more than most people ever get to see.
The crickets are going in the grass and somewhere down the street a dog is barking at nothing.
Past the corner of the house, I can still see Jacob’s truck. A darker shape against the dark, unmoving.
“Can I say one thing?” Zeke asks.
“Sure.”
“I stopped flirting with you on your birthday.”
I blink at him. “What?”
“Before that I was always, you know.” He shrugs, a little embarrassed. “Making jokes. Testing the water. Seeing what would happen.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I’ve known Zeke my whole life.
He’s always been charming, always been a flirt, with me, with every woman in the county, with the preacher’s wife over the offering plate one memorable Sunday that his mother still hasn’t forgiven him for.
I never thought it meant anything serious.
“But that night at Sue’s.” He shakes his head. “You kept looking at that empty chair. Every time the door opened, your whole face would light up for a second, and then it would fall when it wasn’t him. Over and over. For two hours.”
My throat tightens. I look away, out at the yard, at the fireflies blinking in the grass.
“That’s not how a woman looks when she’s falling out of love,” Zeke says quietly. “That’s how she looks when she’s still all the way in.”
He’s quiet a second. Then he says it, plain, to the yard and not to me.
“I’ve been in love with you since I was nine years old, Ellie. I’m done pretending I’m not.”
I don’t move. I make myself look at it, because he’s earned that much, and I look at it for one whole second.
Zeke. The easiest man I know. A man who fixes what’s broken the same day you call, who tells the story that makes the room laugh so nobody looks at the empty chair, who would never in his life leave me at a table.
I could have that. I know it the way I know my own name, and I know just as sure, in the same second, that I don’t want it.
Not because he’s not enough. Because he’s not the one, and he never was, and there’s a truck across the road with the engine off that I can’t stop looking at even now.
“I love you, Zeke,” I say. “Not like that. Not ever like that.”
“Yeah.” He looks at the yard. “I figured. Had to say it anyway.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He’s still looking at the yard.
“He’s a fool,” he says, after a while. “He’s been a fool since the day he married you and didn’t know what he had.
But he’s sitting out there in the dark right now, not knocking on the door, not making a scene.
Just waiting.” He glances at the truck, then back at me.
“That’s more than he’s done in a while.”
“I don’t know if I can trust it.”
“Then make him earn it.” He squeezes my arm, gentle, and lets go. “But don’t shut the door all the way. Not yet.”
He goes back inside, and he doesn’t touch me on the way, and I know that’s on purpose too.
I stand on the porch alone, looking out at the dark street, at the truck that hasn’t moved, and I wonder how much of that Jacob could see from where he’s sitting, and whether he watched another man say it to me and stayed in his truck anyway.
He doesn’t get out. He doesn’t wave or flash his lights or do anything to get my attention. He just sits there.
I could walk down the drive. It’s forty steps to the road, I’ve counted them going to the mailbox, and forty steps back, and I could open his door and get in and we’d sit there in the dark and not say anything, and it would be the most we’ve had in two months.
I stand on the porch with my arms wrapped around myself and I don’t take the first step, because the first step is his, and he’s taken it exactly this far and no farther, and I’m not going to carry him the rest of the way. Not this time.
I go inside and I don’t look back.
***
I lie in the guest bed and I listen for his engine.
It doesn’t start. At midnight, when I’ve quit pretending I’m not listening, I hear it turn over and back out slow and go up the street, and I lie there in the dark with the sound of it going away and I don’t know if I’m relieved or the other thing.
Sue calls me at eight the next morning.
I’m still in bed, not sleeping but not awake either, drifting in that gray space where thoughts come loose and float around without connecting to anything. The phone buzzes on the nightstand and I grab it without looking, expecting Mrs. Bellinger or maybe Zeke.
“I need you at the diner.” Sue’s voice is tight. “Right now.”
“What?” I sit up, rubbing my eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“The jeweler just called me. Daphne Long walked in the second he unlocked, trying to sell your aunt’s ring.”