24. Ellie
— ? —
Ellie
Five days.
He doesn’t call. He doesn’t text. He doesn’t show up at the office with flowers or trucks or any of the gestures that mean nothing without the man behind them.
He doesn’t park across the road from the Bellingers’ with his headlights off.
He just disappears, and the town notices him disappearing the way it noticed everything else, and reports it to me one day at a time.
Mrs. Bellinger keeps me informed whether I want her to or not.
Sunday: “He wasn’t in church. Jackson was, in his chair, and he sat through the whole thing looking at the empty end of Jacob’s pew.”
Monday: “Sue says he was at the counter at seven. She still isn’t pouring.”
Tuesday: “Hollis stopped by. Said Jacob’s been at the ranch since dawn every day, working on the repairs himself. Won’t let the crew do anything he can do with his own hands.”
Wednesday: “The preacher saw him at the cemetery. Apparently he was at his parents’ graves for a long time. Just standing there.”
Thursday: “Nothing today. Sue says he didn’t come in. Nobody’s seen him.”
Our anniversary was Tuesday. Nobody said it. I didn’t either.
Zeke hasn’t come by the office since the porch.
He sent one text on Tuesday: Still your friend.
Still around. Don’t be weird about it. I wasn’t weird about it.
I read it at my desk and went into the bathroom and cried for five minutes for a man I don’t love, because he deserved better than the second I gave him, and then I washed my face and came back out and I wasn’t weird about it.
I check my phone anyway. Every hour, sometimes more. I hate myself for it, hate that after everything, after the basement and the confession and the way his voice broke on the word love, I’m still the one waiting. Still the one checking. Still the one who can’t stop hoping.
At work I go through the motions. I file papers and answer phones and smile at clients and pretend I’m fine, and Mr. Bellinger watches me from his office doorway and doesn’t say a word.
He knows. The whole town knows. In a place this small, there are no secrets, only varying degrees of how long it takes for everyone to find out.
Thursday night I lie in the guest bed and stare at the ceiling and think about what he said in the basement.
I was selfish to marry you.
I love you.
I’ve loved you since you walked up to me at that wedding.
Watch me.
I think about his mother, wasting away for a man who didn’t deserve her. I think about a fourteen-year-old boy feeling relieved that his parents were dead. I think about grandparents who looked at a child and saw a monster instead.
I think about the heater. About Daphne in an open robe, about him walking away inside five minutes, about him deciding not to tell me because he knew how it would sound.
He was right. It would have sounded bad.
It would have sounded like more than it was.
But nothing happened, and he kept it from me anyway, and that silence was a crack that Daphne crawled through.
I think about the plate under the foil on the patio table, the night he went to the west wing and came back with a lie on his face and I was too tired of being the one who asked to make him say it.
I think about all the silences. All the things he didn’t say, the words he couldn’t get out, the love he felt but couldn’t speak. I think about a year of marriage built on gestures and touches and everything except the three words I needed to hear.
And I think: he said them now. In the dark, where nobody could see, where he couldn’t hide behind anything. He said them the way you’d pull a nail out of your own hand. He said them and it hurt him.
Maybe that’s what real means. Maybe real is supposed to hurt.
Friday morning Mr. Bellinger stops at my desk on his way in and puts a hand on it and doesn’t say anything, and then he says, “It’s Friday,” and goes into his office, and I sit there and look at the door he closed and I don’t know whether that was a warning or a nudge.
Sue calls me at five-thirty on Friday.
“He’s here.”
“Who’s here?” I know who’s here. I’m already reaching for my keys before I realize I’ve moved.
“Don’t be dense, honey.” Her voice is gentler than usual, softer than I’ve heard it since the storm. “He’s been in your booth since five. Two cups of coffee, which I poured, before you ask. His phone isn’t on the table. He asked me what time you blew out the candles on your birthday.”
My stomach turns over. “What did you tell him?”
“Seven-thirty. When I finally made us stop waiting and lit them myself.” A pause. “He didn’t say anything after that. Just sat there staring at the door, waiting for someone to walk through it.”
“I don’t.”
“I’m not telling you what to do.” Her voice firms up. “Lord knows you’ve had enough people telling you what to do lately. I’m just telling you where he is. What you do with that information is your business.”
She hangs up before I can respond.
I sit in my car in the diner parking lot for twenty minutes.
The engine is off. The windows are down.
The evening air is warm and smells like cut grass and rain coming, and I can hear the jukebox playing through the diner’s open door, some old country song about love and loss and second chances.
Through the window I can see him in the back booth, the same booth where I sat on my birthday with an empty chair beside me, watching the door, waiting for a man who never came.
He’s wearing a clean shirt, navy blue, one I bought him for Christmas last year. His hair is combed. His hands are wrapped around a coffee cup, and he’s not drinking from it, just holding it, staring at the door.
He looks tired. He looks older than he is. He looks like a man who’s been carrying a heavy thing for a long time and is finally ready to put it down.
I put my hand on the door handle at six.
I take it off. I put it back. A woman I know from church walks past the car and sees me and pretends she didn’t, and I’m grateful, and I hate that I’m grateful.
The clock on the dash says six-oh-two, six-oh-three.
I think about the four Fridays. I think about him at the fence that morning in April saying it first, and me believing him, and I think that I’m going to walk in there and believe him again, and that I’m a fool, and that I’ve never once been sorry for being this particular fool.
At six-oh-five I get out of the car.
The door swings shut behind me and half the diner turns to look.
I feel their eyes on me, Sue at the register, the couple in the corner booth, the old men at the counter who’ve been eating here since before I was born.
They’re all watching to see what happens next.
That’s why I don’t turn around. I won’t give them the satisfaction of seeing me run.
Sue doesn’t look up from the register. She’s got a rag in her hand and she’s wiping a spot that’s already clean, and I know that rag, and I know she’s giving me the room by not giving me her eyes.
Jacob stands up when he sees me. His hands go to his sides, then to the back of the booth, then to his sides again, and he doesn’t know what to do with them.
I walk toward him. Every step is a long one. The jukebox changes songs, a slower one now, about going home.
He gestures at the bench across from him and I slide in. Sue appears with the coffee pot before I’ve settled, filling my cup without asking, and then she’s gone again, giving us space.
“You came,” he says.
“I almost didn’t.”
“I know.” He looks at me across the table, tired all the way through, and there’s a look on his face I’ve never seen on it. “Thank you. For being here.”
“I’m not sure why I am.”
“That’s okay.” He wraps his hands around his cup again. “I’m not sure why you should be.”
He doesn’t reach across the table. His hands stay on the cup. Two weeks ago he’d have had my wrist in his hand before I finished sliding in, and I’d have let him, and his hands stay on the cup, and I don’t know whether to be grateful or sad.
We sit in silence for a moment. The jukebox plays. Dishes clatter in the kitchen. The world goes on around us. Nothing out there is wrong.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jacob says finally, “about what you need. Not what I think you need. What you actually said you needed, in that parking lot.”
“And?”
“You need to know I’m choosing you. Not saying it.
Doing it.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a set of keys.
Lays them on the table between our cups.
“Hollis has the ranch. As of Monday morning. The operations, the schedules, the hands, the calving list, the 3 a.m. phone calls. All of it. He’s got the set that matters. ”
I look at the keys. They’re ordinary keys, brass and silver, keys that open doors and start trucks.
Nothing special about them except what they represent.
I’ve watched him take that ring out of his pocket ten thousand times.
At the far shed, at the pens, at the kitchen island with a plate going cold in front of him while he answered the phone.
That ring has been in his hand more than I have.
“Then what are those?”
“The ones I’m not carrying anymore.” He pushes them an inch toward the window, away from both of us.
“That ranch has been my excuse for a year. Every Friday I didn’t come home.
Every dinner I missed. Every time you asked me for anything and I said I couldn’t because I had to work.
” He holds my eyes. “I’m done hiding behind it. ”
“Jacob, you can’t just hand your whole ranch to your foreman because your wife left.”
“I didn’t hand him the whole ranch. I handed him the part that kept me from her.
” He doesn’t look away. “I’m not asking you to come back.
I’m not asking you to say anything or decide anything.
I’m telling you where I’ll be. This booth.
Every Friday. Six o’clock. Whether you walk through that door or not. ”
Sue comes by and refills my cup without being asked. I wrap my hands around it, feeling the warmth seep into my palms, and I try to work out what I’m feeling.
I can’t.
I stand up.
“Ellie.”
“I’m not saying no.” I meet his eyes. “I’m saying I need to see what happens next.”
I leave the keys on the table where he put them. I leave the coffee half-drunk. I walk the length of the diner with every eye on me and my back straight, the way I walked to the principal’s office in third grade, and I don’t let my face do anything. At the door I turn around.
“Sue said you asked what time I blew out the candles.”
His jaw tightens. “I wanted to know how long you waited.”
“Almost two hours. I nearly gave up three times.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know you are.” I push the door open. “That’s what makes this so hard.”
***
Saturday evening I’m at the Bellingers’ stove with three pots going when I look up through the window over the sink.
His truck. Across the road, lights off, the way it was last week.
He stayed away five days. Five days of silence, of space, of letting me breathe the way I asked him to.
And then I sat in his booth for twenty minutes, and here he is.
Not at the door. Not on the porch. Across the road with the engine off, and I don’t know if that’s a man who’s learned or a man waiting for me to teach him the next one.
I look at the plate in my hand. I look at the window.
I get an idea I’m not proud of.