8. Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
BEN
I can’t sleep, which is new.
Sleep’s never been my problem. You work a body hard enough all day and it does what it’s told at night.
But I lie in that neat little cabin with the quilt square across me, the window cracked to the creek sound, and my brain runs the day on a loop.
The decking going down true. Sandwiches on a tailgate. A laugh with a head thrown back.
The night before a man’s wedding, that’s not the footage that’s supposed to be playing.
I get up for water I don’t want, and that’s when I see it through the window. Light down the hill. The barn glowing against the night sky.
It’s near eleven. The whole ranch is dark except that barn.
I know who’s in it before my boots are on.
The meadow’s cool and wet through, fireflies still working the low grass in ones and twos like the night shift.
The doors of Something Blue are held open by a ladder, a heap of string lights beside them.
Ella Lockhart is standing in the middle of the barn, head tipped back, glaring at the rafters with her hands on her hips.
“It’s eleven o’clock,” I say.
She startles half out of her boots, hand flying to the chain at her neck. “Fuck me. Wear a bell.”
“You’ve been up since four.”
“The lights came today instead of Wednesday.” She gestures at the heap like that settles it.
“They have to go up tonight. There’s no time tomorrow, tomorrow’s flowers and tables and four hundred other things.
Rose was supposed to help, but she’s asleep, and honestly, it’s easier alone than supervising Rose on a ladder at midnight. ”
“You’re not doing this alone.”
“Ben.” She points at me and shakes her head. “You are getting married in a matter of hours.”
“Then we’d best get them hung.” I pick up the far end of the first string and start walking it out. “Where do they go?”
She stands there a second, screwing up her face, fighting the need to accept my help. Then she gives it up, pulls a paper from her back pocket, and unfolds it.
It’s a copy of a page from the notebook. The old lady’s sketch. The barn drawn in soft pencil with its doors flung wide, and the strings of light swagged in with yellow, six long loops down the length of the rafters and a tail of them running out the doors to the first tree.
“She drew where every strand goes,” Ella says. “So that’s where they’re hanging.”
“Then we’d better get started.”
It’s slow work, and it’s good work. She runs the ladder because she’s lighter, and arguing with her about ladders would take longer than the lights.
I feed the strings and mind the swag depth against the sketch, calling it, two inches lower, hold, there.
She clips off each run, comes down and stands beside me, squinting up at it.
We get the yellow-pencil loops out of a dead woman’s sketch and into the actual air, one rafter at a time.
Minding the swag means looking up. Looking up means her, stretched to the last clip, shirt riding loose of her waistband, and a man standing under that at midnight learns things about himself he’d rather have left unlearned hours out from an altar. I hold the ladder and study the floorboards.
“Tell me a dream you had,” she says from up the ladder. “Before. When you were a kid.”
“A dream?”
“Everybody had one. Rose went through a phase of wanting to be a preacher, don’t ever tell her I told you. Cassie used to line her stuffed animals up and give them their shots. I planned weddings for barn cats.” She clips a strand. “What was yours?”
I feed her the next length and think about lying, and don’t.
“A table,” I say.
She looks down at me.
“That’s the dream. A big table, full. People I belonged to, staying put. Nobody leaving, nobody getting taken anywhere. I used to build it in my head at night, who’d sit where, what we’d eat.” I keep my eyes on the lights. “Kid stuff.”
She’s quiet a minute, working the clip. “That’s not kid stuff. That’s the best dream I’ve heard all year. Is that what you’ve found with Carla?”
I swallow. Is it? I thought so at first, when I went to her ranch with Ethan to do some business and the ranch owner introduced me to his beautiful daughter.
Mr. Vaughn pushed the match. What my daughter needs is stability, he’d said.
And son, I think you’re just the man to give it to her.
I’d thought so too, at the time. But I’m not sure stable is what Carla wants, or where love fits into it all.
But I can’t say any of that aloud. Not the night before my fucking wedding.
I smile at Ella. “What was yours? Barn cat weddings aside.”
“This.” She says it simple, no drama, and drives the last clip home. “This barn. Full of light and people. I used to think the dream was Grandma’s. Now I think it was always both of ours, and she just got me started.”
She comes down the ladder. We walk to the doors. She finds the plug by feel and looks at me.
“Ready?”
“Hit it.”
She hits it.
And the barn comes alive.
Six swags of warm gold running the length of the rafters, exact to the pencil, doubling themselves in the shine of the floorboards.
The light spills out the open doors into the dark, and the fireflies rise off the meadow to meet it.
Ella makes a sound that isn’t a word. Her hands come up over her mouth, and she turns a slow circle under it all.
I stand in the doorway of a barn a dead woman dreamed, and watch that dream come true for her granddaughter forty years later.
“She was right,” Ella whispers. “It’s exactly what she said. She was right about all of it.”
“So were you. You built it.”
“I had help.”
“You had help the last two days. You had five years of nobody.” I say it plainer than I mean to, but it wants saying and nobody around here seems willing.
“Ella. Look at what you did. You’re standing exactly where you’re supposed to be standing.
Some people never once in their life get to say that. ”
She looks at me across the gold light. Her eyes are shining, and it isn’t all the bulbs. For a long second, neither one of us finds anywhere else to look.
My phone rings.
Carla. The gold dress, the gold light, the tinny pop song filling Evelyn’s barn. I step out onto the new decking to take it, and Ella turns away fast, busy with the ladder that doesn’t need her.
“Baby!” Music behind her, glasses, a room laughing.
“Okay, quick thing, the florist. I said blush and cream for the arbor, but Daddy’s friend said blush photographs pink, like PINK pink, so I need you to tell them cream and white when they get there, are you writing this down?
Cream and white. Not blush. And the chairs, Garrett thinks straight rows read better on camera than curved. ”
“Whatever you want, Carla.”
“Perfect. That’s why I love you.” A splash of laughter behind her, and her voice going away from the phone already. “Cream and white! Don’t forget! Tomorrow, baby. Can’t wait.”
She’s gone before I answer.
I stand on decking I laid myself, holding a phone she never once asked a question into. Behind me, the light from the barn is pouring out across the meadow. She didn’t ask how the venue looks. She didn’t ask how I am. Cream and white, not blush. That’s tomorrow, itemized.
Back inside, Ella’s winding the spare wire, lights gilding the loose hair around her face. She glances up at me with a question she’s too polite to ask, and instead says, “Cream and white?”
“You heard.”
“Yep. I’ll handle the florist.” She ties off the wire. “Curved rows, though. For the record. The camera can cope.”
I laugh at that. I’ve done more laughing in two days on this ranch than in the last two years anywhere else.
I douse the lights while she locks up. We say goodnight in the meadow, she goes up the hill and I go down it.
The fireflies fill the dark between us.
She makes me smile. That’s all it is. Some people make you smile, nothing wrong with that. Tomorrow I’ll stand in her grandmother’s barn under her grandmother’s lights and marry somebody else, and it won’t matter one bit that the wedding planner makes me smile.
I’m still smiling when I fall asleep.