19. Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
ELLA
Rose calls at six and doesn’t say hello.
“Sister night. Bootleggers, eight o’clock. I already told the others, you’re the only holdout, and before you start, your spreadsheet will still be sad tomorrow.”
“Rose, I can’t be in town yet. People will—”
“People already are. That’s the point. You come in, you drink one beer, you laugh once, and by tomorrow the story’s Ella’s doing fine instead of nobody’s seen Ella.” A bar towel snaps somewhere on her end. “Trust me on this, El.”
She hangs up before I can argue, which is the whole Rose method.
So at eight I push open the door of Bootleggers for the first time since my life became seventy-two point type, and the noise washes over me warm and familiar. Some things never change in Cedar Ridge, and Bootleggers is one of them.
The old neon bootleg sign is still buzzing over the mirror. The jukebox is playing something with a fiddle in it. Pool balls crack in the back, the dartboard thunks, and the Friday regulars are packed in along the bar.
The talk dips when I come in. A beat. Two.
Then Earl Fisk, of all people lifts his glass from the corner stool and says, “Ella. Flowers were the best this county’s seen,” and the bar hums back up around me like a hive of bees.
Rose watches the whole thing from behind the taps with the smug smile that says her plan is working.
My sisters have the round table under the moose head, which has worn a bra on its antlers since before we were born. No one knows who it once belonged to. Cassie’s already there, off shift, lambless for once. Faith’s beside her with a Coke, eyeing Cassie’s beer with envy.
I sit. Cassie pushes a beer at me she’s already ordered, because Cassie plans ahead.
“To the north cladding,” she says. “Ben says it’s done.”
“Nearly done.”
“He said done.”
“Then it’s done,” I say, because I’ve stopped double-checking behind that man.
The door bangs at half past, and in walks Beth, mud to the collarbone, one cheek painted like war, hair flattened by a hat she’s left in the truck. She crosses the bar to a scattering of applause she absolutely encourages, drops into a chair, and puts her chin in her hands.
“Two-one,” she says dreamily. “Two point one seconds.”
“You’re not allowed in my section covered in arena,” Rose calls over.
“Two point one, Rose.”
“You smell like a calf’s backside.”
“Sam says…” Beth begins, and the table detonates before she can finish.
“There it is,” says Cassie.
“Four seconds,” Faith says. “That’s a record. She usually makes it ten.”
“What? He’s my trainer. Trainers say things.”
“What did Sam say, Beth?” Rose has materialized with a rag and no mercy, stacking empties. “Tell us what Sam said.”
Beth holds out as long as she can, which is no time at all. “He said the run was so clean he’s entering me in Gatlinburg. And that…” She goes pink under the mud. “And that watching me rope is the best part of his week.”
The table goes up like a grandstand. Faith does the whooping.
“The best part of his week?” says Cassie. “His week that consists entirely of watching people rope?”
“It’s professional appreciation.”
“He drove forty minutes last week to return a glove,” Faith says.
“It was a good glove!”
I laugh, and it surprises me how easily the sound comes.
Around us the bar rolls on. Maggie Purvis is holding court by the dartboard.
Two men at the bar are arguing about a fence line.
Naomi is in the corner booth with Miss Dinah and two lemonades, sitting closer than pastoral care strictly requires.
She catches me noticing and raises her glass, entirely unrepentant.
This town. It ran my worst week on its front page, and tonight it made room for me at the bar. Both things are true. That’s what a town is, I suppose.
“You’re smiling,” Cassie says.
“It’s a bar. People smile.”
“You’re smiling at the wall, though.” She follows my eyeline to the wall, which contains a shelf of dusty softball trophies and nothing else. “Fascinating stuff, is it, the 1998 season?”
My cheeks flush. I wasn’t seeing the trophies. I was seeing a skillet, two mugs swapping places, and a line of block capitals marching down my sad, angry list, making it a plan. I was thinking a man who notices cold mugs of tea is a man you could set a clock by, and my face has betrayed me.
“She’s smiling about the venue,” Faith says loyally.
“She’s smiling about something six foot two that fixes gutters,” says Rose, sailing past with a tray.
“I am not.”
Four faces look at me with the pity a terrible liar earns in a family of professionals. I’m saved, in the truest sense of the word, by the door.
Ben walks into Bootleggers like he’s a local. He clocks the room in one pass, the moose head, the dartboard, us, and there’s a ripple of chatter. The Gazette groom, in the flesh, but he doesn’t stop to be famous. He goes to the bar, leans in to Rose, and says a sentence I can’t hear.
Rose looks at him. Looks at us. Starts pulling taps.
He arrives at our table carrying the round. Amber ale for Cassie. Wheat for me. Coke with two limes for Faith. And for Beth, who he’s known collectively for one dinner and a breakfast, a plate of Bootlegger’s fries, extra salt.
Beth stares at the fries. “How?”
“You roped tonight. You never eat before, you’re starving after, and you,” he nods at the mud, “came straight here. Fries travel farther than a burger with beer in the picture.” He sets down his own glass, still standing, no move to sit, a man mid-errand.
“Two-one, by the way. Sam texted Silas. Whole ranch knows.”
“Sam texted Daddy?”
“Congratulations,” Ben says.
Beth puts her face in her hands to a fresh round of jeering. Under the table Faith kicks me, eyebrows going like semaphore, because he knew all our drinks, El. I kick her back harder.
“You not sitting?” Cassie asks him.
“Can’t. Early start.” He turns to me, and here it comes, whatever he actually walked in for. He frowns. “Wendell County run’s at six. Hollis wants the oak gone by noon, and the strings are waiting in Gatlinburg after. My truck won’t take the load.”
“You want Daddy’s flatbed?”
“I want your daddy’s flatbed.” A pause, and the corner of his mouth shifts, and I watch him decide to say the second half.
“And a co-driver who knows a straight board from a warped one and argues with strangers as well as I do. It’s a long way to Wendell County with nobody underlining things twice. ”
The table has gone conspicuously, theatrically silent. Rose has stopped wiping a glass that was already dry.
“Six o’clock,” I say, level as I can manage. “I’ll bring the good flask.”
“I’ll bring the list.” He collects his glass, nods to the table, and heads through the crowd toward the door, pausing once to say something to Earl Fisk that makes him laugh and slap the bar.
The silence at our table lasts exactly as long as the door takes to shut.
“A co-driver,” says Cassie.
“Shut up.”
“The good flask,” says Faith.
“I will disinherit all of you,” I tell them, and drink my wheat beer to hide whatever my face is doing now. Around us Bootleggers roars on. Somewhere in it, Rose is already at the taps, telling the regulars I’m doing fine.
For the first time since the headline, she’s not even lying.