22. Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Two
BEN
Silas knocks on the guest cabin door at dawn.
“Moving pairs.”
By half past I’m on a borrowed gelding named Amos, and we’re pushing forty cow-calf pairs off the worn home pasture toward the summer grass in the north forty.
It’s slow work done right, and Silas does it right.
No hollering, no hurry. You give a cow room to make the right choice and act as if she thought of it herself.
We ride the edges, let the lead cow find the gate, and keep the pairs mothered up so nobody’s bawling for a calf that’s forty feet behind her.
Dolly works beside us, sweeping wide then pinching in, and I revise my opinion of that dog for the second time in two days.
Off the clock, she’s a criminal. On it, she’s the best hand on the place.
The light comes up while we work. It lays itself down a ridge at a time, and the mist burns off the creek in ropes. For long stretches there’s no sound but hooves in wet grass and the creak of leather. My shoulders drop an inch. They’ve been up around my ears so long I’d stopped noticing.
At the creek crossing, the calves balk, never having encountered water before.
Silas holds the far bank. I ease Amos downstream of the bunch, give them the space, and when the boldest calf finally hops it like the creek’s electric, the rest pour after him in a panic, and Silas laughs from the other side.
“Committee courage,” he says. “Same as church.”
We settle the pairs on the new grass and check everything’s as it should be. Good water, good clover coming. The mountains loom over us, blue going pale at the edges where the day’s heating up. I haven’t thought about a single one of my problems in three hours.
That’s when the phone buzzes.
CARLA.
Not a call. A text, the fourth one since the wedding, and the first three I never answered.
My mom needs to know what we’re doing about the gift registry. Also, we should talk. When you’re ready. I miss you.
I sit in a field of other people’s cattle and read I miss you three times, waiting to feel the same.
The truth is, I don’t miss her. I keep waiting to.
I lie in that neat cabin some nights and go looking for the grief the way you’d pat your pockets for keys.
What I find instead is worse. I miss the plan.
I miss the man I was going to be, settled, with a quiet life squared away and the folder complete.
She was the load-bearing wall in a house I’d been drawing since I was six.
The house came down. Now some mornings I catch myself whistling while I frame up a different one, and then I feel like a liar.
What does it say about me? Either I never loved her right, or I loved a woman who was never standing there.
Neither of those options is comfortable to think about.
And under all of it, low and steady as a pilot light, the anger. The humiliation. She let me stand at that fucking altar. She’d have let me say the words.
Silas rides up beside me, which is how I know I’ve been sitting still too long.
“Carla,” I say, and put the phone away.
“Mm.” He watches the pairs spread out across the new grass. “First contact?”
“Fourth. First I’ve read past the top line.” Amos shifts his weight and cocks a hip. “She says she misses me.”
“Might do,” Silas says. “People generally miss what they’ve lost.” He lets that sit a moment.
“You don’t have to know what you feel yet, son.
Grief doesn’t arrive in order. Some men bleed the day of.
Some don’t find the cut for a year, doing something ordinary.
Both ways bleed.” He gathers his reins. “Don’t let anybody clock you on it. Including you.”
He turns his mare down the fence line, and I follow.
We’re checking the last stretch of wire when he says, without looking over, “You sit a horse like a man who was raised to it.”
“My cousin Ethan’s outfit. Horses since I could walk.”
“It shows. And you handle cattle like a man who respects them, which is rarer.” He pulls up at the gate, and his eyes come over to me, level under the hat brim.
“I’ve had summer help on this place for forty years.
Most of them work the land. Now and then one belongs to it.
” He nods once, like a man closing a gate. “You’ll do, Ben.”
You’ll do. I look hard at the far tree line.
“Thank you.”
We come down the track at midday, Dolly trotting ahead with her tail like a flag. There’s a car parked at the pasture gate and Reverend Naomi leaning on the fender in boots that have seen actual ground, a thermos balanced on the post like she’s been comfortable a while.
“Silas Lockhart,” she calls. “And the famous Ben. I brought lemonade and an ulterior motive.”
“We’ll take both,” Silas says.
She pours into the thermos cup and passes it up to me first, which feels like a maneuver, and lets us get a drink in before she deploys.
“So. The venue,” she says to me. “Word in town is the decking’s new, there’s oak going up the north face, and a man bought Wilson’s entire trailer for the beds. Maggie says it looks a picture.” She takes the cup back, refills it, hands it to Silas. “Is Something Blue taking bookings again?”
“That’s Ella’s question to answer.”
“It is. And I’ll ask her.” Naomi looks at me with deep-water eyes. “But I find it educational, asking the partner first. You didn’t say no, and you didn’t say too soon, and you didn’t flinch. You said it’s her question. That’s a yes with manners on it.”
“Ma’am, I just work there.”
“Mm,” says Naomi. She screws the lid on the thermos, business concluding. “Tell Ella I’d like to come see the changes to the venue. This week, if she’ll have me.” A pause, and she smiles. “Tell her to bring the diary.”
She gets in the sedan, pulls out careful around Dolly, and is gone down the valley road with the dust standing gold behind her.
Silas and I sit our horses at the gate.
“The diary,” I say.
“If Naomi wants to look around, it means she wants to book,” Silas says, gathering his reins, and there’s a grin under the hat brim now. “Son, I believe you’d better go find Ella.”
My phone buzzes at the gate. For half a second, I think it’s Carla again. It’s worse.
The electrician. Hotel job’s run over, Knoxville wants him after, August is off, try Kowalski in Sevierville.
Kowalski, it turns out, is booked past Thanksgiving.
I try another two local guys, then a fella in Maryville who owes Ethan a favor.
By the time I put the phone away, I’ve spent every name I’ve got.
The annex is still a kitchen with one working ring, and Naomi Price is coming this week to look at the venue.
First problem all summer I have no idea how to solve.