27. Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Seven
ELLA
Thursday after lunch, Ben takes my clipboard out of my hands and sets it on the trestle table face down, like he’s confiscating a weapon.
“Get in the truck.”
“I have a two o’clock with the linen.”
“You had a two o’clock with the linen. Rose took it.
She says, and I’m quoting, tell my sister the napkin man doesn’t scare her and to get gone.
” He’s already holding the door. There’s a cooler on the back seat and a blanket folded on top of it that makes me swallow hard.
“It’s the first afternoon in three weeks with nothing burning.
I asked Silas where a person takes somebody to show off the area. Get in the truck, Ella.”
Somebody. To show off the area. I get in the truck.
He drives us up out of the valley on a forest road I haven’t ridden since high school, switchbacks climbing through hardwoods, windows down, the green going deeper and the air turning cooler with every turn.
Neither of us talks much. It’s not the shoulder-to-shoulder working quiet.
This quiet has a hum in it neither of us names.
He drums one thumb on the wheel at the overlooks.
I watch his forearm work the gearshift, then make myself watch Tennessee instead, with partial success.
The trailhead’s empty. A quarter mile of soft path, and then the trees open up and the world falls away.
The overlook hangs above everything. The valley rolled out below like a quilt somebody loved, creek stitching silver through it, our ranch a green patch with the barn’s tin roof catching light.
“Silas said this was the one,” Ben says, watching me instead of the view.
“Daddy was right.” I find the flat rock at the edge and sit. “Evelyn had her own spot. Different ridge, farther along. She’d make Daddy drive her up, and she’d sit there like a paying customer.” The words come out before I’ve decided anything. “I’ll show you sometime.”
“I’d like that,” he says, and starts unpacking the cooler.
Then he hands me the tin, and I stop breathing for a second.
Buttermilk biscuits. Not the tall, proud ones Mom sells in the bakery.
These are thin, crisp-edged, lopsided. Griddled.
Beside them sits a jar of blackberry jam with a square of gingham over the lid.
I know before I taste anything whose kitchen these came out of.
Except that kitchen’s been closed for a year and a half.
“How?”
“You told me the bakery does cathead biscuits and everybody loses their minds over them.” He pours coffee from the thermos, not looking at me, giving me room.
“And then you said, real quiet, like a footnote, but Grandma’s were flat and burnt on one edge and better.
One time. Two weeks ago. In the truck at Hollis’s.
” He passes me a cup. “I asked May. She cried on the recipe card, and then she made them. Burned edges and all. She says if they’re wrong, the blame’s mine for asking. ”
I take a bite. Butter, griddle-crisp, the blackberry sharp over the top. The taste hits the back of my throat and turns into her kitchen. The radio on the sill. Flour on everything. Being eight years old with jam on my chin. My eyes spill over before I can stop them.
“They’re not wrong,” I manage. “They’re perfect.”
“Good,” Ben says, and lets me cry on a rock over a biscuit without a shred of judgment.
And then he does the thing nobody’s done since the funeral.
“Tell me about her,” he says. “Not the end. Not the barn.” He settles back against the rock beside me, shoulder near, coffee in hand. “Everybody in Cedar Ridge tells me what she left. Nobody’s told me what she was like. Start wherever.”
So I start wherever.
I tell him about Evelyn Ruth Lockhart, who drove a truck like a threat and sang alto like an apology.
Who kept a garden that fought her every year of her life, while the ditch flowers came up perfect, which she said was God’s sense of humor, and she respected it.
Who once ran a wedding-crasher off the church lawn with a cake server and then mailed him a slice because he’d come for the cake, and a person ought to get what they came for.
I tell him she taught me lists. That she read tea leaves badly, on purpose, so everybody left her kitchen with a good fortune.
That she called me her steady one. That I spent a lot of years thinking it was praise and then some wondering if it was a life sentence.
Ben doesn’t flinch when I say that. He just nods and gives me space to keep talking.
I tell him the truth about the five years at the end.
Learning to lift her. The night terrors.
Selling her truck without telling her the truth about why.
The way she’d surface some evenings, all the way back, and we’d have two hours of her, cards, gossip, the radio.
How those two hours cost more than the bad nights, because you had to hand them back.
“And here’s the thing I’ve never said out loud.
” The valley’s going gold below us. His shoulder is warm against mine now, arrived there sometime during the truck story, steady as a wall.
“Some days I resented her. Sundays especially. I’d stand at her sink and watch my class’s lives go by on my phone.
Engagements, cities, jobs. I’d hate everybody a little, then hate myself the rest of the week for it.
And she knew. One night she took my hand and said, baby, resenting the weight doesn’t mean you’d put it down. And I cried in her lap like the flu.”
“She was right,” Ben says. “You never put a single thing down. I’ve watched you carry this whole ranch with a smile on, weeks running.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“I know exactly who’s talking.” A breath of a laugh through his nose. “Why do you think I recognized it?”
The sun drops. The ridges go from gold to rose to ash-blue.
We eat every biscuit in the tin and drink the thermos dry.
I talk more than I’ve talked in years, and he listens.
At some point, the blanket ends up around both our shoulders because the mountain evening comes on cool.
Neither of us makes a big deal about it.
“Thank you,” I say, when the first stars appear. “Nobody asks about her anymore.”
“Thank you for telling me about her. I’d have liked to argue with her about that garden.”
“She’d have loved you.” It comes out without thinking. “God. She’d have been unbearable about you.”
He turns his head. In the last light his eyes go dark, and for a second the mountain’s very quiet.
“We should head down while there’s road to see,” is what he says. Doing it right. Some part of me knows that’s what this is, and that same part of me is halfway to ruined over it.
The drive down is dark and warm, headlights swinging through the switchbacks, radio low on a station that’s mostly fiddle. My hand’s on the bench seat between us because the mountain road wants both of his, right up until the road straightens out along the creek.
His hand comes off the gearshift and settles onto the seat. An inch from mine. The same one inch that’s been following us around for weeks.
I’m done letting inches win.
I move my little finger. That’s all. One knuckle’s worth of nothing. The side of my hand comes to rest against the side of his, and I hear his breath change over the fiddle music.
He doesn’t look over. I don’t either. The headlights pour down the valley road, and our hands stay exactly where they are.