31. Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-One
ELLA
Naomi arrives for the planning meeting dead on time.
We set up on the decking because I want to appreciate the effort gone into finishing it.
It’s Friday afternoon and Something Blue barely needs my imagination anymore.
The oak’s up the whole north face, gone honey-dark after a month of sun.
The beds are a riot, ironweed shoulder-high, asters budding on schedule for September.
Inside, the bar’s finished and waxed, the loft rail’s rebuilt, and Evelyn’s lights hang over a floor you could serve supper off.
There’s only one thing left on the build I haven’t signed off, but I’m not thinking about the bench today. Today is logistics.
And logistics with Naomi, it turns out, is what my job was supposed to feel like all along.
“Processional music.” She fans herself and smiles. “Dinah wants to play herself in. I told her that’s showing off. She told me forty years of hymns has earned her one entrance. What do you think?”
“I think she plays a chosen piece once everyone is settled, then Faith’s friend takes over the piano and Dinah can scoot out the side entrance ready to walk down the aisle with nothing else on her mind.”
Naomi stops fanning. “Now that,” she says, “is why a person hires a professional.”
It goes like that for two hours. Menu, timings, the logistics of two elderly cousins who don’t speak and where to seat them.
Every suggestion I make, she takes or improves.
Not once does she ask to see three options with mood boards.
Not once does she check her phone mid-sentence or ask how it’ll photograph.
Carla made me re-stage a tablescape four times for her feed, texting Garrett between takes, and I planned that wedding stressed as a woman working under a leaky roof.
I catch myself waiting for the drip. It never comes.
Naomi wants a wedding you can experience, not one you can post. My eyes sting, stupidly, and I have to blink hard so Naomi doesn’t catch it.
“You keep looking at me funny,” Naomi says.
“You trust me.”
“Child, I married and buried half this town. I know competence when it pours my sweet tea.” She consults her legal pad. “Which reminds me. Parking, arbor, rain plan. I did all that with Ben.”
“He mentioned.”
“Mm.” Her eyes don’t leave the pad. “Handy having your best man on staff.”
Before I can decide what to do with best man, Ben himself comes up the steps with the coffee pot.
He’s been in and out all meeting, hanging the last run of gutter.
Every time my mug’s gotten low, he’s appeared, filled it without a word, and gone back to work.
No hovering. No joining in. Just coffee arriving before I’ve noticed I want it.
He fills Naomi’s tea glass too, sets a plate of May’s shortbread at her elbow, collects the empties, and is gone down the steps before the fan’s finished its arc.
Naomi watches him go.
“September thirteenth,” she says. “Big day. Lot of moving parts. He’ll be around for it, I assume?”
“Of course he’ll be here.”
It’s out without thinking. Instant, certain, said the way you’d say the mountains will. Naomi lets a silence open up just wide enough for me to hear myself.
“Of course he will,” she agrees, gathering her pad, sailing on like a woman who’s heard every confession this town ever mumbled.
At the steps, she pauses. “Dinah and I are at Dorothy’s tonight, seven thirty.
Anniversary of the first asking. The one that doesn’t count.
” Her eyes go over my dress, hung on the annex door since noon, pressed and waiting, and there is nothing that woman misses.
“I hear Dorothy’s is lovely on a Friday. ”
She’s gone down the track before I can think of an answer.
Dorothy’s Supper House has stood on Main Street since Eisenhower, with white tablecloths, steaks and a neon script sign that spells Dorothy’s in tired pink. I’ve eaten there for graduations and funerals. I have never once walked in holding a man’s hand.
We park in front of the Gazette on purpose because Ben Callahan does not do things by halves. He comes around and opens my door, then we walk the length of Main Street in the evening light, his hand around mine.
The town notices. Deke stops sweeping the feed store walk and forgets to start again.
Two church ladies pause mid-conversation outside the pharmacy, and one of them puts her hand to her chest like the choir just came in early.
Through the Gazette window, Earl Fisk looks up from his layout desk, takes us in, hand in hand, and slowly, gravely, tips an imaginary hat. Ben tips one back.
“He’s going to print something,” I mutter.
“Let him. I’ve read worse about me in that paper.” His thumb moves over my knuckles. “This is the corrections column.”
Dorothy’s has the charm of a place that’s witnessed sixty years of anniversaries. Naomi and Dinah raise their lemonades from the corner table as we pass, entirely unsurprised. The hostess seats us at the window table, which I suspect is deliberate.
And it’s easy. That’s the wonder I keep coming back to.
Our first real date, both of us in clothes with no sawdust on them, and there’s no performance in it anywhere.
He orders the ribeye and asks the waitress about her mother’s hip by name, because a month here and he knows the town better than I do.
We argue about the bridal suite dormer through the appetizers.
He steals my potatoes with no remorse. Under the table, in front of everyone and hidden from everyone, his boot rests against mine and stays.
Halfway through the mains, my phone buzzes against my purse like a trapped hornet. I ignore it. It persists. I check it under the tablecloth, purely in case of venue emergency.
The sister group chat. Forty-one messages.
Beth: BOOTLEGGER’S WINDOW. LOOK ACROSS THE STREET.
Rose: Did you see they shared a dessert menu?
Faith: Is he wearing a collared shirt?
Cassie: Statistically, this was inevitable. Congratulations to statistics.
Rose: Tell him if he hurts you, he gets the Hollis rate
Beth: WAVE AT US
Faith: Mom says invite him Sunday. Mom is in the chat now.
Mom: Hello sweetheart. Pot roast Sunday. Tell Ben. x
I look up. Across the street, in the lit window of Bootleggers, three of my sisters and one bar towel are pressed to the glass like a nativity. Beth waves.
“Your family’s watching us,” Ben says without turning around. “Have been since the salads.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He cuts his steak entirely at peace. “Told you we should’ve taken a booth in the back.”
“You booked the window table.”
“I did,” he says.
He wanted everyone to see us. I reach across and squeeze his hand.
“Something I keep thinking,” he says over coffee, turning his cup slowly. “Watching you with Naomi today. You know what you looked like?”
“Sweaty? It was ninety on that decking.”
“You looked like somebody doing the exact thing she was built for.” He holds my gaze.
“I’ve watched a lot of people work, Ella.
Most of them are doing a job. Today, couple times, I looked up at you running that meeting, and I thought, there it is.
That’s what Evelyn saw. That’s what she was betting on the whole time.
” He sets the cup down. “Wanted you to know I noticed, since she can’t. ”
The restaurant goes blurry at the edges. I put both hands over his on the tablecloth, in the window, where the whole street can see, and hold on until my voice comes back.
“You can’t just say things like that at Dorothy’s,” I manage. “There are rules.”
“I’ll take it up with Dorothy.”
He raises his coffee cup, and his eyes over the rim have that steady warmth that turns my insides to mush.
“To the future,” he says.
I raise mine. I clink it. I smile at the man I am certainly, terrifyingly falling in love with, in the window of Dorothy’s on a Friday night, in front of my sisters and Earl Fisk and the whole town.
“To the future,” I say.