32. Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Two
BEN
Caleb’s truck comes up the track Saturday morning with its windows down and a familiar head hanging out the passenger side, ears inside out with joy.
Bear hits the ground before the truck’s fully stopped and takes me at the knees like old times. I go down in the yard dust on purpose, because some traditions you don’t fight. I get a face full of tongue and eighty pounds of lab-shaped homesickness. Over the top of it comes my brother’s boots.
“He’s been insufferable since I told him. Rode the whole way with his head out like a parade.”
Then Dolly arrives.
She comes around the barn at a dead run to investigate the commotion, sees Bear, and locks up mid-stride like she’s hit the end of an invisible rope.
Bear sees her. His tail goes around like a crank handle.
What follows is thirty seconds of the stiffest, most formal circling ever conducted, two professionals assessing each other’s credentials.
Then Dolly performs a play bow so sudden it raises dust, and they’re gone.
Both of them. Flat out across the meadow in a big joyful circuit, swapping the lead, Bear barking like crazy, Dolly running silent because Dolly wastes nothing.
“Well,” Caleb says, watching them go. “That’s them sorted.”
He hauls his toolbelt out of the truck bed without asking what we’re building. Showing up with tools is our equivalent of sitting down with a beer to talk.
What we’re building is Naomi’s arbor.
I’ve had the cedar milled and stacked in the barn a week, waiting on the right help, because I wanted my brother on this one.
Five weeks ago I stood in this valley while a wedding came apart around me.
Now I’m building the frame two women will stand under in September, and the man handing me the level is the same one who held the back of my neck in the dark.
There’s something fucking poetic in that.
We work the way we’ve always worked, with one of us cutting and one of us complaining.
“Your posts are proud of the line.”
“They’re set to the aisle sight, not the string. Photographer shoots down the valley.”
“Since when do you know what photographers want?”
“Since I run a wedding venue, apparently.”
“Since you run a wedding venue?” He drives a screw home and shakes his head.
“Ethan’s never going to survive this. You know he’s coming down, don’t you?
Him and Josie both. Josie heard what you’ve been doing with the barn and got out her diary to come see.
And Noah wants a look at your trail heads.
He’s talking about a swap deal, his trekking clients get a night down here, your brides get a mountain ride up there.
” He sights along the crossbeam. “Maeve says first Sunday in October. She’s not asking. She’s written it on her calendar.”
“That’s a lot of Callahans when you include the partners and kids.”
“That’s the advance party.” He grins. “You bridged the families, brother. Live with it.”
May feeds us at noon, and Caleb charms her so thoroughly she sends him back to work with pie in a tin marked in Sharpie: CALEB’S.
DO NOT TOUCH. THIS MEANS YOU FAITH. Silas shakes his hand at the porch steps, and they have one of those conversations that’s four sentences long on the outside and a full treaty underneath.
Beth talks roping at him until he promises to come watch Gatlinburg. The worlds don’t collide. They braid.
It’s mid-afternoon, both of us up ladders setting the header, when Caleb says it.
“You laugh now.”
“What?”
“You laugh. Out loud. Four times since I got here, I counted.” He feeds me the beam end, steady. “Whole time we were kids, I could get maybe one a season out of you, and I worked for those. Something down here rewired you.” A pause, one screw’s worth. “It ain’t the cedar.”
I set my end and say nothing.
“Can I say a thing about Carla?” he asks. “Now that there’s no wedding to keep the peace for.”
“Say it.”
“We hated it.” He comes down his ladder and stands there with the drill hanging from his hand.
“Not her. It. What it did to you. You want to know what we watched for two years? We watched you get smaller. Little increments. You quit playing cards at family nights because she thought the game was childish, you remember that? You’d sit half out of every conversation with your phone in your palm like a man on call.
You drove a truck she picked. Second year, you started asking her before you’d commit to Sunday dinner.
You. Asking permission for Sunday dinner.
” He sets the drill in the grass. “Josie called it two months in. Said, ‘that woman doesn’t want Ben, she wants the service department. What he does, not who he is.’ We all decided it wasn’t our business.
You seemed set. You’d carried everybody your whole life, and who were we to grab at the one thing you’d picked for yourself.
” He looks at me straight. “I’ve been sorry about that silence since June. Sorrier than you know.”
The meadow’s loud with bugs. Down the hill the dogs have flopped in the shade of the water trough, done with their circuit, Bear’s head on Dolly’s back, like they’ve known each other for years.
He’s right, and I can see it now the way you can see a leaning post from the next field over, but never from where you’re standing.
The cards. The truck. The permission. I’d have told you at the time it was compromise, that’s what a man does, he adjusts.
It didn’t feel like disappearing. It felt like being a good partner.
“You know what shames me,” I say. “It’s not her.
I’ve got no grief for her, and for a while I thought that made me broken, that a man could stand at an altar in June and be whistling by July.
” I test the header with both hands. “But it’s not broken.
You don’t grieve a job. And that’s what I was to her, and near as I can tell that’s what she was to me.
A position I was filling. Quiet life, wife, house.
I had the fucking folder. I never once had the feeling.
“Here’s the part I’ll own, though, since we’re saying things.
” I come down off my ladder. “Everything you just named. I saw it all, Caleb. Same as you, same time as you. A man doesn’t shrink for two years without noticing.
I kept choosing it because the wedding came with the rest. The house.
The table with people at it. The dream I’d been building since I was six years old, and there it was with a date on it.
” I make myself finish. “She fooled me for two years. I helped her do it. I decided not to look.”
“That’s not the same as what she did.”
“No. But it’s not nothing.” I pick his drill up out of the grass and hand it back. “And the grief I have, it was never for her. It’s for that table. I had every chair filled in my head.”
“And now?”
“Now I start over.”
Caleb looks at me a long moment with Naomi’s arbor standing square and true between us and the valley laid out gold past his shoulder.
“You in love with her?” he asks. “Ella.”
I open my mouth.
“Hand me the brace.”
He hands me the brace. He doesn’t ask again. He just watches me set it, smiling, like he’s had his answer. We finish the arbor as the light goes long. Neither of us says her name again, and it’s the loudest quiet of the day.
He loads up at dusk. Bear takes his leave of Dolly with ceremony, and then hangs his head out the window at maximum extension as the truck rolls out, watching her sit at the cattle guard, watching her all the way down the track.
“October,” Caleb calls, arm out the window. “First Sunday.”
“October.”
I stand in the yard while his taillights run the valley road north, toward the ranch I grew up missing, the family I found my way back to, two hours and a whole life away.
The pull’s still in my chest, the one that’s pointed north since I was a boy, the one that used to go off like a struck bell whenever anybody said the word home.
But it’s pointing behind me now. Up the hill. At a lit kitchen window and a woman setting two plates.
I watch my brother’s lights out of sight, and then I turn around and walk home.