42. Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Two
ELLA
The barn is spotless, and I clean it anyway.
Naomi’s wedding is in four days. That’s what I’ve been holding onto since this morning.
There is a wedding in four days. I’m a professional and professionals fucking function.
So I function. I polish the bar he built until my arm aches.
I re-tape the aisle runner that was taped.
I count chairs that were counted. The count comes out different twice because my mind keeps drifting away from numbers and back to him.
It’s somewhere in the third hour, folding napkins at the trestle table, that I understand I’m not functioning. I’m fleeing in place.
The napkins won’t fold. My hands have developed a tremble I can watch from somewhere above myself.
The folds come out wrong. I shake each one loose and start over.
The stack grows and collapses, grows and collapses.
A glass gets knocked and smashes. I stand over the pieces but can’t make myself get the broom, because the broom is in the annex, hanging on the rack he built, at the height he measured.
Everything, everything, everything in this building is him.
I sit down on the floor next to the broken glass and break.
I cry the way the storm came up the valley. Ugly, heaving, snot and salt, hands over my mouth, rocking on the boards he sanded, and once it starts there’s no stopping it.
That’s how Mom finds me. On the floor of a spotless barn, beside a broken glass, wrecked beyond any version of myself she’s ever been shown.
Mom crosses the barn and lowers herself onto the floor beside me. She moves the glass aside with one careful sweep of her hand. Then she takes hold of me and pulls me in, and I fall into her lap like I’m six years old.
“Beth gave me the bones of it,” she says, over my head, while I shake.
“After your young man went out the gate this morning like the tail end of a storm. So I know what happened. You’re going to tell me in your own words when you can, because saying it is part of it.
But not yet. Right now you cry it all the way through, baby. Half-cried is worse than none.”
I cry it all the way through. It takes a long time. Her hand moves on my back in the same circles it’s moved for almost three decades. Evelyn’s lights hang dark above us. Eventually the storm burns out, the way they do.
Then I tell her. All of it, hoarse, still lying in her lap.
Mom listens the whole way through without one sound. When I finish, she’s quiet a while longer, her hand still going. When she finally talks, her voice is gentle, but it doesn’t let me off, and I will love her the rest of my life for doing both at once.
“I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told a soul but your grandmother,” she says.
“Years ago, the bakery nearly went under. Flour contract, bad winter, a loan I’d signed that I shouldn’t have signed.
Eleven months, Ella. Eleven months I hid it from your father.
Cooked the books at my kitchen table after he was asleep.
And I told myself the exact same thing you’ve been telling yourself since June.
I’m protecting him. He’s carrying the ranch, the girls, his mother dying that year, I will not add one ounce.
I was a hero about it. Heroes don’t sleep, but I was one. ”
“Daddy found out?”
“The bank called the house.” Her hand doesn’t stop its circles.
“And here’s the part I’m giving you, so sit up and take it.
” I sit up. She looks at me, and there’s Evelyn in her face, the directness, the love with no cushion on it.
“He forgave the money in about a minute. The money was nothing. What took him the better part of a year, baby, was the eleven months. Because I hadn’t been protecting him.
I’d been deciding for him. Every day for eleven months I looked at that man and made a ruling about what he could bear.
That’s not protection. Protection is a coat you put over somebody.
What I did, what you did, is a wall you build around them.
You can build it out of pure love, every brick.
It’s still a wall. They’re still inside it. They never agreed to be.”
The room blurs. I don’t argue. There’s nothing left in me that wants to argue.
“I keep saying I meant well,” I manage. “To Beth. To myself. Like it makes it okay.”
“Meaning well and doing the right thing are not the same.” She says it without cruelty.
“Ben’s not standing in your intentions this morning, baby.
He’s standing in the consequences, and they’re the same size they’d have been if you were wicked.
That’s what you have to live with. Intentions are between you and God. Consequences are between you and him.”
“He won’t even look at me.”
“No. He won’t for a while.” She takes my chin in her flour-worn hand, the way she did over skinned knees.
“Now here’s what you’re not going to do.
You’re not going to camp on his porch making your case, because your case is a request that he hurry, and he owes you no hurry.
You’re not going to punish yourself in front of the family so somebody argues you out of it, and don’t look at me like that, it’s a Lockhart specialty, I invented half the moves.
” A breath. “And you’re not going to decide for him one more time.
Not even the small ones. Not even deciding he’s better off without you, which is the same sin in mourning clothes.
If there’s a road back, he builds it at his own speed, and you leave every gate on this ranch unlocked, and that’s all.
Gates unlocked. Lights on. Truth told, from here to the grave, even when it costs. Especially.”
“And if he leaves?”
My voice barely makes it out. Mom doesn’t flinch.
“Then he leaves. And you will still be my daughter, this will still be your grandmother’s barn, and there will still be a wedding here Saturday, for two women who waited thirty years.
Longer than you’ve been alive. Through worse than this.
” She gets up off the floor and puts her hand down for me.
“Which is the other thing. Saturday comes whether your heart’s in pieces or not.
Naomi chose you. So Saturday you’ll stand up in this barn and you’ll do the finest work of your life, broken, because that’s what the women in this family do. ”
She sweeps the glass. She won’t let me do it. She sets the napkin stack straight with four moves of her hands, kisses my head, tells me supper’s at seven, attendance mandatory. Then she’s gone up the track and I’m alone in the barn.
I walk it once before I close up.
His fingerprints are everywhere. Every corner of this building has him in it. I could walk it blind and put my hand on a hundred things he touched. Soon I’ll have to do exactly that, and smile at a caterer while I do.
Except one place.
Under the big window on the north wall, outside where the beds part on purpose, there’s a bare stretch, four feet of nothing, raked and waiting.
The bench. Evelyn’s bench, from the notebook, the one he promised the first week.
Materials are stacked in the annex, cut list made, his block hand on the tag.
It’s the only promise in this building still standing open, and it’s the only place on the barn where he isn’t.
I stand in front of the empty space for a long time while the light fades.
I don’t fill it with chairs. I don’t move a plant stand in front of it. Saturday there will be four feet of bare wall at Naomi’s wedding, and if anybody asks, I’ll say it’s waiting on something, because that’s the truth.
Gates unlocked. Lights on.
I flip Evelyn’s lights on over the empty barn, all six loops, burning gold for nobody, and I leave them on when I go.