43. Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Three
BEN
Three in the morning, and I’m splitting wood nobody needs by the light of the shed lamp.
It’s that or drive. Those are the two things left in me tonight, swing or drive, and I pick swing.
The pile was head-high at midnight, seasoned oak I bucked for the family’s winter three weeks ago in another man’s life, and I’ve been going through it like it owes me.
Set, swing, crack. My shoulders quit an hour ago.
My hands are past blisters into something I’ll pay for later.
I keep swinging, because when I stop, the thinking starts, and my thinking tonight is fucked up and best ignored.
Here’s where my mind keeps going.
Beth knew. Since last night, one night, fine.
But my head doesn’t stop at Beth. Without wanting to, I start doing a headcount.
May, Silas, Naomi. The whole town patting my arm all summer.
Our Ben. Good boy. Better to know before than after, son.
She squeezed my arm when she said it, that church lady, week one, and what did SHE know?
Set. Swing. Crack.
Nobody knew. Probably nobody knew. Beth knew for one day. I can stand here and tell myself that. But it doesn’t make any of this better.
Twice. That’s the swing that splits the knotty one, the piece I’d set aside as not worth the fight. Twice in one summer. A man gets ambushed once, that’s an ambush. Twice, you start questioning the man and how much fucking respect he’s being shown, and how much he isn’t.
I trusted Ella more than I’ve trusted anyone.
Fucking stupid, really, to trust anyone after what Carla had just done to me.
But I did. And I told her the thing I’ve never told a living soul, not Caleb, not anybody.
Five years old. Peace. I laid it out for her and she listened to all of it, and she was keeping her own secret that whole time.
She heard me say you’re the quietest my life has ever been and still said nothing. I’m such a fucking idiot.
I bury the maul in the block and go inside before I start on the fence posts.
The cabin’s a stranger already. Funny how fast that happens.
Same quilt, same jar of flowers, same flannel on the hook, and none of it’s mine.
I don’t make a list. First time in my life, standing at a crossroads without a pencil, because the one thing this summer taught me is that my columns never once held anything that mattered.
Everything I’d write goes on both sides anyway.
Her name. This valley. The whole fucking ruined summer.
I pack like the cabin’s on fire. Drawers upended into the duffel, papers, boots, zip. Done. However long it took, it took too long.
The notebook’s on the table where it’s lived all summer.
I pick it up on my way past. I stop at the stove, open the fire door, and stand there with sixty pages of this summer in my hand over the cold ash. The sketches. The five-year plan. The page with her name standing in the right column.
I can’t do it. Even my anger, it turns out, has a limit. I shut the fire door and drop the notebook on the table hard enough to jump the salt shaker. Then I take my bag out into the dark, angrier at that than at anything else all night. Can’t even burn a fucking notebook. Some wrecking crew I make.
The phone rings at four forty. CALEB. I kill it on the second ring.
Not tonight, brother. He’ll say come home or he’ll say stay, and I’m in no condition to hear anyone else’s opinion. The text comes a minute later.
May called Regan. Regan called me. I know what’s going on.
Then, while I’m still reading:
Whatever you’re doing at 4am, do it slow. That’s all. Slow, brother.
Slow. I throw the duffel into the truck bed hard enough to hurt my wrist, and stand there in the gun-metal light, breathing like I’ve run somewhere.
I still love her.
That’s what all the swinging was about. I was trying to sweat the love out of me.
The woodpile took the beating. The love stood off at a safe distance and watched.
If it had gone down with the trust, this would just be packing, and I’m good at packing, I’ve walked away from places before.
Instead, I’m out here at dawn loading a truck to get away from a woman I’d still walk through fire for.
The unfairness of it makes me so fucking mad I could start on the woodpile again.
Dolly is sitting in front of the tailgate.
I didn’t hear her come. She’s just there, planted on the gravel between me and the latch, ears up, doing her silent read of me.
“Don’t,” I tell her.
She lies down. In front of the tailgate, chin on paws, eyes up, immovable.
“You’re not my dog.”
Her tail sweeps once. Agreeing. Staying.
I get in the cab anyway. Start the engine. She doesn’t move, so I back around her, which she permits, tracking me the whole way with her ears. I roll down the track in low gear with my lights off, past the equipment barn, past the big house, dark and asleep.
At the bend, the venue comes into view. And I stop the truck.
Because the lights are still burning. Six gold loops over an empty barn at quarter to five in the morning.
Doors closed, nobody home, blazing away over the beds, the arbor, the dark.
And no woman on this ranch forgets lights.
Not that woman. That woman has never once forgotten a light, a lock, a linen count.
I’ve watched her close that building forty times, every switch in order.
She left them on.
For me. For nobody. For whatever a lit empty barn means at the end of a wrecked week. I sit at the bend with the engine idling, hands strangling the wheel. The anger wants it to mean nothing. The rest of me can’t let it. Between those two, the truck doesn’t move.
And then, because the universe isn’t done with me, Saturday’s wedding sits on me like a debt I haven’t paid.
Two old women, thirty years engaged. An arbor I built with my brother’s hands on the other end of the beam. A parking lane I haven’t mowed. A rain plan only I know inside out.
I want to be the man who drives. Right now, tonight, I want it like a drink. Let this valley find out what it feels like when the reliable one finally fucking isn’t.
But I gave Naomi my word I’d be there, and my word is the one thing on this ranch that nobody got to. Not Carla, not Ella, not this whole smiling town. It’s mine. Last thing standing with my name still on it.
So the wedding gets me. Not her. The wedding.
I turn the truck around.
Back up the track, past the sleeping house. Dolly’s still lying by the cabin steps, and she watches me park. She doesn’t gloat, which is more grace than I’d have managed in her position.
I don’t take the bag inside.
It stays in the truck bed, zipped, squared, ready, the contents of my life sitting in the dark under a strapped tarp. Saturday, I stand where I said I’d stand. Sunday is Sunday’s problem.