Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Elise found her name card three seats from where she’d put it herself.
She had the seating chart by heart. She’d built the dadgum thing over two evenings of juggling who couldn’t bear to sit by whom, and she’d parked herself at the tail of the family table, close to the coolers, where a person could slip off without anybody marking the gap.
Her card had moved.
Kelly drifted past with a stack of napkins and the airy look of a woman with clean hands. “Oh, I shuffled a few spots this morning. Just balancing the tables out. You had all the talkers bunched on one end.”
“Funny. I balanced them in March.”
“It plays better this way. Trust me.” And off Kelly went, to fuss over the lemonade before Elise could lodge a complaint with management.
Trust me. The two words Kelly Shipley reached for whenever the truth got inconvenient.
The joint barbecue ran the same every June, two ranches’ worth of folding tables dragged under the live oaks, Bolton hands and Hickory Hollow hands trading the same stories they’d traded last summer and meaning every word as much as ever.
Elise had ordered the brisket and chased down the county permit for the bonfire, all so two hundred people could pretend the food turned up by magic.
It was her favorite sort of work, the kind nobody clapped for.
Elise found her reassigned seat.
The man in the next chair didn’t rise and didn’t offer his hand.
He gave her a short nod and turned to his plate.
Hat on one knee, sleeves rolled past forearms the color of a man who earned his living outdoors.
A stranger. At a barbecue she’d planned down to the toothpicks, parked at her table, working through her caterer’s brisket, and not one word for her.
“I’m Elise.” She set her plate down. “I run the office over at Hickory Hollow.”
“Stephen.” A pause. “Garrett. Bolton crew.”
Three words and a surname, dished out as though she’d charged him by the letter.
“So you rode over with the Bolton bunch.” She aimed for bright. “How’s Chad treating everybody these days?”
“Fine.”
“All this rain hasn’t bogged down the fence work?”
“Mostly.”
She reached for the rolls and came up a foot short. The basket slid into her hand before she’d finished stretching, and the cowboy hadn’t so much as glanced over.
“Thanks.”
He dipped his chin.
“You been on at Bolton long?”
“Few years.”
Two words that time. Practically a soliloquy.
She’d carried on richer conversations with the answering machine.
She sized him up as one of those men who’d run clean out of words the same day they learned to back a trailer. She turned to her brisket and let him be.
A man like that would never carry their side of a friendship, or any relationship most likely.
Elise had learned to read people fast, sorting the ones worth her energy from the ones who’d only drain it, and this one she filed under not worth the postage.
Pleasant enough to look at, maybe. Useless across a dinner table.
The longer she sat, though, the more the layout of the whole thing nagged at her.
“Whoever set this up ran the coolers clear across the lawn from the food,” she said, mostly to her plate. “And the smoker line bends right around the dessert table. Give it an hour. Those pies’ll be a casualty.”
The cowboy laid down his fork.
“I set it up.”
Oh, shoot.
“Coolers sit across the lawn so the young ones quit crowding the smoker,” he said, even and unhurried. “Line runs past the desserts so folks build a plate while they wait, instead of bunching up hungry and short-tempered at the meat. Works fine. Has for six years.”
The most words he’d spent yet, and every one of them earned at her expense.
Heat climbed Elise’s neck. She’d taken a chunk out of a man’s work to his face, the lone subject he’d open his mouth for, and she’d done it sitting close enough to pass him the salt.
“It’s a smart setup,” she made herself say.
“It is.”
He picked his fork up again and left her to stew in it.
Annie swept up to the table with a sweating pitcher, topping off glasses nobody had emptied.
“Elise! You two getting acquainted? Stephen’s the best hand on the whole Bolton place.
Runs the north line slick as clockwork, don’t you, Stephen.
You’d have a world to talk about, the pair of you, what with you running Robert’s whole office and him running half of Bolton’s. ”
“Annie.” Robert’s voice drifted over from the next table, mild as milk. “That pitcher’s empty.”
“It is not.” She tipped it. One drop fell. “Well. Now it is.” And off she sailed, pleased as a hen with a fresh egg.
Elise looked at the cowboy. The cowboy looked at his iced tea. Whatever grand conversation Annie pictured for the pair of them had died on the table between them.
Across the lawn, Kelly and Annie stood by the lemonade with their heads tipped close, two conspirators who went still the second Elise glanced over. Annie’s hand bobbed up in a wave a beat too slow. Kelly discovered an urgent fascination with the dessert table.
Elise’s eyes narrowed.
The seating change. The flimsy excuse, and a silent stranger dropped at her elbow who happened to be single and somewhere near her age.
No.
Kelly wouldn’t. The woman had a ranch to help run and a hundred better things to meddle in than Elise’s love life, which Elise had retired from on purpose and with paperwork.
She brushed it off. Folks tipped their heads together at barbecues. That was the entire point of barbecues.
Besides, the cowboy plainly wanted no part of her, which suited the theory poorly. A man steered into a setup generally made some effort. This one acted as though she’d been seated beside him for a penance.
When her glass ran dry, she carried it across the lawn to the coolers, glad of the errand and the pocket of quiet on the far side of the crowd.
Robert’s voice pulled her up short.
He stood behind the equipment trailer with Kelly, his back half to Elise, his words pitched for one set of ears.
“…leave her be, Kelly. I mean it.”
Elise stilled in the trailer’s shadow.
“I’m not doing one solitary thing,” Kelly said.
“You’re doing the thing you always do. Whatever you’ve got cooking over here, leave Elise out of the pot. She’s got plenty on her plate without your help.”
“You fret too much, Robert Shipley.”
“And you scheme too much. Give me your word.”
A beat. “Fine. Spoilsport.”
Elise eased off before they caught her there, glass empty in her hand, the words rattling around without a hook to catch on.
Whatever Kelly had simmering, Elise wanted none of it.
The woman always had something on the stove.
Last spring it ran to a surprise anniversary trip that took three months and four bald-faced lies to pull off.
Whatever it was this time, it would surface on its own the way Kelly’s schemes always did, with fanfare and a cake.
Elise had learned the hard way not to go digging.
Digging only got a person handed a role in the production.
She filled her glass and returned to her seat, where the cowboy had cleaned his plate and sat angled toward the band tuning up, easy as a man who didn’t owe the world a sentence.
Both times her rounds carried her past the smoker line, it moved easy, folks loading pie and slaw as they shuffled, nobody bunched up and snapping. The coolers stayed clear of the children. Six years, he’d said. He’d been right, and he hadn’t gloated about it, which sat worse than if he had.
The night rolled on the way ranch nights did, fiddle music and a pack of kids wound up on root beer.
Elise worked the party the way she always did, half guest and half staff, never able to leave a thing un-tended.
Over at the serving tables, Midge had the hired caterers moving to her count, the way she ran the Bolton kitchen the rest of the year, and the two of them fell into the easy shorthand of women who handled things for a living.
Elise topped off the sweet tea urn and dug a power strip out of the supply tote.
When Dewey’s youngest came up sniffling over a skinned knee, she had a bandage out of her purse before the boy got the whole sentence out.
“You come prepared,” Midge said.
“I come employed.”
She slipped away as the first stars pricked through.
Home was a dozen quiet miles with the windows down and the radio off, the night air cool off the river bottoms and the road hers alone clear to the turnoff.
And if a face rode along with her down that dark stretch of county road, it wasn’t Kelly’s, and it wasn’t the seating chart’s.
It was a rude cowboy who’d handed her three words and a correction and hadn’t troubled himself with a fourth.
Except he’d slid her the rolls before she’d asked. He’d built a barbecue that ran slick as a clock and let her tear into it without lifting his voice. A rude man would have let her reach for those rolls instead of nudging them over, and corrected her after with relish. This one hadn’t.
She didn’t care for the math on that.
All evening she’d been certain she had the man pegged, and the pegs kept slipping loose.
Quiet wasn’t the same creature as empty.
She’d taken the one for the other because it asked less of her, and a woman who prided herself on reading folks at a glance had read this one twice and come away with two different men.
Stephen Garrett. She’d kept the name without meaning to, and that was the most aggravating part of the whole night.