Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Elise had run the barbecue through her head eleven times since Saturday, and it came out the same on every pass.
She’d been set up.
Not romanced. Set up, the way you’d set a mousetrap, with a tidy square of cheese and a spring you never spotted till it had you by the tail.
The cheese had a name. Stephen Garrett. She didn’t care for cheese, and she cared less for being handled.
By Monday she’d built a whole case, and she was halfway through arguing it to the empty office when the door swung open and the accomplice strolled in.
“Morning, sunshine.” Kelly set a to-go cup on the clear corner of the desk and dropped into the chair across from her. “You ducked out of the barbecue early. I turned around and you were gone.”
“Funny thing about that.”
“What thing?”
“The seating chart.” Elise folded her hands on the desk, calm as a banker about to deny a loan. “Walk me through it again. The part about balancing the tables.”
Kelly’s face went smooth and bright, the look of a woman with nothing in the world to hide and decades of practice hiding it.
“I told you. You had all the talkers bunched on one end.”
“You sat me next to the one man in three counties who’s never strung four words together on purpose. Balancing, my foot. That’s stacking the deck.”
“Stephen?” Kelly pressed a hand to her chest. “I sat you by Stephen because he’s quiet and you’re not, and I figured you’d carry the table. A hostess thinks about flow.”
“Is that what we’re calling it.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Kelly.” Elise leaned in. “I built that chart and I scrutinized every name and position. Then when I reviewed it to make sure it still made sense, I was now seated right next to a bachelor. You don’t reshuffle two hundred people for flow. You do it to make a point.”
Kelly sipped her coffee, unbothered. “You’re awfully suspicious for a woman nobody’s chasing.”
“I’m suspicious because I can read a spreadsheet, and you’re a spreadsheet with a pony tail.”
A laugh got away from Kelly before she could catch it. Then she rearranged her face back into innocence.
“You wound me,” she said, not wounded in the least.
“I keep your books and I could price that wound to the penny.” Elise rolled her chair an inch.
“You’re no fun when you’re right.”
“And no fun when I’m tired, and you’ve made me both before the coffee’s even cooled.”
Kelly waved that away, so Elise said the rest of it, the part that wanted saying out loud, to Kelly and maybe to herself.
“Here’s where it lands. I’m not a project. No charity case with a casserole and a calendar opening, either. Whatever you and Annie cooked up over the lemonade, uncook it.”
“Annie and I were talking about rolls.”
“You were clocking me across the lawn.”
“Everyone keeps an eye on the dessert table.”
“Mm.” Elise wasn’t buying it, and they both understood that much.
“I don’t need setting up. I’m not lying awake wishing some fella would ride up and complete me. I’ve got a job I’m good at and a life I built with my own two hands. I’m not handing the keys to a stranger.”
“And if I did want a man, which I don’t, it wouldn’t be that one.
” Elise nodded toward the window, as though Stephen Garrett might be loitering in the lot.
“Dirt on his boots, ten words max to his name, and an ambition that runs the length of a fence line. A girl could die of old age waiting on him to finish a sentence.”
She was the only one who could make her own life what she wanted it to be. Independence hadn’t come free.
Kelly let the quiet sit a moment, reading her in that too-knowing way of hers. Then she rose, smoothed her slacks, and pivoted as though not one word of it had landed.
“Well. The order we were expecting from the Dean anniversary party came in, and Robert wants the south forty bush-hogged before the buyer flies in Thursday. You’ll handle the scheduling?”
“I always handle the scheduling.”
“That’s why we love you.” And Kelly breezed out, mug in hand. With that one, a body could never tell victory from retreat.
Elise turned to her screen.
The case that had looked airtight first thing wore thin as the morning wore on.
Kelly meddled, true. The woman meddled in everybody, the way some folks gardened or collected spoons.
That hardly made Elise the center of the flower bed.
A reasonable person pinned the odd seat to chance and got on with her Monday, and Elise wanted very much to be a reasonable person.
She let it drop and gave the morning to the work, which never schemed and always wanted doing.
The day filled itself the way her days did, a stack of invoices and Robert mislaying his reading glasses twice before noon. When she killed the office lights at the end of it, the barbecue had shrunk to a footnote.
Her apartment was dark when she let herself in. She went around switching on the lamps she favored, the warm ones, until the place glowed the way she’d made it to glow.
It was a small home and a good one, and every piece in it had a story she’d chosen on purpose.
On the bookshelf stood a photo of her and her high school friend, Dani, at seventeen, sunburned and laughing on the tailgate of Dani’s old truck, the summer they drove to the coast on ninety dollars and a full tank.
Elise had a hundred newer pictures on her phone and not one she loved more than this one.
A blanket lay folded over the arm of the couch, soft and a touch lopsided, the one she’d knitted the winter her aunt Carol sat her down and walked her through it, stitch by clumsy stitch, until her hands caught the rhythm.
Aunt Carol always said a body ought to make at least one warm thing with her own two hands. Elise had knitted a dozen since.
In the cupboard sat the plain white dishes her mother pressed on her the week she signed the lease on her own place, a little chipped now and dear to her in a way good china never managed.
She’d assembled this life one chosen object at a time, and every one of them said the same thing. Mine. Nobody handed it to me, and nobody gets to take it away.
She set her keys in the dish by the door and stood a moment in the middle of all of it.
The apartment was quiet.
Not the good quiet of the office after everyone went home.
A different quiet. The kind that counted the one set of keys in the dish and the lone mug drying in the rack and found the number wanting.
She’d chosen every lamp and cushion in the place, and not one of them was waiting up for her.
A home could be a fortress and a solitary cell at the same address, depending on the hour.
The photo had Dani in it, three states away now, married and busy and down to a group text she answered when she surfaced. Her mother lived in the dishes, a Sunday phone call and a four-hour drive Elise made too seldom. The apartment, all told, was a museum of people she loved from a distance.
She’d told Kelly the truth that morning, every word of it.
A job she was good at. A life she’d raised up from the studs.
It was a fine life, and she’d defend it to anybody who came at it sideways.
The defense simply held up better in daylight, with the phones ringing and Robert losing his glasses. A dark kitchen asked harder questions.
She let the thought come, and then she let it go, the way she’d trained herself.
“None of that,” she told the empty room, and her own voice steadied her the way it always had.
She filled a big pot with water and put it on the stove to boil.
A fistful of salt went in after, then the good bronze-cut pasta she saved for the nights dinner ought to be a kindness instead of a chore.
She talked herself through it the way she’d talk a panicking bride down off a rained-out reception.
You are fine. You’ve got a full life and garlic that needs chopping.
Loneliness was weather. It rolled in, and given time it rolled on out, and the trick was to keep stirring till it did.
She chopped the garlic finely, the way her mother had shown her, the blade rocking with a sound she could have made in her sleep. There was a particular mercy in a chore the hands had memorized. Her mind could wander off anywhere it pleased, and supper still got made.
The garlic hit the hot oil and the kitchen turned fragrant, and her shoulders relaxed.
She ate at her dining room table, using her mother’s plain white plates, in the warm lamplight of a home that was nobody’s doing but her own.
She was proud of what she’d made for herself.
But when she was in her curated home, she was alone.
The part she didn’t want to admit was right in front of her.
And if a quiet cowboy wandered through her mind somewhere between the pasta and the dishes, she chalked it up to a long hectic week. But she couldn’t wash his image away like she washed the dinner dishes.