Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Stephen Garrett called on a Tuesday, which was its own small event, since the man treated telephones the way other folks treated wasp nests.
“Pollard,” she answered, out of office habit.
“It’s Stephen.” A pause, the kind she’d come to read as him lining up his words. “Was thinking you might want to get a coffee. In town. Sometime.”
Elise opened her mouth to recite the reasons she shouldn’t.
“Sure,” she said instead. “Saturday.”
The reasons could form a committee and file a grievance later.
“Not a date,” he added, quick. “Just coffee.”
“Two people and two cups,” she said. “I expect I’ll survive it.”
And that, somehow, was that.
She set the phone down and stared at it a moment, as though it might explain itself. She had said yes. Out loud. To coffee. With the same cowboy she’d spent a whole supper running down to Kelly not three weeks gone. Her own consistency had filed for divorce.
She made the mistake of mentioning it to Kelly.
She hadn’t meant to. It slipped out over the vendor reports, a throwaway line about being busy Saturday morning, and Kelly pounced on the word coffee the way a barn cat takes a june bug.
“Coffee,” Kelly said, lighting up. “With who?”
“A person.”
“A tall, quiet, fence-mending sort of person?”
“Goodbye, Kelly.”
“I’m only happy for you,” Kelly called after her, in a sing-song that promised the opposite of letting it go.
But Kelly had gone pink with delight, near to bouncing in her chair, as pleased as Elise had ever clocked her over a thing that wasn’t her own business.
The woman lived for other people’s news.
Elise filed the reaction under Kelly being Kelly and got on with her day. A coffee was hardly headline material.
The shop sat on the square between the hardware store and the bank, six tables and a chalkboard menu somebody redid in a different hand each week.
Elise had driven past it a thousand times and gone inside all of twice.
Saturday mornings she generally spent with a spreadsheet and a pot of her own coffee, which was free and asked her no questions.
She’d changed her shirt three times before leaving the apartment, then been cross at herself for changing it the once.
Stephen was there ahead of her, hat off, two waters already on the table, filling his chair the way he filled everything, as if he’d grown there.
He’d cleaned up. Pressed shirt, clean-shaved, hair still showing the teeth of the comb.
The effort of it reached her in a way a tailored suit never could have on another man.
“You found it,” he said.
“I run logistics for a living. Finding a coffee shop is within my powers.”
“Wasn’t sure you’d show.”
“Neither was I, frankly. You caught me before my better judgment woke up.”
The coffee came. She took hers black. He doctored his with enough cream to founder a calf, and she had opinions.
“That’s not coffee, that’s a milkshake that lost its nerve.”
“It’s coffee with manners.”
“Coffee that quit on itself, and dragged a grown man down with it.”
“Says the woman drinking fence-post creosote.”
She laughed at her own line. He near about did too, which from him counted double.
“You make your bed,” he said, as if it were an accusation.
“Every morning. A made bed is a promise to your future self.”
“Waste of good minutes, tidying a thing you’ll only crawl into again by dark.”
“It’s discipline.”
“A quarrel with a blanket, that.”
She had no answer for that, which annoyed her near as much as it pleased her.
They argued about the radio, him loyal to AM weather and cattle reports. “Conway Twitty is not driving music,” she informed him. “He surely is. You’re driving it wrong.” Then they moved on to the proper way to load a dishwasher, which neither of them owned, purely for the sport of it.
None of it mattered, and that was the marvel of the thing. Every argument was a door propped open, an invitation to keep talking, and Stephen kept walking through.
At some point the bickering settled, and they sat in the lull of it easy, two cups and no agenda.
He asked about her people. She told him about her mother’s Sunday calls and the four-hour drive she kept not making.
He told her about a blue heeler named Pete who’d worked cattle till he was fourteen and lay buried under the live oak by the house.
The way he said the dog’s name carried more of the man than an hour of questions could have.
“You don’t have another?”
“Haven’t had it in me to get one.” He turned his cup. “A good dog’s a long goodbye.”
“That’s the saddest thing anybody’s said to me over coffee.”
“You asked.”
It should have put her off, a man that careful with his own heart. It did the opposite. It made her trust him, which was worse, or better, and she hadn’t sorted out which yet.
Somewhere into the second cup, a thought crept up on Elise and sat down uninvited.
She’d spent two years dead certain she wanted a life with no one in it but herself. Tidy and controlled. Safe as a locked drawer. And here she sat across from a man who’d argue about dishwashers for free, and the wanting had gone and rearranged itself while she wasn’t looking.
She’d had it wrong, perhaps. Not about the work, never about the work.
But about the rest, the part she’d boarded up and christened a fortress.
A fortress with one chair in it might not be the prize she’d sold herself on.
She’d defended that fortress as if it were the last dry ground in a flood.
From in here, with the coffee going cold and the cowboy going warm, it had the look of a very tidy way to be alone.
She’d armored that piece of herself so long she’d near forgotten there was a person under the plating, a woman who used to want things out loud. Across the little table from Stephen Garrett, the plating itched the way a cast does three weeks past due to come off.
It was a dangerous thought to let in. She let it in anyway.
When the cups stood empty, an hour had slipped off somewhere she couldn’t account for, which never happened to Elise, who accounted for everything.
“This wasn’t terrible,” she said, gathering her bag.
“High praise.” His mouth tipped up. “Same time next week?”
She should have hedged, left herself an exit.
“Saturday,” she said.
Monday, the strangeness found her.
She was passing Kelly’s open door, arms full of the week’s filing, when Kelly’s voice drifted out, low and pleased with itself, aimed at the phone wedged against her shoulder.
“…told you it would take. Project Cowboy’s heating up really well. They had coffee Saturday, and she came back glowing, not that she’d own up to it under torture…”
Elise stopped.
Project Cowboy.
The filing went heavy in her arms. She stood there a breath, the words settling wrong, the way a receipt won’t square with the register no matter how you add it.
She could go in and ask. The old Elise, the one who read every spreadsheet to the last cell, would have planted herself in that doorway and demanded the whole ledger.
Instead she stayed in the hall and talked herself down.
So Kelly had a nickname for a scheme. The woman had a nickname for everything. She’d dubbed Robert’s anniversary trip Operation Sweetheart and last spring’s roof repair the Great Shingle Crisis of Early June. A pet name wasn’t a plot.
And coffee was coffee. People talked about coffee. There was nothing sinister in two friends being tickled that the lonesome workhorse of the office had finally gotten herself a Saturday morning.
Still.
Something about the phrase sat crooked. Heating up, the way a plan does, with a timeline and a hand on the thermostat. A project implied an objective. An objective implied somebody running it.
And she had a fair guess who. Annie’s fence assignment. The barbecue she’d been steered to the way you steer a heifer up a chute. Lined up in a row, the pieces made a picture she didn’t care for.
But lined up was the whole trouble. Elise was good at lining things up. Show her three coincidences and she’d hand you a conspiracy with a flowchart and a budget. That was the bookkeeper in her, forever hunting the error in the ledger, and not every ledger had one.
Besides, suppose it was true. Suppose Kelly and Annie had nudged a fence assignment here and a seating card there.
No one had scripted the laugh over fence-post creosote, or the way Stephen had said a dead dog’s name soft as a prayer.
Whatever the meddlers set in motion, the part that mattered had happened between two people and two cups, with no audience and no script.
She shut the thought in a drawer and slid it closed.
She had filing to do, a coffee to look forward to, and a fortress she was, after two years of bolting it shut, halfway to letting somebody knock at.
If a small voice at the back of her mind went on murmuring those two words, well. She had years of practice ignoring small voices. She’d built a whole life on it.