7. Ellie
— ? —
Ellie
The chair is empty.
Jacob’s chair is empty.
It’s six o’clock. He said he’d be here at six. He promised. He looked me in the eye in our kitchen three days ago and said “I’ll be there” and I believed him, because he’s my husband, because he promised, because I keep thinking this time will be different.
I’m wearing the green dress I bought for tonight, the one he’s never seen, the one that’s cut low enough to show off my tits and short enough to show off my legs.
I bought it because I wanted him to look at me the way he used to look at me, hungry and desperate and mine.
I bought it because I had plans for after the cake, plans that involved him peeling this dress off me in our bedroom and putting his mouth on every inch of my skin and fucking me until I forgot my own name.
The chair is empty and my plans don’t matter.
“He’s probably just running late,” Mrs. Bellinger says from across the table. She’s wearing her good dress, the purple one she saves for special occasions, and her hand finds mine and squeezes. “You know how the ranch gets.”
“He’s not pulling calves in May,” I say.
“He’ll be here.”
I check my phone under the table. Nothing.
Sue moves the cake to the back counter, out of the sightline of the door. “We’ll cut it when he gets here,” she says, and she doesn’t meet my eyes.
Mr. Bellinger is sitting in the booth behind me, and I hear him mutter to his wife, and I hear her kick him under the table. The whole diner heard it too. Everyone’s pretending they didn’t.
Later, I text him. Where are you.
No response.
The room is handling it a dozen different ways and I can see every single one.
Sue keeps refilling coffee cups that don’t need refilling, finding excuses to walk past my table and touch my shoulder.
Mrs. Bellinger has moved to the chair beside me, Jacob’s chair, so it’s not empty anymore, and she’s talking about her garden now, about the tomatoes that came in early this year and the beetles that got into her squash and how she’s trying a new fertilizer Mr. Bellinger read about in a magazine.
I nod and smile and say “that’s wonderful” in all the right places and I don’t hear a single word.
Mr. Bellinger has stopped muttering but his jaw is tight and I know he’s got opinions he’s not sharing.
The presents are piling up on the end of the table.
A candle from the mail carrier, lavender, my favorite scent, wrapped in tissue paper she must have saved from last Christmas.
A set of dish towels from the church ladies, embroidered with sunflowers, probably made by hand.
A gift card to the bookstore two towns over from the couple who run the hardware store, tucked into a card their daughter signed with a crooked heart.
Everyone brought a present. Everyone thought of me.
Everyone is here except the one person who promised.
Zeke slides into the booth across from me, and he doesn’t flirt.
He doesn’t grin. He doesn’t do any of the things Zeke always does, the compliments and the jokes and the easy charm he’s been running since we were kids.
He just looks at me with those brown eyes and for a second he doesn’t say anything at all.
Then he says, “You remember when you punched me in the third grade?”
I blink at him. “What?”
“Third grade. Recess. I pulled your braid and you turned around and punched me right in the nose. Blood everywhere. The teacher had to call my mama and your aunt.”
I don’t know where he’s going with this but I’m grateful for the distraction. “You deserved it.”
“I absolutely deserved it. I was a little shit.” He leans back in the booth and raises his voice a little, enough that the nearby tables can hear.
“She broke my nose, you know. Had to wear a splint for two weeks. Told everyone I got in a fight with a sixth grader because I was too embarrassed to admit a girl half my size laid me out.”
Someone at the next table laughs. Then someone else.
“And when the teacher asked what happened,” Zeke continues, “Ellie here looked her dead in the eye and said, ‘If he didn’t want to get punched, he shouldn’t have touched my hair.’”
More laughter now, spreading through the diner. People are looking at me, but not with pity this time. With warmth.
“She got sent to the principal’s office,” Zeke says. “And she walked there with her chin up and her shoulders back like she was going to accept an award.”
The laughter gets louder. Sue is smiling behind the counter. Mrs. Bellinger is wiping her eyes. And for a minute, just a minute, I’m not the woman with the empty chair. I’m just Ellie, the girl who punched Zeke in the third grade because he touched her hair.
At seven-thirty, Sue brings the cake back out and puts it in front of me and lights the candles, twenty-five of them, and the whole diner starts singing.
I smile through all of it. I smile while they sing and I smile when they clap and I smile when Sue tells me to make a wish and blow out the candles.
I close my eyes and I wish for my husband to walk through that door and I blow and the candles go out and the door doesn’t open.
I cut the cake and pass out slices and Sue’s pecan pie comes out too, because she knows I love it, and I eat a piece standing at the counter while she watches me with worried eyes.
The hardware store couple’s little girl shows me a drawing she made, a yellow sun with a smiley face, and I tell her it’s beautiful and I tuck it into my purse.
Mr. Bellinger finally comes over and squeezes my shoulder and says “happy birthday, sweetheart” in that gruff way he has, and I can see in his face that he wants to say more but his wife is watching so he doesn’t.
I text Jacob again under the table: Please.
Nothing.
I excuse myself to the bathroom and I lock the door and I stand at the sink and I look at myself in the mirror. The green dress. The careful makeup. The curled hair. Nobody looking at me would know.
I call him. It rings and rings and goes to voicemail, and wherever it is, he isn’t holding it.
I hang up before the beep because I will not leave my own birthday on a machine.
When I go back to the table I eat cake I can’t taste and I drink coffee I don’t want and I let Mrs. Bellinger tell me more about her garden, about the new trellis her nephew built and the way the morning glories are taking over the back fence.
I let Sue push another slice of pie at me and I eat it even though I’m not hungry because she made it for me, because she’s been making pies for me since I was seven years old, because that’s what the people in this town do for each other.
I let Zeke tell another story about our childhood, about the time we snuck into the old barn out on the county road and found a litter of kittens and tried to hide them in my aunt’s garage, and everyone laughs and I laugh too and it sounds almost real.
When people start leaving, they hug me and wish me happy birthday and tell me they’ll see me soon and they don’t mention Jacob.
Not a single one of them mentions Jacob.
They just hug me a little tighter and hold on a little longer and I know what they’re thinking and I hate that they’re thinking it.
Sue wraps up the leftover cake and presses it into my hands and tells me she loves me and I tell her I love her too and I walk out to my car with the cake box and the presents and my phone in my pocket, silent.
I drive home with the windows down and the night air on my face and I don’t cry.
Not over this. Not over him. The road is dark and empty and the stars are out and I think about the first time he drove me home from a date, how he held my hand the whole way, how he walked me to my door and kissed me so softly I thought I might die from wanting him.
I think about how I fell in love with him and how I married him and how I’m driving home alone on my twenty-fifth birthday with a cake box on the passenger seat where he should be.
I pull up to the house and the lights are on. His truck is in the drive.
I sit in my car for a minute, holding the steering wheel, staring at the house where I live, where I’ve lived for almost a year, where I thought I was building a life with a man who loves me. The lights are on in the east wing, our wing, and in the west wing too.
I get out of the car and walk up the steps and open the door.
Daphne is on the couch in the living room, in my spot, the spot where I sit every night when Jacob and I watch TV together.
She’s got a glass of wine in her hand, the good wine, the anniversary wine Jacob and I were saving, the bottle I hid behind the flour in the pantry so she wouldn’t find it.
She’s wearing a silk robe and her hair is wet like she just got out of the shower.
“Oh!” She looks up at me with wide eyes. “You’re home early. How was your party?”
I don’t answer her. I can’t. I’m looking at the wine glass in her hand and the robe slipping off her shoulder and my spot on my couch and I can’t make words come out.
“He left around four,” she says, her voice sweet and helpful. “Some problem with one of the workers. He said he’d call you.”
My hands are shaking. The cake box is shaking. I set it down on the hall table before I drop it.
“He said to tell you,” Daphne continues. “I must have dozed off. I’m so sorry.” She smiles at me, that smile, that fucking smile. “Happy birthday, by the way.”
Headlights sweep across the windows. A truck in the drive.
Jacob comes through the door with blood down the front of his shirt.
It’s not his blood. I can see that right away, the way it’s smeared and dried, the way it’s brown instead of red.
He’s been at a barn somewhere, or a field, pulling somebody out from under a rail, doing his job while I sat in a diner with forty people who love me and an empty chair where my husband should have been.
He looks at me. He looks at the cake box on the table. He looks at Daphne on the couch with his wine in her hand. He says my name the way he says it when he already knows.
“Where were you, Jacob?”