10. Jacob
— ? —
Jacob
Fence with Hollis in the heat, and Hollis says the thing nobody else will.
We’ve been out here since noon, replacing posts that rotted through over the winter.
The sun is brutal and there’s no shade for miles, just open pasture and the fence line stretching toward the horizon.
My shirt is soaked through and my back is screaming and I haven’t thought about anything except the next post and the next hole and the next strand of wire.
That’s the point. That’s why I’m out here instead of in the house, instead of anywhere near Ellie or Daphne or the mess I’ve made of everything.
Hollis works beside me without talking, the way he’s worked beside me for ten years.
He digs while I set posts, hands me wire when I need it, holds things steady when I hammer.
The other hands are spread out along the line, working in pairs, and I can hear their voices carrying across the pasture, laughter and cursing and the occasional shout when someone catches a finger on the wire.
The kid with the sunburned nose is two pairs down, the one who couldn’t sit a saddle in April, and he’s gotten better since then, sets a post straight now without being told twice.
Hollis hands me the water jug every half hour without asking if I want it and I drink because he’d stand there holding it until I did.
“Men are talking,” Hollis says.
He’s got twenty years on me and he’s been running cattle since before I was born and he doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean. He’s also the only man on this ranch who’ll tell me the truth to my face, which is why I keep him around even when I don’t want to hear it.
“Let them talk.”
“She walks the place like she owns it.” He spits in the dirt and goes back to digging.
“Daphne. Telling the hands what to do, bossing the maids around. Jenna’s been running her errands to town on the ranch’s dime, did you know that?
Three trips last week for things Miss Long needed from the pharmacy. ”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Didn’t think you did.” He straightens up and wipes his forehead with the back of his glove and looks at me with those sharp eyes that miss nothing.
“And your wife’s been eating supper alone on that patio more nights than not.
Every man on this place has seen it. Every man on this place knows where you weren’t on her birthday too. ”
I grip the post driver and slam it down, hard enough to drive the post six inches into the ground in one strike. The impact shudders up my arms and into my shoulders and I don’t care. I slam it down again. Again.
“Jackson raised me,” I say.
“Long asked you to look after his girl.” Hollis picks up another post and sets it in the hole. “He didn’t ask you to lose your wife doing it.”
I think about Jackson’s voice on the phone that first morning, dragging the words out one at a time, and I think about my wife on that patio with her plate in front of her and the west wing lit up across the pool, and I can’t put the two of them in the same head at the same time.
Every time I try, one of them falls out.
I don’t answer. I just keep slamming the driver until my arms give out and Hollis tells me to quit before I hurt myself, and then I stand there in the heat with my chest heaving and sweat dripping off my jaw and I still don’t have an answer.
We work in silence for another hour. The sun moves across the sky and the shadows get longer and the other hands start drifting back toward their trucks, calling it a day.
I keep working. I keep setting posts and stringing wire and pounding stakes into the hard ground because as long as I’m working I don’t have to think about the way Ellie looked at me this morning when I left before dawn.
By the time Hollis and I load the last of the tools into the truck, the sun is dropping toward the horizon. I climb into the driver’s seat and sit there for a minute, staring through the windshield at the pasture.
“You gonna drive or you gonna sit there feeling sorry for yourself?” Hollis asks from the passenger seat.
I start the truck and head back toward the house.
The drive takes twenty minutes, and I spend every one of them thinking about what I’m going to say to Ellie.
I’m going to apologize for missing dinner again.
I’m going to tell her I know I’ve been distracted and I know I’ve been distant and I’m going to do better.
I’m going to hold her face in my hands and kiss her and tell her she’s the most important thing in my life, because she is, she’s always been, even when I’m too stupid to show it.
I’m going to tell her Friday, and I’m going to mean it, and I’m going to be there at six with my boots off before she has to remind me. I can’t cook and I’m not going to pretend I can, but I can sit at the table, and I can look at her while she talks, and I can shut my phone in the truck.
I’m going to fix this. Tonight. Right now.
I pull up to the house and Zeke’s tow truck is in my driveway.
He’s under the hood of the ranch pickup, the one that’s been making that noise for a week, and Ellie is sitting on the porch rail with a glass of lemonade in her hand.
She’s wearing shorts and a tank top and her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and her legs are tan and bare and I can see the curve of her waist under that thin cotton and I want to pull her off that rail and carry her upstairs and spend the rest of the night with my mouth on her skin.
Then I see who she’s laughing at.
Zeke says whatever he says and she throws her head back and laughs, and her whole body is loose and easy and relaxed in a way she hasn’t been with me in weeks.
She looks happy. She looks the way she looked the day I married her.
And she’s looking at Zeke, and Zeke is looking at her, and everything I was going to say dies in my throat.
I park the truck and get out and I’m barely civil.
“What’s going on here?”
Ellie’s laugh dies. Zeke straightens up from under the hood and wipes his hands on a rag and looks at me.
“Pickup broke down,” he says. “Ellie called the shop.”
“I didn’t know you made house calls.”
“I do when a friend needs help.”
Friend. The word sits in my chest.
“Thanks for coming out,” Ellie says to Zeke, and her voice is cool now, the easy warmth gone the second I opened my mouth. “I’ll see you around.”
“Anytime.” Zeke looks at me one more time, holds my eyes for a second longer than he needs to, and then he gets in his truck and drives away.
The pickup’s hood is still up. I can hear the engine ticking as it cools. He fixed it. He came out here on a Tuesday evening and fixed a truck that’s mine, on a ranch that’s mine, for a woman who’s mine, and he did it because I didn’t.
I stand in the driveway and watch the taillights disappear around the bend, and the apology I had planned is gone.
The speech I was going to make is gone. There’s just this red thing in my chest, this ugly jealous thing I don’t know what to do with, and I know I’m about to open my mouth and I shouldn’t and I can’t stop myself.
“Why was he here?”
“Because the truck broke and you weren’t.”
“I was fixing fence.”
“You’ve been fixing fence for eight days.” She’s still sitting on the rail, the lemonade glass sweating in her hand, and her voice is calm in a way that makes my skin prickle. “You’ve been fixing everything except the thing that needs fixing.”
“Don’t start, Ellie.”
“Don’t start?” She sets the glass down on the rail, slow and deliberate, and stands up to face me.
“I’ve been trying for a month to get five minutes with you.
Five minutes where you’re not working or sleeping or dealing with Daphne’s latest crisis.
Five minutes where you actually look at me and see me and remember that I’m your wife. ”
“I see you.”
“Do you?” She’s shaking now, or maybe I’m the one shaking, I can’t tell anymore. “Because it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like I’m an afterthought.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Fair is being chosen, Jacob.” Her voice cracks on my name and she stops and takes a breath and when she speaks again it’s steady. “Fair is being put first. And I can’t remember the last time you put me first.”
“I’m building this for you. Everything I do, I do for you, for us.”
“I never asked for that.” She takes a step toward me, and there are tears in her eyes but she’s not crying, she’s too angry to cry.
“I never asked for the ranch or the money or any of it. I asked for you. I asked for your time. And you can give me a bracelet and a diamond and a house with six bedrooms, but you can’t give me five minutes. ”
I open my mouth to argue, to tell her she’s wrong, to tell her I’ve been doing everything for her.
“Sometimes I think you’d notice Daphne leaving a room before you’d notice I did,” she says.
I open my mouth to tell her that’s not true.
Nothing comes out.
She watches nothing come out, and I see the moment her face changes, the moment her shoulders drop and her eyes go flat. She looks at me one more time, waiting, giving me one more chance to say anything at all.
I still can’t speak.
She goes inside and the screen door slams behind her and I’m standing in the driveway alone with the sun going down and all the words I should have said stuck somewhere between my brain and my mouth.
I stand there for a long time. The sky goes from orange to purple to black.
The stars come out one by one. I think about going inside, about knocking on the bedroom door, about getting on my knees if that’s what it takes.
But every time I take a step toward the house, I see her face again, that flat disappointment, and I stop.
Her lemonade glass is still on the porch rail, with an inch left in the bottom and a ring of water under it, and I pick it up and carry it in and rinse it and put it in the rack, and that’s the one thing I do for her tonight.
I go inside eventually. The house is dark and quiet. I walk down the hall and I stop outside the bedroom door. I can see the light under the door, can hear her moving around inside, and I raise my hand to knock.
I drop my hand.
If I knock she’ll say come in, because she always says come in, and then I’ll be standing in that room with nothing to say to her, and she’ll watch me have nothing to say to her, and that’s the thing I can’t do twice in one night.
I walk away and I sleep on the couch, one floor under her, and I don’t put my hand on her hip, and I’ve never once been under this roof and not done that.