25. Ellie
— ? —
Ellie
I set the plate on the counter under the window.
Right in the middle of the sill, where the light from the kitchen falls on it, where a man sitting in a truck across the road couldn’t miss it if he tried. A pork chop and mashed potatoes and Mrs. Bellinger’s creamed corn, steam still rising, a meal that says someone cares enough to cook.
Mrs. Bellinger watches me from the doorway with a dish towel in her hands and doesn’t say a single word. That’s how I know she understands exactly what I’m doing.
I want to see if he can stay in the truck.
He said watch me. Fine. I’m watching. If he gets out of that truck and crosses the road and knocks on this door because he can’t stand it, because he needs to be near me, because his want is bigger than my ask, then everything he said in the basement is just more words.
Just another version of a man who does what he wants and calls it love, the way his father did, the way he swore he’d never do.
If he stays in the truck, then maybe. Maybe isn’t yes. But it’s the first word I’ve had for him in two weeks that isn’t no.
I pull the chair around so it faces the street, and I sit down, and I eat my dinner looking straight at the dark shape of his truck across the road.
The street is quiet at this hour. Most of the neighbors are inside, their windows glowing yellow with lamplight, the blue flicker of televisions casting shadows on their curtains.
A dog is barking three houses down, the same sharp yap it’s had since it was a puppy.
The porch light next door is burned out again.
Mrs. Bellinger mentioned it twice this week, wondering if someone should say a word.
I cut a piece of the pork chop and lift it to my mouth and chew slowly.
I think about the first time Jacob cooked for me, back when we were dating, back before everything went wrong.
Scrambled eggs at two in the morning after a dance at the community center, both of us a little drunk, him standing at his stove in bare feet and jeans with no shirt, me sitting on his counter watching him work.
The eggs were terrible. He forgot the toast until it went cold.
I ate every bite and told him it was perfect, and he looked at me like I’d given him what he didn’t know he wanted.
The truck doesn’t move.
I cut another piece. I think about the way he used to look at me in those early days, every word out of my mouth a surprise to him.
I think about the way that look faded over time, replaced by a comfortable look, a less hungry one.
I told myself the comfortable one was better.
Steadier. More reliable. I told myself a lot of things.
Ten minutes pass. The street gets darker as the last of the sunset fades, the orange glow on the horizon shrinking to a thin line and then disappearing entirely.
The streetlamp at the corner flickers on, casting a pool of light that doesn’t quite reach his truck.
He’s harder to see now, a shadow behind the windshield, and I can’t tell if he’s watching me or staring straight ahead or looking at nothing at all.
I eat my potatoes. I think about the basement, about his voice cracking on the word love, about how long it took him to get to it and how it came out of him in the end, in pieces, in the dark, where he didn’t have to watch my face while he said it.
I think about what it costs to grow up the way he did. What it does to a person, to spend your whole childhood watching love destroy the people around you and then deciding, consciously deciding, that you’ll never let it touch you.
He let it touch him anyway. He married me anyway. And then he spent a year trying to love me without saying the word, keeping the wall up and letting me in at the same time, and you can’t do both.
Twenty minutes. The street has gone full dark now, the last traces of twilight swallowed by the night.
The only lights are the streetlamp and the glow from windows up and down the block, little squares of yellow in the darkness.
His truck is just a shape now, a darker patch against the dark, and I have to squint to make out the outline of it.
Mrs. Bellinger comes through on her way to the living room and pauses behind my chair.
“He’s still there,” she says quietly.
“I know.”
“Been there going on an hour now. Hasn’t moved an inch.”
“I know.”
She squeezes my shoulder and keeps walking, and I keep eating, and the truck keeps not moving.
From the study I hear Mr. Bellinger clear his throat, the rustle of newspaper pages turning.
He hasn’t said anything about Jacob being out there.
Hasn’t said anything about any of it, really, except the one comment at dinner.
But I know he’s aware. I know he’s listening, in his way, keeping track of the situation without inserting himself into it.
That’s how he’s always been. Present but not pushy, there when you need him and absent when you don’t.
I finish the chop. I finish most of the potatoes. I push the corn around on my plate because I was never hungry for corn, never really wanted it, just put it on the plate because Mrs. Bellinger made it and it seemed rude not to take some.
Forty minutes. I think about getting up. I think about crossing the road right now, knocking on his window, telling him what? That I forgive him? I don’t, not yet. That I want him back? I do, but wanting isn’t the same as trusting, and trust is the thing that broke.
I stay in my chair. I push the corn around some more.
Mrs. Bellinger is watching me from the living room with the television on mute, and she hasn’t said a word about the chair facing the window or the plate on the sill, and I know she won’t.
She’s been raising me part time since I was ten and June sent me over with a pie, and she’s good at it.
I think about the plate under the window, and how he’d have known it for what it was from the first bite, because he watched me eat across a table for a year and he knows I don’t sit facing a street.
He knows. And he’s sitting there letting me do it to him anyway.
Fifty minutes. An hour. The dog down the block has stopped barking. The television flicker in the neighbor’s window has gone still. They’ve turned it off, gone to bed, given up on whatever they were watching. The street is quieter now than it was, the hush of a small town settling in for the night.
I think about what it means that he’s still out there.
That he hasn’t crossed the road, hasn’t knocked on the door, hasn’t done any of the things the old Jacob would have done.
The Jacob who took what he wanted and figured the world would catch up.
The Jacob who put a ring on my finger six months after our first date because waiting felt like a waste of time.
That Jacob would have been on this porch an hour ago. That Jacob would have knocked until someone answered and then said his piece whether I wanted to hear it or not. That Jacob didn’t know how to wait for anything.
This Jacob is sitting in his truck in the dark, not moving.
I carry my plate to the sink. I turn on the water, wait for it to get hot, squirt soap onto the sponge.
I wash the plate slowly, running the sponge over every inch of it, scrubbing at spots that aren’t there.
I rinse it once, then twice, watching the water run clear.
I set it in the drying rack, then pick it up and rinse it again, because I’m not ready to be done yet, not ready to decide what comes next.
I dry my hands on the dish towel. I fold it neatly. I hang it on the hook by the stove.
Then I go and stand at the window, square in the light, and I look straight at the driver’s side of his truck for a full minute.
Nothing. He doesn’t move, doesn’t wave, doesn’t flash his lights, doesn’t do anything except sit there and watch me watch him.
I reach over and turn off the kitchen light.
The street goes dark on both sides. The only light now is from the streetlamp at the corner, casting long shadows across the pavement, and his truck is just a darker shape against the dark. I can’t see him at all now. I can only feel him out there, the way I felt the storm coming before I saw it.
I stand there in the unlit kitchen with my heart going, and I think: he stayed. For an hour and a half, with me eating dinner right in front of him, he stayed in that truck. He didn’t cross the road. He didn’t knock on the door. He didn’t do any of the things I expected him to do.
I should go up to bed. I should let that be the whole answer, let him sit out there all night if he wants to, let him prove whatever he’s trying to prove on his own time.
Instead I go to the front door. I open it. I step out onto the porch, down the steps, across the lawn. The grass is cool and damp under my bare feet, I forgot to put on shoes, and the night air is warm and soft against my skin.
The sidewalk is rougher than I expected, the concrete cracked and uneven.
I count my steps without meaning to, the way I counted them from the porch the night of the dinner and didn’t walk them, forty steps there and forty steps back.
The curb. Then the street, the asphalt still holding the day’s warmth, gritty under my bare soles.
I walk slowly. Each step feels deliberate, weighted, and I’m walking toward what I can’t take back. The streetlamp casts my shadow long and thin across the pavement, stretching toward his truck ahead of me.
Twenty steps. Thirty. I can see him more clearly now, his shape behind the windshield, the outline of his shoulders, the way he’s sitting perfectly still with his hands on the wheel, afraid to move.
I stop with my hand a foot from the door. The engine is cold. He hasn’t so much as run the radio. He’s been sitting in the dark for an hour and a half with nothing to do but not get out.
His window rolls down before I get there, and his face in the streetlight is careful and tired and not sure of anything. He’s been holding his breath for an hour and he’s afraid to let it out.
“You stayed in the truck,” I say.
“You said watch. I’m watching.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
“I’m trying, Ellie.” His voice is rough. “I’m trying to be what you told me you needed.”
I look at him for a long moment. Two years I’ve been with this man, and I’ve watched him wait out a colt for a week. I’ve never once seen him wait for me. Jacob Walker takes what he wants, and when the world doesn’t arrange itself around him, he makes it.
But here he is. Sitting in a truck in the dark, engine off, lights off, not moving, because I told him to stay.
“Come sit on the porch,” I say.