31. Jacob
— ? —
Jacob
The ranch house is whole again.
New roof, the shingles dark against the sky. New beam in the foyer where the tree came through, solid and straight, the wood still pale where it hasn’t weathered yet. The whole place smells like cedar and fresh paint.
The repairs took six weeks and we spent every one of them at the house on Elm Street. First on the air mattress, which was terrible for my back and perfect for everything else. Then on a real bed I bought the second week, a king-size that barely fit through the narrow doorway of her old bedroom.
Six weeks of Fridays.
The first one, I sat in the booth at six o’clock the way I said I would, and she walked in at six-fifteen and slid into the seat across from me and asked me about my day, and I told her.
All of it. The calf that didn’t make it, the fence, the argument with the feed man.
I’ve never told her about a day in my life.
She listened the whole way through and didn’t say one word about how long it took me to learn to do that.
The second Friday, she told me about June. Things I’d never heard. The year the cookies stopped and why.
The third Friday, we stayed until Sue kicked us out at closing.
She turned off all the lights except the one over our booth and made a big show of sweeping around our feet, and Ellie laughed and said “Okay, okay, we’re going,” and we went back to Elm Street and I told her about my mother.
Not all of it. She’d heard that in the basement.
Just the parts I’d left out. The sound of her crying through the walls at night.
The way she used to look at me sometimes, and I was the only good thing in her life, and I knew it at ten.
The way I tried so hard to be enough, and never was.
The fourth Friday, Sue put both cups on one check without asking and said “Well,” and that was the town saying it.
This morning is the first Sunday we’ve slept under this roof since the storm.
She walked through every room last night before she’d get in the bed, the way she walked through Elm Street, and I followed her and didn’t say anything, and when she got to the west wing door she opened it and looked in and closed it again and came back to me and said, “Okay.” Just that.
I’m in the kitchen attempting breakfast. The bacon is limp on one side and raw on the other.
The eggs have turned into what might charitably be called a scramble if you squinted and were feeling generous about it.
The toast is somehow both soggy and cold.
I’ve been at this every Sunday for six weeks and I haven’t gotten one part of it right yet, and I’m going to keep at it until I do, because she laughs every time, and I’d ruin a hundred breakfasts for that.
Ellie comes down in one of my shirts, the blue one she likes, her hair everywhere, her feet bare on the tile.
“You’re terrible at this,” she says, looking at the plate.
“I’m getting better.”
“You’ve said that every Sunday for six weeks.”
“Consistency.”
She laughs and crosses the kitchen and kisses me, her hand on my chest, her body warm against mine. I feel it everywhere, in my chest, my stomach, the back of my throat. Every time she touches me, every single time, it hits me this way. I can’t believe my luck. I keep expecting to wake up.
“Hollis called,” she says, sliding onto a stool at the counter. “Cow down in the north pasture. She’s not getting up.”
“It can wait.”
“It sounded important.”
“Hollis can get a cow up. He’s done it a thousand times.” I slide the plate in front of her, limp bacon and questionable eggs and all. “Sunday breakfast doesn’t wait. That’s the rule.”
“You made that rule.”
“And I’m keeping it.”
She eats the limp bacon without complaint and I love her so much I have to look at the stove to keep from saying it again. I’ve already said it three times this morning, once when I woke up, once in the shower, once while she was getting dressed. I’m making up for lost time.
Someone knocks on the front door.
We’re not expecting anybody. I wipe my hands on a towel and go to answer it.
Jackson Long is on my porch.
He’s leaning hard on a cane, his weight shifted to one side, his hat in his other hand, and there’s a truck in the drive with one of his hands at the wheel.
He’s on his feet, which he wasn’t the last time I stood on his porch.
It cost him. I can see what it cost him in the way he’s holding the cane.
“Jacob.”
“Jackson.” I don’t step back. Not yet. He’s the man who taught me to look a person in the eye when I shake his hand, and I’m not shaking his yet. “What do you need?”
“I came to say a thing to your wife.” His voice is slower than it used to be, the words coming with effort. “I said mine to you. I never said it to her.” He looks past me toward the kitchen, where Ellie is watching from the doorway with a cup in her hands. “If she’ll have me in.”
I look at Ellie. It’s her house and her call, and I’ve learned that. I’ve learned a lot of things in the last six weeks.
She nods, once.
“Come in, Mr. Long. There’s coffee.”
He makes his way to the couch slowly, the cane tapping on the hardwood with every step. It takes him a long time. I don’t offer to help. I’ve learned that too, that he doesn’t want help, that his pride is the only thing the stroke hasn’t touched. But I stay close in case he needs it.
June’s quilt is draped over the back of the couch. Ellie put it there the day we moved back in, said it made the place feel like home. Jackson lowers himself down next to it with a grunt and rests his hand on the fabric for a moment, feeling the softness of it.
“My wife had a quilt like this,” he says. “Her grandmother made it. She used to put it over me when I fell asleep in my chair.”
“June made this one,” Ellie says. “When she was sixteen.”
“Good woman, June. Knew her forty years. She never had much use for me, and she was mostly right.” He shakes his head slowly. “She’d have been proud of you. What you’ve made of yourself.”
Ellie sits down in the chair across from him, a cup of tea cradled in both hands. Tea. She’s had coffee every morning of her life, and I didn’t think about it until now. Her face is careful, guarded, but there’s more underneath it than that. Curiosity, maybe, or hope.
“I owe you an apology,” Jackson says. “I asked Jacob to take my daughter in. I knew what she was. I’d known since she was fifteen, and I sent her to your house anyway.
” He pauses, breathing hard, and I can see how much this is costing him.
“Because I didn’t want to deal with her myself.
Because it was easier to make her someone else’s problem.
Because I hoped you’d fix her, and that was never your job. ”
The room is quiet. I can hear the clock on the mantel, the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the distant lowing of cattle in the far pasture.
“She almost killed you,” Jackson says. “Because of choices I made. Because I put my comfort ahead of your safety, your happiness, your marriage.” His voice cracks. “I’m sorry. It’s not enough, and I know it’s not enough, but I’m sorry.”
Ellie is quiet for a long moment. I watch her face, watch her take it in, watch her decide what to do with this.
“Thank you for saying it,” she says finally. “To my face.”
“It’s the least of what I owe.”
“Is she staying gone?”
“She is. Her mother’s sister has her in California. She’s working at a dentist’s office, answering phones, filing papers.” He almost smiles. “First honest job she’s ever had in her life.”
“Will she come back?”
“No.” His voice is firm on this, certain. “I told her if she sets foot in this county again, the will changes too. The money’s already stopped. She believed me.”
Ellie nods slowly. “I hope she finds what she went looking for.”
Jackson looks at her for a long moment, and his face changes, and it’s respect, maybe, or wonder.
“You’re a better woman than she deserves,” he says. “Better than any of us deserve. I hope Jacob knows how lucky he is.”
“He’s learning,” Ellie says, and she glances at me, and there’s a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “He’s a slow study. But he shows up.”
I walk Jackson to the porch. The morning is bright and warm, the sky that hard blue you only get in Texas in summer, the blue that goes on forever.
“Take care of each other,” he says.
“We will.”
He drives off, his truck kicking up dust on the long driveway, and I watch him go until the dust settles and the sound of his engine fades and there’s nothing left but the quiet of the morning.
When I go back inside, Ellie isn’t at the counter. She isn’t in the kitchen at all.
I find her in the west wing.
The door is open, and she’s standing in the middle of the bare floor where Daphne’s bed used to be. We cleared this room out weeks ago, hauled everything to the dump, scrubbed the walls and the floors until no trace of Daphne remained. It’s just an empty room now, waiting to become a different one.
But there’s a shirt hanging in the closet. On the shelf above it, still in its box, there’s a silver bracelet with a sun on it. She put it there herself the day we cleared this room out. She doesn’t wear it. She keeps it.
And the shirt.
The door is open and Ellie is standing in front of it, looking at a flannel shirt on a wire hanger. The blood on the front of it has gone brown and stiff, and I never washed it. I hung it in there the day we scrubbed this room out, so the first thing in it after Daphne would be a thing of Ellie’s.
“You kept it,” she says without turning around.
“I couldn’t throw it away.”
“Why?”
I cross the room to stand beside her, looking at the shirt.
“Because you left it for me. Because you took mine and left yours, and I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it meant you were still in it somewhere.
” I take a breath. “I kept it because it was proof. Proof that you came back. That you were there, even when I thought I’d lost you.
That somewhere in all that anger and hurt, you still. ”
I can’t finish the sentence. She finishes it for me.
“Still loved you.”
“Yeah.”
She turns to look at me, and there are tears in her eyes, but she’s smiling. Really smiling. Not the one she gives me over my terrible cooking, not the one from the parking lot with the whole town watching. The one from the fence in April, before any of it, that I thought I’d used up.
“I have a thing to show you,” she says.
She reaches into the pocket of my shirt, the one she’s wearing, the one she stole from my closet this morning, and pulls out a small white plastic stick.
She holds it up.
Two pink lines.
“I took it this morning,” she says. “Before you started wrecking the bacon.”
My voice doesn’t work. My body doesn’t work. I just stand there in the empty room where Daphne used to sleep, looking at those two lines, looking at her face above them, looking at the future we almost threw away.
“Are you-”
“Yes.” She’s laughing and crying at once, her hand pressed to her mouth, her eyes bright. “Jacob. We’re having a baby.”