Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Ella
Ialmost don't go three separate times.
The first time is Friday morning, when Darlene calls to say she and Dale are driving up to Pikeville for the weekend to see Dale's sister, which should mean the weekend is mine and free and uncomplicated, but which instead makes me stand in the diner kitchen with the phone in my hand thinking: she'll know.
She'll come back Monday and she'll know by the way I look that something happened, because Darlene has always been able to read me like a ledger, and I'll have to account for it, and whatever I give her as an account she'll find the error in.
The second time is Saturday afternoon, when I'm upstairs getting dressed and I look at the jacket on the hook and the boots on the floor and I think: who do you think you are.
Not meanly. Just factually. The Rally is for people who belong there and I am a woman who works a diner six days a week and goes to family dinners on Sundays and that is the shape of my life, and shapes don't change because you put on different boots.
I put the boots on anyway. I sit on the edge of the bed and lace them, the leather soft now from the oiling, the fit exactly what it was built to be because it was built for my foot and my foot hasn't changed.
I stand up in them and they hold me half an inch taller and I feel, absurdly, like a different woman is standing in my apartment.
Then the jacket, the sky-blue leather Dovie's daughter outgrew, warm and broken-in and the brightest thing I own by a distance that's almost embarrassing.
The bathroom mirror is small and shows me in pieces, and the pieces don't look like a woman who works a grill.
They look like someone who might be going somewhere.
I make myself stop looking before I can talk the someone back out of existence.
The third time is in the truck, two miles from the Rally field, when the traffic backs up on the county road and I can see headlights ahead and the glow of the bonfires on the ridge above and I think: I could turn around.
Nobody knows I'm here. I could turn around and go back and make pie and go to bed and nothing would be different.
I don't turn around.
I park in the field they've designated for vehicles a quarter mile below the main site and I sit in the truck for one minute. Just one. Then I get out.
The jacket is warm. The boots are right. Those are the two things I know when I step out of the truck and hear the music carrying down from the ridge on the cool October air, something with a heavy bass line and a fiddle underneath it, which is exactly the combination my father would have loved.
I go toward the light.
* * *
The Rally is everything the Caudill boy described and everything my father made it sound like and also its own thing entirely, something you can't get from description because description doesn't have the smell of it: woodsmoke and leather and food from a dozen vendors set up along the eastern fence, the particular electricity of a few thousand people in one field choosing to be in the same place for one night.
There are more motorcycles than I have ever seen in one place, rows of them throwing back the firelight, and people moving between them in cuts and flannel and worn leather, and kids, which surprises me, kids chasing each other through the dark at the edges of the firelight.
Old men in lawn chairs near the bonfires.
Women my age and older laughing in clusters.
It is not the dangerous thing Darlene always made it sound like.
It's a county turning out for itself. My father called it a country that existed for one night a year and then went back underground, and standing in the middle of it I finally understand what he meant, that it was never the bikes or the band, it was the permission.
For one night the whole ridge agrees to stop being careful.
I buy food from a woman selling Navajo tacos out of a silver trailer and I eat it standing at the edge of the first bonfire, watching.
I'm not good at crowds. I've never been good at crowds, not because I'm afraid of people but because I've spent three years making myself small and small doesn't fit in a crowd, it just disappears into one.
But this crowd is different. It's not watching me, it doesn't require anything from me, and slowly, over the twenty minutes I stand there with my taco and my beer, the particular tension I carry in my shoulders every day begins, slightly, to ease.
I pay for the taco with a ten and the woman makes change and hands all of it back to me, the whole of it, and I stand there for a second with the bills in my hand like they're something strange, because there is no one here to take a cut of them.
No one is going to tell me the till came up short.
No one is going to ask me why I'm standing still when there's work that needs doing.
The money is just mine and the evening is just mine, and the smallness of that, the fact that having my own change in my own hand can feel like a gift, tells me something about the size of the life I've been living that I would rather not look at straight on.
So I don't. I eat my taco. I let the bass line come up through the ground and through my father's boots and into me.
I don't look for him. That's what I tell myself: I'm not here for that.
I'm here because Dovie Sturgill told me a story about her husband and because my father said this ridge looked beautiful from below and because I am twenty-seven years old and I have talked myself out of everything good for three years and I am done with that, at least for tonight.
I look for him a little.
I don't find him in the first hour. I find the band, a four-piece playing original music that owes something to bluegrass and something to rock and doesn't apologize for either, and I stand at the edge of the crowd around them for two songs and let it move through me.
I find the vendor Birdie's people run, according to the Caudill boy, the one with the real food, the not-for-sale stuff you only know about if you know about it.
I find the east fence, which runs along the ridge line, and I stand there for a few minutes and look down at the valley below, the lights of Stillwell in the dark, the diner sign a small red pulse from this distance.
It looks different from up here. Everything does.
The beer is cold and the air is cold and I'm warm inside the jacket, and for the first time in longer than I can pinpoint I am not thinking about the register or the pie case or Darlene's small nods or the documents she keeps trying to get me to sign.
I'm just here. Just standing on a ridge on an October night with the county spread out below me and a band playing something with a fiddle in it, and my father's boots on my feet, and I think: he was right. It is beautiful up here.
"You came."
I don't startle. The voice is low and even and I've been hearing it at my counter for seven months and some part of me, the part that was looking while telling myself I wasn't, recognizes it before I've finished turning around.
He's in his cut and a dark henley and he's standing close enough that I could touch him if I reached out, which I don't, and he's looking at me with the full-attention look that has been taking me apart in small pieces since July.
Not surprise. Not the crowing satisfaction of a man who predicted something correctly.
Just: you came. Like it's the thing he wanted to happen and he's noting that it did, setting it down with the same deliberateness he sets his coffee cup down, careful and certain.
His eyes move. I track them without meaning to, from my face to the jacket to my feet, and when they reach my feet something shifts in his expression. Not a smile exactly. Adjacent to one. Something that lives just beside a smile and is quieter and more specific.
He says, "Those are your boots, aren't they."
Not a question. He already knows, and I don't understand how, because nobody has ever seen these boots.
I've kept them to myself for years, under the bed, worn across the apartment floor and nowhere else, the last thing of my father's that no one has gotten their hands on.
Tonight is the first time they've been out in the world.
And the first time I wear them anywhere, a man looks down at my feet and understands, without being told, that they aren't just boots.
That undoes me more completely than I have language for, the fact of being seen that clearly by someone I have barely let myself speak to.
"Yes," I say.
He says, "Good."
One word. Good. Like it's a verdict on something, like me being here in my father's boots is the right answer to a question he's been sitting with.
I look at him. He looks at me. The bonfire crackles somewhere behind us and the band moves into something slower and the ridge holds us both in the cool October dark, and I think: oh.
I think: this is what it feels like when the thing you've been pretending not to want is standing right in front of you.
"You knew I'd come," I say.
"No." He considers this. "I thought you might. Those are different."
"What made you think I might."
He's quiet for a moment, the way he's always quiet, not searching for words but deciding which ones to use. "You've been waiting to go somewhere for a long time," he says. "I could see it."
I look out at the valley. I look back at him.
"I almost turned around," I say. "Three times."
"I know."
"You couldn't know that."
"You're here," he says. "Which means you almost weren't. That's how it works for people like you."
People like you. I want to ask what he means. I don't, because I think I understand it, and I think if he explained it the understanding would be less.
"Buy you a drink?" he asks.
I hold up my beer. Half full.
"When you finish that one," he says, and there's something in it, the patience of it, the assumption that he'll still be here when the beer is gone, that does something to the tension in my chest I've been carrying so long I stopped calling it tension. I started calling it just the way things feel.
"Okay," I say.
He stands beside me at the fence and we look out at the valley below and he doesn't fill the quiet with anything, which is one of the things about him I've been trying not to catalogue and failing at completely.
Most people fill silences. They fill them with noise or questions or the performance of ease.
He just stands in them like they're rooms he's comfortable in, and after a minute I am too.
Below us somewhere is the diner, my whole life folded into one lit building, small enough from up here that I could blot it out with a thumb, and that does something to me I don't expect.
Up here I'm not the woman who runs it. I'm just a woman at a fence on a cold night standing next to a man who knows how to be quiet.
The distance is the gift. I think maybe this is what people mean when they talk about getting away, that it was never the leaving, it was the angle the height gives you on everything you left at the bottom.
The beer is cold. The band plays something with a fiddle.
My father's boots are on my feet and the ridge is beautiful and I am here.
I finish the beer. He's still here when I do.
"Okay," I say again. "Show me where to go."
And he does.