Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Ella
Imake it back with twelve minutes to spare.
I know this because I'm watching the clock on the truck dashboard the entire drive down the mountain, calculating.
Darlene's text said they were leaving Pikeville at nine-forty.
Pikeville to Stillwell is fifty-three minutes on a good road, forty-five if Dale drives the way Dale drives when he's wound tight, which he has been for months.
I have twelve minutes when I pull into the diner lot, maybe ten by the time I get upstairs, and I use eight of them getting out of the jacket and hanging it behind the door and changing out of the Rally clothes and into the ones I left folded on the bed this morning, on purpose, because some part of me planned for the landing even while the rest of me was pretending I might not go.
I wash my face. I go downstairs. I put the coffee on.
I am sitting at the counter with a cup when Darlene's headlights sweep the lot.
* * *
They come in through the back the way they always do, Darlene first with a takeout bag from wherever they stopped on the road, Dale behind her, the back door catching the frame the way it always does.
I don't flinch at the sound because I was expecting it, and when you know a thing is coming you can brace for it, and the bracing is almost the same as not flinching.
Almost.
"You're up late." Darlene sets the bag on the counter and looks at me. She looks at the coffee. She looks at me again with the particular assessment she brings to everything, the inventory, checking me against the last time she saw me for discrepancies.
"Couldn't sleep," I say. "Made coffee."
"Mm."
She walks the length of the dining room while she says nothing, the way she does, running a finger along the back of a booth, checking the register drawer is locked, reading the room for evidence of a day she wasn't here to manage.
Dale stands by the door with his hands in his pockets and his weight rocking heel to toe, and I keep the counter between us without deciding to, the way I keep the counter between myself and certain weather.
I don't look at him directly. I've gotten good at knowing where a person is in a room without looking at them, and I've gotten good, lately, at making sure the room always has something solid in it between me and Dale, though if you asked me why I couldn't give you a reason that would hold up to being said out loud.
Darlene finds nothing, because there's nothing to find. The boots and the jacket are upstairs behind a door. Down here I'm just a woman who couldn't sleep and made a pot of coffee in her own father's diner.
"We'll see you in the morning," she says, which is not a kindness, it's a schedule. Then they're gone, the truck doors, the engine, the headlights swinging back out across the lot and away toward the house, and I'm alone in the building with the coffee going cold in front of me.
* * *
When the lot is dark again and the road is quiet I let out the breath I've been managing since the phone lit up on the ridge, the breath I held for the fifty-three minutes down the mountain and the eight minutes changing clothes and the entire performance of the coffee cup, and I sit there in the empty diner in the quiet and I let myself feel it.
Not the running. Not the twelve minutes. Not Darlene's inventory look.
The ridge.
The brisket and the band and the valley below and the way he stood at the fence like the silence was a room he was comfortable in. The way he said good about the boots. The way he said I had reason to be when I told him he'd been patient, and didn't explain, and didn't need to.
The way he touched my face.
The back of his hand. One knuckle. Slower than anything I've had from another person, slower than anything I knew to expect, and I turned into it before I knew I was going to, the way you turn toward heat without deciding to.
I press two fingers to the line of my jaw, where his knuckle was, and I stay there a moment.
For three years this counter has been the most fixed thing in my life, the thing I stand behind and work at and account for.
Tonight a man I've handed ten thousand cups of coffee stood on a ridge and looked at me like the counter wasn't the point, like I wasn't the sum of what I produce from behind it.
I don't have a system for that. I have systems for almost everything.
I built them young and I built them well and they've kept me upright through things I don't take out and look at.
I don't have one for being wanted slowly by a patient man, and the not-having scares me more than almost anything Darlene has ever done, because Darlene I understand. This I don't.
Then I go upstairs.
* * *
I go up to put the boots away before I've taken off anything else, because that's the ritual and the ritual is the point.
They come out of the box, they go back in the box, the box goes under the bed, and nothing in the world gets to touch them but me.
I have the right one in my hand. I crouch by the bed and I reach for the left.
It isn't there.
It isn't on the floor where I changed in the dark.
It isn't kicked under the bed. It isn't in the tangle of Rally clothes I left on the chair.
It isn't anywhere in this room, and some cold patient part of me already knew that, has known it since the gate, since the bare-foot cold on the drive down that I wouldn't let myself look at because looking at it would have cost me seconds I didn't have.
I sit down on the floor with one boot in my lap.
The right one. The heel he tooled with our initials side by side, E.S.
and R.S., mine and his, cut deep and precise by a man who knew leather and took his time and wanted his daughter to be able to find herself and find him in the same place, on the same boot, for as long as the leather lasted.
The left one is identical. Was. Is, still, wherever it is.
Out on the ridge in the wet grass in the dark with my name and his name on the heel.
I know exactly when it went. I came off that fence at a dead run the second the screen said DARLENE, the body moving before the mind agreed to it, three years of practiced exits firing all at once, and at the gate my heel caught the latch in the black and the boot wrenched half off and I grabbed for it and got a fistful of cold air, and the clock was screaming, and I made the only choice the clock allowed.
I left it.
I left my father on a gate post in the dark because my stepmother was forty minutes down the mountain and I have been trained, carefully, over years, to choose the exit over everything I love.
I set the boot in the box. The one boot, in the tissue, in the space cut for two.
It's leather and craft and the careful old work of a man who took his time, and it is not my father. My father is gone and has been gone for three years and no boot was ever going to change that. I know this clearly.
I also know I kept them in a box under my bed because they were the last thing of his that no one else had put their hands on, and now one of them is somewhere I can't reach and I don't know who finds it or what they do with it or whether it ever comes back.
I don't cry. I think about it, the way I think about a lot of things, and then I do what I do with most of what I feel, which is set it down carefully where I can find it later if I ever decide I want it, and stand up, and keep moving.
The moment passes. I make it pass.
* * *
Sunday opens gray and still.
I go down and start the grill at six, because the diner is closed Sundays but the prep doesn't do itself and motion is better than sitting, and I make biscuits and I roll the pie dough for Tuesday and I inventory the walk-in and I write the supply order for Wednesday, and I do all of it in the particular silence of a building that is just mine on a Sunday morning, no Becca, no Lena, no car in the lot but my own.
Darlene's car is back in the lot by eight. She lets herself in and pours her own coffee and looks at what I've prepped and gives the nod that means adequate, the one she'll never say out loud because saying it would cost her something.
"You should think about signing those refinancing papers this week," she says. "The accountant wants them by the end of the month."
"I'll think about it," I say.
She takes her coffee back out to the car and sits in it making calls, which is where she conducts the parts of her life she doesn't do in front of me.
I stand at the grill and I think about the papers.
I've read them three times now, and each time the language slides out from under me in the same place, the same paragraph, like a stair that isn't where my foot expects it.
Something is wrong with the shape of them.
I don't have the word for it yet. But I kept this diner's books for my father before Darlene kept them for me, and I know the feel of a number that's lying, the particular wrongness of it, and these papers are lying to me about something I can't yet name.
I think about Ash.
I think about him standing at the gate after I ran, if he went to the gate at all, if he even noticed the boot or if it's still out there in the grass getting wet.
I think about the way he said you don't need to be sorry. Like he'd already decided it, already filed it somewhere, and what I carried off the ridge as a thing requiring apology he'd categorized as just a thing that happened. No ledger. No account to settle.
I am so unused to that.
I am so unused to it that I stood there for two full seconds just trying to parse the grammar of it, and then the clock took over and I ran.
I go to the pass-through window. I look at the end stool.
He'll come Tuesday. He always comes Tuesday. I'll have to look at him knowing I ran, knowing he stood there and watched me go, and I'll have to figure out what my face does with that and whether I can manage it across a counter.
I'll manage it. I've been managing things across that counter for three years. It's what I know how to do.
Except that what I know how to do and what I want to do have never felt further apart than they do right now, standing in my father's diner on a gray Sunday morning with one boot in a box upstairs and the other one on a ridge somewhere and Ash's knuckle still somehow against my jaw if I press my fingers there.
I press my fingers there.
I go back to the biscuits.
I don't expect to see him again the way I saw him last night. I don't let myself expect that. In my experience, when something good happens it exists in its own closed bracket, self-contained, and you carry it with you and you don't go looking for the next one, because there usually isn't one.
But I think about the boot.
I think about it out there on the ridge, specific and identifiable, both our initials cut into the heel.
And I think, without entirely meaning to: if someone finds it, they'll know whose it is.
I don't let myself finish the thought after that. It's too much like hope, and hope is a thing I've been rationing for a long time, and I'm not sure I'm ready to stop.