4. You’ll Fit In Fine #2
“I watched one of your documentaries. You got a coherent interview out of a man who answered every question with another question. I think you can handle peaches.”
“Different skill set. Peaches are less forgiving.”
Elise smiled and went back to rolling pastry.
The windows stood open to the yard. Outside, Evan and Walt were carrying folding tables toward the event barn while the twins trailed behind with small cloths, polishing chair legs with considerably more enthusiasm than accuracy.
Jay opened a drawer for a towel and found exactly what he needed.
Elise moved through the kitchen with the same unconscious certainty, reaching for bowls and utensils without looking.
“You know where everything is.”
“I’ve been in this kitchen since Evan and I were sixteen.”
Jay glanced up. “High-school sweethearts?”
She cringed. “Unfortunately.”
“Does he know you describe it that way?”
“He was there.” She dusted flour across the counter. “My mother used to help Della with weddings before the lodge expanded. I grew up in and out of here, and eventually Evan figured out I was in love with him.”
“Eventually?”
“It took a painful amount of time.”
The back door opened, and Evan came in carrying an empty flower bucket.
“Have you seen the good scissors?”
Elise didn’t look up. “Your back pocket.”
He reached back and pulled them free. “This is why I married you.”
“Because you can’t keep track of your own belongings?”
“Among other things.” Evan stole a peach slice from Jay’s cutting board, kissed the flour near Elise’s temple, and headed back toward the door.
“Hey, that was for the pies.”
“Marriage is communal property.”
The door swung shut behind him. Elise shook her head, but there was nothing performative about the affection in her face.
She had not so much married into the Shaw family as formalized a membership that already existed.
Sixteen years old in this kitchen, Della and Walt now Mom and Dad, Evan still needing help locating objects attached to his own body.
Jay returned to the peaches.
The week’s footage was good—better than good in places.
They had caught a ranch wedding being hurried indoors beneath dry lightning, cattle moving through morning haze from a fire two counties away, and Walt standing in an empty reservoir describing the summers when he had swum there as a boy.
Shaw Ranch was becoming harder to imagine as merely one part of the film.
So was Harris.
Jay had spent years becoming briefly useful in other people’s lives.
Give him a few weeks and he learned names and routines, which doors stuck, who took coffee without sugar, which argument everyone avoided at dinner.
Then the film ended. Equipment went into cases, everyone promised to stay in touch, and Jay boarded a plane while the lives he had learned continued without him.
Nothing here felt temporary. Elise moved through the kitchen she had known since adolescence.
Evan crossed the yard carrying tables while listening seriously to something Willa was telling him about a chair leg.
Della’s clipboard hung beside the pantry, covered in the ordinary logistics of keeping a small civilization fed.
And Harris moved through the barns and fields as though there had never been any question where he belonged. Someone called his name and he already knew what they needed. Something broke and people expected him to appear.
Jay’s own family loved him with enough force to cross oceans, interfere with flight schedules, and generate forty unread messages before breakfast. He belonged to them. Of course he did.
This was different. This was belonging to people and a place at the same time.
Through the kitchen window, Harris crossed from the guest barn toward the equipment shed, his shirt dark between the shoulder blades. Claire had left nearly an hour ago, but Harris had managed to find enough work around Rain’s injury to occupy the rest of his day.
Attraction was already inconvenient enough without adding another form of longing.
Elise slid another peach toward him. “How was Rain when you left?”
“Quiet. Harris was still with her.”
“He’ll check her every twenty minutes until somebody physically removes him from the barn.”
“I’m starting to suspect he considers vigilance a personality.”
“He considers it a job. Especially with Rain.”
Jay looked at her in question.
“She was Eleanor’s mare,” Elise explained. “Nell’s.”
The nickname caught him. Eleanor was the name in his notes and on release forms, the name Harris had gone still hearing in the interview room. Nell belonged to somebody’s sister.
“What was she like?”
Elise’s hands slowed over the pastry. “Opinionated. Funny when she wasn’t trying to be.
She could talk Harris into things the rest of us wouldn’t bother asking him to do.
” A small smile passed across her face. “Rain was the same with her. Stubborn with everybody else, perfect the second Nell got in the saddle.”
“He still rides her?”
“Sometimes. Mostly he takes care of her.”
There was enough distinction in the answer that Jay understood it.
“She’s one of the pieces he has left,” Elise said.
Outside, Harris emerged from the equipment shed carrying wire cutters and headed back toward the trough. Apparently the broken wire had not been permitted to remain broken for even an hour.
“He’s still working.”
“Yeah. He’ll keep going until somebody makes him stop, then he’ll be up at five tomorrow.”
“Evan said nobody was allowed to do anything before noon.”
“Evan has been trying to impose that rule since they were teenagers. Harris gets quieter when he’s disobeying you. That’s how you know.”
Jay smiled.
“Mom might manage to keep him at the party tonight,” Elise said. “He has a harder time saying no to her on her birthday.”
“He says no to everybody.”
“He says no first. That isn’t always where he ends up.”
That tracked uncomfortably well with Jay’s experience.
Elise inspected the edge of the crust. “He’ll stay. He just likes pretending he’s been taken hostage.”
“Does he actually enjoy parties?”
“More tolerance than enjoyment. He used to be better at them.” Some of the ease left her voice. “Claire likes dancing. She could usually get him onto a floor by ignoring the first six times he said no.”
Of course Claire had danced with Harris. They had been married for twelve years. Presumably they had also eaten meals, shared beds, spent holidays together, and done hundreds of other things Jay had absolutely no need to reconstruct.
The knife went through the peach harder than necessary.
Elise glanced at the cutting board. “You’re taking that out on the fruit.”
“The knife’s dull.”
“Right.”
She returned to the pie without requiring him to defend the lie, which was somehow worse than teasing him would have been.
By the time Della appeared in the doorway, the kitchen smelled like butter, fruit, and sugar. Jay had flour on his shirt and dough stuck to one hand.
Elise looked up. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”
“It’s my kitchen.”
“It’s your birthday.”
Della paused long enough to check the oven timer and answer a question from one of the kitchen staff before coming to the counter.
Even on her birthday, she seemed incapable of entering the kitchen without registering what needed doing.
Jay had initially taken the constant motion for fussing.
After several days, he understood it differently.
Della liked this—the menus and timing, the deliveries and staff, the quiet satisfaction of making sure everybody at Shaw Ranch got fed.
“I’m aware,” she said. “People have been behaving strangely toward me since breakfast.”
Her attention moved over the pies before settling on Jay. “Which one did he touch?”
Elise pointed to the peach pie.
“I washed my hands,” Jay said defensively.
“That wasn’t my concern.”
He put a hand over his heart. “I brought artistry.”
“You brought fingerprints.” Della brushed flour from his sleeve. “You also missed a spot.”
“I’m just contributing texture.”
Della smiled despite herself. “You’ll fit in fine.”
The sentence landed with enough quiet force that Jay almost forgot to answer.