27. Ask Me Again in Willowbend #2
Morning finds us at a roadside diner with pancakes the size of hubcaps. Owen puts his hand over mine on the table, and I turn my palm up under his, and a conversation we started at the Wagon Wheel a month ago finally finishes its sentence.
I make two phone calls with syrup still on my thumb.
The first is to my placement coordinator, a woman who has processed six years of my contracts and has never heard me say the words I say now.
"I need to cancel Millbrook."
Silence. Then, "Cancel. You."
"Me."
"Is everything all right?"
I look across the booth at the man stealing bacon off my plate like he's earned it. "Everything's better than all right."
The second call is to Willowbend General, about a permanent ER posting that Debbie Sue Monroe has emailed me four separate times with the subject line NO REASON, IGNORE THIS.
The HR woman doesn't even pretend to be surprised. "Miss Greer, honey, we've been holding it."
***
We come back under the WELCOME TO WILLOWBEND sign at half past ten, my hand in his on the console, and my phone starts going off before we clear the feed store.
DEBBIE. All caps. Then more all caps. Then a voice memo that is mostly screaming.
We stop at the station first because Owen says the department deserves to hear it from him. Tater takes one look at us walking in holding hands, presses the back of his wrist to his forehead like a woman in a silent film, and faints sideways onto the hose bed.
"Get up," Owen says.
"I'm dead," Tater says from the hose bed. "Grief killed me. Tell my wife she was right about everything."
"She knows."
Chief Weyland comes out of his office, looks at the two of us, looks at Tater playing dead, and says, "Peterson. That permanent slot still needs a name on it."
Owen doesn't even blink. "Put mine."
The bay erupts. Somebody hits the air horn. Tater resurrects for the occasion.
***
The farmhouse takes us three days.
Dust sheets come off furniture that's been holding its breath for years. Windows go up. Light gets in. Owen carries boxes from my cottage in defiance of every lifting restriction Dr. Osei ever wrote, and I let him, because a man needs his victories.
I unpack every box.
Every one.
The last box, the one that has ridden shotgun through six years and eleven cities without ever once being opened, I unpack at the kitchen table while Owen pretends not to watch from the doorway.
Mama's old recipe cards. A photo of me at seven, gap-toothed, in front of school number four. A nightlight shaped like a star.
I put the nightlight in the hallway outlet outside the second bedroom and neither of us says anything about it, and both of us walk past it slower than we need to.
The whiteboard goes up on the farmhouse kitchen wall that night. Owen writes at the top of it in permanent marker, big block letters, pressing hard:
ANGRY SUNSHINE LIVES HERE.
"That's not what I wrote," I say.
"I edited."
***
Sunday evening, golden hour, Owen tells me we're taking a walk, and he's a terrible liar because he's wearing a collared shirt to do it.
He drives us out past Starlight Hall and parks at the mouth of a back lane I've never seen, and when we walk in, I stop breathing.
Asters. A whole path of them, blue-purple and glowing in the last light, running crooked and lovely between the fences like somebody planted a river.
"Rue's recommendation," Owen says. "She had opinions. She had a list."
"Of course she did."
"This was number one. She underlined it twice."
Halfway down the path there is a hedge, and the hedge is whispering.
The hedge has binoculars. The binoculars have Millie Hawthorne attached to them, church hat and all, and crouched beside her is Debbie Sue Monroe holding a walkie talkie and a wad of tissues, and neither of them is even a little bit hidden.
The walkie crackles. Rue's voice comes through it, calm as Sunday. "Report."
"Eagle is in the flowers," Millie whisper-shouts into it. "Repeat. Eagle is IN. THE. FLOWERS."
"We can hear you, Millie," Owen says.
"NO YOU CAN'T."
"Ignore them," Owen says to me.
"Debbie's already crying."
"I AM NOT," Debbie sobs from the hedge.
He stops me in the thick of the blooms, takes both my hands, and goes down. Good knee this time. Slow and sure, no grimace, a man who healed up with somewhere to be.
The walkie crackles once more, soft. "The eagle has knelt. Everyone hush."
Everyone hushes.
The hush lasts four seconds. Then the hedge starts sniffling. A wet, heroic, losing-battle sniffle, followed by the unmistakable click-click-click of a phone camera with the shutter sound left on.
"Debbie," I say, not looking away from Owen.
"I'M NOT HERE."
Click. Click.
The ring in his hand is old gold with a small honest stone, and I will find out later he stood in Henrietta Cole's shop for two hours until she pulled a tray from the back and said this one.
"Nellie Greer." His voice is steady and his eyes are not. Behind him the hedge blows its nose. "You're the first thing I've ever been early for. So I'm asking again, on home dirt, like you told me. Marry m—"
"Yes."
"I had more."
"Yes anyway."
He slides the ring on my finger and comes up off that knee and kisses me while the hedge falls completely apart. Millie is honking into Debbie's tissues. Debbie is filming and crying at the same time. The walkie crackles, satisfied. "Mission complete. Bring me my binoculars back, Millie."
We're walking back through the blue-purple dusk, his arm around me, my head on his shoulder, when my phone lights up.
Rue Hawthorne: Couple twelve. My record stands. — R
I laugh and show Owen, and he's still grinning when the second text lands underneath it.
Rue Hawthorne: P.S. The Hall is yours the second Saturday of October. Roof open. I booked it before he parked the truck. Don't argue with me, Nellie. I've never once been wrong.
"Ninety days landed Tuesday," he says.
"What landed Tuesday?"
"My leave. Ninety days, that was the deal I made with myself the whole drive down. Get my head right, go back to Chicago." His thumb traces the ring on my finger. "I never even looked."
"Looked at what?"
"The date I was supposed to leave. It's still out there on the calendar somewhere.
" He huffs a laugh, quiet, like something is coming loose in him one knot at a time.
"I used to know it to the day. Counted down like a man doing time.
Somewhere between the stitches and the storm and you, I quit counting.
This town stopped being before and turned into now. "
"Owen."
"I counted it out on the interstate, Nellie.
Against the odometer, somewhere in Missouri.
The clock ran out Tuesday, and the second Saturday of October was the day I circled to load the truck and drive north.
" He tips his head at my phone, and his eyes are shining and wrecked all at once.
"That's the day she booked. The day I was supposed to be gone. "
I stare at the phone. Back down the path, Millie and Debbie are dragging their lawn chairs out of the hedge, arguing over who cried first. Rue was never even here.