Barn Dance Slow

Evelyn Mackey clocked out of the feed store at six fifteen on a Tuesday, and her whole body felt like a sack of chicken feed by the time she got the truck home. Thirty hours that week already, plus old Darrell calling in sick twice. Her shoulders had settled into a permanent hunch somewhere around month four of the year.

The house was dark except for the living room, where the TV was flickering blue against the wall. Bethany was asleep on the couch, still in her clinic scrubs, one sock on and one sock off. A cup of tea sat on the coffee table, cold and half full, a skin already forming on top.

"Hey, baby," Evelyn said softly, kneeling by the couch.

Bethany stirred. "Mm. What time is it?"

"Past six. You didn't eat, did you."

"I had a granola bar at two." She rubbed her eyes. "I meant to wait up. I was going to make that pasta you like."

"It's fine. There's leftover chili."

"That's fine too." She yawned and didn't move. "Sorry. I was going to be awake. I had this whole plan."

"You had a whole plan?" Evelyn smiled. "What kind of plan?"

"I don't remember. It was good though." Bethany's eyes were already drifting shut again. "It involved you, probably."

Evelyn sat on the floor next to the couch for a while, back against the armrest, watching the TV play some show about people flipping houses. She heated up the chili later and they ate it standing in the kitchen, mostly in silence, and the evening ended there. Not a bad evening. Just a small one. They'd been having a lot of small ones lately.

***

Wednesday morning Bethany was at the kitchen table in her robe, hair wet, poking at her phone. Evelyn poured two cups of coffee and set one down in front of her.

"Thanks, hon." Bethany took a sip and made a face. "This is the dark stuff."

"It's the same stuff we always have."

"It's stronger on Wednesdays. It knows I have to file the insurance reports."

Evelyn laughed and sat down across from her. She turned her own mug in a slow circle, then stopped it, then turned it again. She had been rehearsing this in the truck on the drive in, and now that the moment was here her rehearsal had fallen right out of her head.

"So," she said. "The barn dance is Saturday."

Bethany looked up over her phone. "Is it? This Saturday?"

"This Saturday. They're doing it at the fairgrounds barn again, with the string lights and everything. Walt Fromm's band. Remember them? From our first one?"

"The one where you stepped on my foot five times."

"Five times, actually. Five times and you still married me, which frankly shows either great character or poor judgment on your part."

Bethany smiled a little at her coffee. "Both, probably."

Evelyn took a breath. "I signed us up to help with setup. Well, I signed me up, and then I wrote your name next to mine in pencil, so it's erasable. It's erasable is my point."

There was a pause. Bethany set her phone down on the table, screen up, then screen down, then picked it back up.

"When is setup?" she asked.

"Friday evening. And the dance itself is Saturday at seven."

"Friday I close at the clinic. I wouldn't get there until almost six."

"That's okay. Setup goes till seven or later. Hilda said they need people to hang the lights mostly, and you're better at the ladder stuff than I am anyway. You have no fear of ladders. It's honestly alarming how little you fear ladders."

Bethany looked at the table. Outside the window a pickup went by on the county road, slow, the way everybody drives past their house.

"I don't know, Ev," she said, and her voice came out flat, flatter than she probably meant it to. "Saturday I'm going to be wrecked. I'm on my feet all day at that front desk and Mrs. Porter has been coming in every single day this month about her husband's paperwork. Every day. Like the paperwork changes."

"So sleep in Saturday. Sleep till noon. I'll make pancakes and we'll be lazy and then at seven we put on actual clothes and go dance for two hours. That's the entire ask. That's the whole..." Evelyn stopped herself and started over. "That's all I'm asking."

Bethany was quiet for a second. "It's just a lot of standing," she said. "And you know how my back's been."

"Then we sit. There's hay bales, apparently. I've been told about the hay bales in great detail by Hilda, who I believe has a personal relationship with every hay bale in the county."

"Ev."

"I'm just saying there are options."

Bethany rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand. "Can I think about it?"

"Sure. Of course you can think about it."

"I'm not saying no. I'm saying let me think about it."

"I know. I know you're not saying no." Evelyn reached across the table and put her hand over Bethany's, and Bethany let her, which was something, though Evelyn noticed she didn't quite squeeze back. "It's just, we haven't really gone anywhere together since the Hendersons' thing in the spring. And that was mostly sitting. And before that, honestly, I can't remember."

"We went to your mom's for her birthday."

"Your mom's birthday."

"That's what I said."

"You said my mom."

"Whosever mom. It was a birthday and it involved potato salad." Bethany smiled at that, a real one this time, small but real, and Evelyn felt a little spark of hope and hated how hard she was clinging to it. "Think about it," she said. "That's all. No pressure. Hilda already put our names down in pencil, though, so if you say no I have to go explain to her why she has to cross out names on an official clipboard, and she takes that clipboard very seriously. There was an incident in 2019 over that clipboard."

"There's always an incident with Hilda."

"There is. It's a whole thing."

Bethany drained her coffee and stood, gathering her work bag off the counter. She came around the table and kissed the top of Evelyn's head on her way past, which she did most mornings, and Evelyn loved it, and also this morning it felt a little like a period at the end of a sentence.

"I'll think about it," Bethany said from the doorway, pulling on her clinic lanyard. "Pencil, right? My name's in pencil?"

"Pencil. Erasable. Fully erasable."

"Okay." She paused with her hand on the door. "Ev?"

"Yeah?"

"The string lights do sound nice." And then she was gone, and the screen door clapped shut behind her, and Evelyn sat there at the kitchen table with two empty coffee mugs and a heart doing something complicated in her chest.

She washed both mugs. She dried both mugs. She stood at the sink looking out the window at the road for longer than she needed to.

Then she got her keys, because she was going to be late for the feed store, and Darrell was still out sick, and somebody had to open the place and sell mulch to people who did not care at all about the state of her marriage. This is what small towns and Wednesday mornings were like. Everything kept going whether you wanted it to or not.

Thursday night Bethany came home from the clinic, stood in the doorway of the kitchen, and said, "Okay."

"Okay what?" Evelyn asked, even though she knew.

"Okay, pencil me in. Saturday. The dance." She hung her lanyard on the hook by the door. "But if my back goes out, we're leaving and you're not allowed to be disappointed about it."

"That's a very reasonable deal and I accept all of it."

"And I'm still doing Friday setup with you, because I already told Hilda I would, apparently, since you told her my name."

"I told her both our names."

"You told Hilda my name before I agreed to anything."

"It was in pencil," Evelyn said. "Mostly."

Bethany laughed, and it was the first real laugh in the house in a while, and Evelyn held onto that too.

Friday came fast. Bethany closed at the clinic and drove out separately, meeting Evelyn at the fairgrounds at ten minutes to six. The barn doors were open and the whole place smelled like dust and old wood and somebody's thermos coffee. Hilda stood at the entrance with the clipboard held against her chest like a shield.

"There they are," Hilda said. "The Mackey-Pearsons. Late-ish."

"It's ten to six," Evelyn said.

"Early-ish, then. Lights are in the boxes by the stalls. Ladder's over there. Don't die on the ladder, I don't have the paperwork for dying on the ladder."

"That's very moving, Hilda."

"Go hang lights."

They hung lights. Evelyn did the ladder work and Bethany fed her the strands and clipped them in behind her, and somewhere around the second strand over the dance floor they stopped talking like coworkers and started talking like themselves again.

"Higher," Bethany said. "No, your other higher!"

"There is no other higher. I'm at the top of the ladder. This is the ceiling."

"That is not the ceiling, Evelyn, there's a whole beam up there."

"You want me to climb onto the beam."

"I want the lights even, yes!"

"You have no fear of ladders either, you just outsource it."

Bethany grinned up at her from the floor, and for a second it was three years ago and they were both twenty-six and stupid at this same barn. Evelyn stapled the strand along the beam and came down, and Bethany was still grinning.

"What?" Evelyn said.

"Nothing. You look good on a ladder. That's all."

"Well. I do have a whole feed store physique."

"You have a mulch-selling physique."

"I lift forty pound bags daily, thank you."

Then Evelyn got distracted, which was the truth of it. She climbed up into the hayloft to run a strand along the loft rail, and up there it was quiet, just the sound of Walt Fromm's guys tuning something down on the stage and Hilda arguing with a man about extension cords. The loft looked out over the whole barn. The string lights weren't plugged in yet but the wiring was done, and she could picture it, all of it lit up and golden.

She took a picture with her phone and sent it to Bethany, who was forty feet below and twenty feet away.

The reply came in four seconds. A winking emoji. Then: come down, you show-off, and hold your end of the strand.

Evelyn laughed out loud in the loft, alone, like an idiot. She climbed down and held her end of the strand.

By seven the lights were up and Hilda pronounced the barn officially set up and everybody drifted out into the parking lot. Bethany was rubbing her neck in the truck cab before Evelyn even had the door shut.

"Long day?" Evelyn asked.

"Long week." Bethany tipped her head back against the seat. "Mrs. Porter came in twice today. Twice. About the same paperwork."

"Maybe you should start charging her rent."

"She'd pay it. She'd absolutely pay it, she loves that desk."

They drove home with the windows cracked and didn't say much, but it wasn't the bad silence. It was the other kind, the old kind, and both of them noticed it and neither of them pointed at it.

Saturday Evelyn made pancakes, like promised, and Bethany slept till nine, and at six forty five they stood in the bedroom while Bethany held up two shirts.

"This one or this one."

"They're both blue."

"This one is a good blue."

"The left one. The good blue."

"You're not even looking."

"I'm looking. You look good in everything, pick whichever one you want, we're going to be late."

"We're not going to be late. It's a barn dance in Millbrook, nobody's late to a barn dance in Millbrook."

She was wrong, they were twelve minutes late, because Bethany couldn't find her other boot, and the drive out to the fairgrounds was quiet again. The radio was on low. Bethany looked out the window at the dark fields going by.

"Say something," Evelyn said finally.

"Like what?"

"Anything. You've got the loud quiet going. I can hear it from over here."

Bethany turned and looked at her. "I'm nervous. Isn't that dumb? We're married. I've been nervous all week like it's a first date."

"It's not dumb."

"It's a little dumb."

"It's a little dumb," Evelyn agreed, and reached over and put her hand on Bethany's knee, and Bethany put her hand on top of it and left it there the whole rest of the way.

The barn was lit up gold from the road, exactly like the picture, and Walt Fromm's band was already into their second song, and half the town was in there two-stepping badly. They paid at the door to the 4H kids, got two beers from the cooler situation, and carried them to a hay bale along the wall near the loft stairs.

They sat. The bale was prickly through Bethany's jeans and she shifted around until she found a workable spot.

"Okay," she said. "This is... actually kind of nice."

"Told you. Hay bales. Options."

"Sit down, Ev, you're hovering."

"I'm not hovering, I'm lowering."

She sat. Their shoulders were touching. Up on the loft rail the