Chapter 9 #2
I don't entirely track how we get there — the conversation moves the way conversations move when they're easy, topic to topic without seams. He's showing me where the footing repair is going to require removing a section of stone and relaying it, which I've been slightly worried about because those stones have been there since approximately the Truman administration, and I don't want to lose them.
"We reset them," he says. "Same stones, just cleaned and re-mortared. Nothing gets replaced that doesn't have to be."
"You're sure?"
"I've done it on older walls than this."
I put my hand on the stone he's pointing to. It's solid under my palm. Not the problem stone — just adjacent to it, showing me the contrast. "The mortar on this section is fine."
"The problem is here." He puts his hand next to mine on the wall, pointing at a section six inches over.
His hand is close to mine without touching it — close enough that I can see a small scar along his index finger, the knuckle healed slightly crooked — and I'm aware of this with an immediacy I am immediately going to ignore.
I am ignoring it. Totally ignoring it.
I focus on the mortar.
"See where it's pulled away from the face?" he says.
"Yeah."
"That's the frost getting in and expanding. Once it starts, it accelerates. You catch it now; it's a straightforward repair. You catch it in two more years.”
"It's a different conversation."
"Yeah."
I look at the wall. His hand is still near mine, pointing at the problem area.
He's not performing proximity — there's nothing deliberate about it; he's just here and we're both looking at the same thing.
But I notice it. I notice the way he smells like sawdust and cold air and something that is just distinctly Ethan, and more importantly, I realize I noticed.
And then I take a step back to look at a wider section of wall, because I'm noticing too many things this morning and I need to be practical about the mortar.
"So, Monday," I say professionally.
"Monday," he confirms, and the faint awareness he has — slides back under the surface of talking about masonry.
He stays for another twenty minutes. Not because there's more to do — the rosebush is handled, the wall conversation is done, the coffees are finished. He stays because we're talking and neither of us is in a hurry, which is its own kind of information I'm also choosing not to examine.
We talk about the garden's original design (Elise's, and we can reverse-engineer it from what's still there), the difficulty of maintaining old fruit trees (there's a pear tree at the back corner that needs attention), whether Gerald could theoretically be cleaned and serviced or whether Gerald's time has come.
I vote for Gerald's continued tenure. Ethan says he'll look at it, in the tone of someone who's going to figure out what's actually wrong rather than just replacing it.
"You fix things other people would throw away," I say.
"Usually worth trying first." He looks at the pear tree. "Most things that seem done aren't."
I look at the pear tree, too.
There is probably a metaphor here. I'm not going to reach for it. But it's there.
"Thank you," I say. "For the rosebush. You didn't have to."
"I was driving past."
"Mags sent you."
"Mags mentioned you might be in the garden." The contained smile reappears. "I was driving past."
I laugh, more authentically than I have in weeks. “Sure you were.”
He goes through the side gate, lifts a hand without turning around, and I hear the truck start and pull away.
I stand in the garden for a minute.
The rosebushes are pruned. The coffee cups are on the porch steps. The wall section we talked about is exactly where it was, but I understand it differently now — not just a problem, but a problem with a cause and a solution and someone who knows how to execute it.
This is not something I'm allowed to be noticing yet, I think.
And then: but I am noticing it.
The thing is — and I know this is complicated; I know the timing is what it is; I know I am seven weeks out of the worst thing that's happened to me — is that I feel like myself around him.
Not the self I was pretending to be, not the self I was curating for Jason's orbit.
The self that reads tutorials about bristle density and gets into forty-five-minute standoffs with rosebushes and wants to understand the problem rather than just have it handled.
He doesn't seem to want a different version of me. He seems interested in the actual one.
Jason was interested in the actual me at the beginning.
Or I thought he was. The longer we were together, the more I understood that what he'd been interested in was the potential me — the version he'd assumed I'd settle into, quieter and more convenient, the one that emerged once I'd made enough small adjustments.
I never did settle into that version. I just got close enough to it that I stopped noticing I was trying.
I pick up the coffee cups, go inside, stand at the kitchen window and look at the pruned rosebushes, the garden wall, and the pear tree at the back that still needs attention.
The structure is there. The bones are right. It just needs someone to pay attention to it.
I think yeah, I can spare that attention.
Then I go make a second cup from Gerald and sit down to work.