Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ETHAN
The Millhaven Community Christmas event is Mags' production.
Has been for twenty-two years, according to Beck, who has been helping set up the Main Street decorations for twenty-two years and has the patience of a man who understood a long time ago that some forces of nature are more efficient to work with than against. The town strings lights along the storefronts, the diner does a prix fixe, the library hosts a children's program, and Bellamy's becomes the unofficial headquarters for everyone who needs coffee, a break, or Mags' opinion on something.
I volunteer every year for setup because the ladders involved require someone who knows what they're doing with heights, and because Mags asks once, simply, in the tone that means she's already scheduled me.
This year there are more lights than last year.
"You bought more lights," I say, standing at the base of the ladder with a coil of what appears to be forty additional feet of white string lights.
"The hardware store had a surplus," Mags says.
"Beck's hardware store."
"Beck gave me a very good deal."
I look at Beck, who is securing the other end of the string to Bellamy’s awning bracket.
"She asked," he says, without inflection.
"I always ask nicely," Mags says.
The event runs four to eight. Setup starts at two.
Cole and Maya are here, Cole doing the heavy lifting on the far end of Main with the enthusiasm of someone who treats community decorating as a competitive sport.
The Nelson family came out — their son-in-law is useful with a drill.
Helen from the library is managing the section near the community center.
Various Millhaven regulars fill the sidewalk in the organized way of a small town that has done this before and knows its own roles.
Delaney arrives at two-thirty with a thermos and work gloves.
I see her come around the corner from Elm Lane and I note, with the accuracy of someone who has been paying attention for three months, that she looks easy.
Natural. Her hair is up against the cold, she's got the coat I've seen her in and a green scarf I haven't, and she scans the street the way someone scans a place they belong in.
She finds Mags first, who hands her something immediately. Then she finds me.
She raises a hand. I raise mine.
Then she's absorbed into the Millhaven setup operation, and I go back to the forty additional feet of lights.
We don't work near each other for the first two hours.
That's just logistics — I'm on the ladder sections, she ends up helping Helen with the community center garland, and Millhaven Main Street is long enough that we're operating on different blocks.
I see her periodically: crouching to secure something at the base of a lamppost, laughing at something Maya says, accepting coffee from her thermos and passing it to Helen.
I do not watch her more than is situationally appropriate.
I watch her a normal amount.
Cole, who is on the far end, texts me at four-fifteen: She's good at this. I don't respond, which Cole has learned to interpret as agreement.
The event opens at four and the street fills.
Millhaven in December does something to itself — it becomes more itself, if that's possible.
The lights coming on in the early dark, the cold that carries wood smoke and cider from the diner's open window, the way people who see each other every week greet each other like an occasion.
It's not performed. It's just what happens when a place knows what it is.
I'm on cleanup patrol during the event hours — moving around the perimeter, making sure the light strings are staying where they should, checking the ladder-hung sections for any wind shifts. It's a quiet job during a loud event. I like it.
I find Delaney at the edge of things.
Not lost — just the way she sometimes is, slightly apart from the center of activity, observing. She has her thermos and she's looking down the lit street with the expression she gets when she's taking something in rather than processing it. Just receiving it.
"Hey," I say.
She looks over. The lights are doing things to the street and to everything on it, including her — the soft quality of string lights in cold air that makes everything look the way December is supposed to look.
"Hey," she says. "The lights are good."
"More than last year."
"Mags told me about the deal she got from Beck."
"Beck told me Mags asked."
She smiles. "There's a version of that story where both things are true simultaneously."
"There usually is, with them."
She looks up at the nearest section of string. Forty feet of it, looped between two storefronts. "That is a significant amount of lights."
"It's a significant surplus."
"Beck must have gotten a very good deal."
"Beck is going to have opinions about storing the rest of it," I say.
She laughs — brief, real, surprised kind. "He already has a system."
"He already has a system," I confirm.
She looks back down the street. The lights run the length of Main in a double row, Bellamy's to the hardware store and back, and the effect in the dark is — it's something. Millhaven made itself a particular kind of beautiful for the occasion.
"I looked up the Arts Center event calendar," she says. "They do a winter show in February."
"They do."
"I've been thinking about—" She stops. "This might be premature."
"You can say a premature thing."
"I've been thinking about submitting something." She says it carefully, like she's testing the weight of it. "For the show. Something visual."
I wait.
"The Nikon," she says. "I've been thinking about loading the Nikon."
Something in my chest does the quiet thing it does. "Yeah?"
"I found Elise's developer notes in the cottage. She kept a little book — what she photographed, what settings, and what worked." She looks at the street. "She photographed this event. More than once, apparently."
"I know," I say. "She photographed everything."
"I want to photograph it." She says it simply. "I want to stand where she stood and see what she saw and then see what I see. Whether it's the same."
I look at her.
She's still looking at the street, and the December lights are being honest in the way lights are honest when you're not trying to look at something, and she's telling me about the Nikon like she's telling me about a decision she's already made and just needed to say out loud to make real.
"Load the camera," I say.
She looks at me. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
She holds that for a moment. Then nods once, with the quality of someone who has settled something.
At six thirty the wind picks up.
Not dramatically — it's December at the Foothills; wind is a fact — but enough that two of the light strings on the far end of Main start moving in ways that make me want to re-secure them before the evening ends.
I tell Beck, who tells Mags, who waves her hand in a way that means yes, handle it, why are you still talking to me.
I take the ladder.
Delaney appears beside me as I'm setting it up. "What do you need?"
"Someone to hold the base."
She takes the base without further discussion. This is one of the things about her I've cataloged thoroughly over three months — she doesn't perform helping, she identifies the thing that needs doing and does it. No announcement.
I go up. Re-secure the string at the bracket, check the next two while I'm at it, confirm the tension. Five-minute job. I come down.
She's still holding the base when I step off the last rung, which means we're close — closer than the ladder geometry requires, because she'd moved in when the wind gusted and she wasn't stepping back until I was on the ground.
I step off the rung.
She doesn't step back.
We're in the space of two people standing at a normal conversational distance except that the ladder and the wind and the logistics have arranged it so the normal conversational distance is less than it usually is, and I'm aware of this with my entire nervous system.
"Good?" she says.
"Good." I don't move. She doesn't move. "The string is re-secured."
"I saw."
The cold air and the string lights and the sound of Millhaven continuing its evening around us, and she's looking at me and I'm looking at her and neither of us is moving.
Her eyes in this light are darker, more complex, the kind of color that keeps revealing itself the longer you look at it.
I'm looking at it.
She's doing something with her expression that I don't have a full read on — it's open in a way she doesn't always have it open, like the cold air or the evening or the accumulated weight of three months has worn down whatever she usually uses to moderate what shows on her face.
I could?—
The thought arrives incomplete.
I could.
"Ethan." My name in her voice, at this distance, does something specific.
"Yeah," I say. I don't know what I'm agreeing to.
The wind gusts again. She pulls her scarf up against it, and the movement breaks the geometry — she takes a half-step back, I shift to fold the ladder, and we're suddenly in the normal amount of space again and the moment has passed.
Not gone. Changed. But passed.
"Thanks," I say. About the ladder base.
"Good system," she says. About the lights.
We fold the ladder together without further commentary and carry it back to Beck's truck.
By eight the event is winding down.
Cleanup is when I'm most useful — the lights stay up, but the equipment gets collected, the traffic cones come in, the borrowed folding tables get stacked and returned.
It takes forty-five minutes with enough people.
Tonight there are enough, and Delaney is one of them, and we end up on the same half of Main Street doing the same job.
Which is how we end up at eight-forty-five, being the last two people at the far end of Main Street with a stack of folding tables and Beck's truck, because everyone else finished their sections and went inside for warmth or the diner's prix fixe.