Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
DELANEY
I spend twenty minutes Sunday morning debating about what to bring.
This is embarrassing information that I'm keeping private.
It's a Sunday dinner at Beck's house, which I've been told is Carol's pot roast and homemade bread and the warmth of a family that does this regularly and means it, and there is no reasonable justification for twenty minutes of deliberation over a contribution.
Except that it's the first time I'm arriving somewhere as Ethan's something. I don't have the word yet. I'm working on the word.
I make a lemon cake.
I have never made a lemon cake before. This is exactly the kind of decision that happens at eight in the morning after twenty minutes of deliberation — my brain locating the recipe I saw somewhere, doing a quick inventory of what Elise's kitchen has, determining that yes, fine, we're making a lemon cake.
Gerald has opinions about the timing of the oven.
"I know," I tell him. "I'm handling it."
By ten-thirty the cake is made, slightly imperfect in the way my baked things are slightly imperfect, which I've decided is a signature rather than a flaw.
I made something.
Ethan
Cake?
How did you know it was a cake?
You made a pie for Thanksgiving. You escalate.
A pie is not an escalation from nothing.
What did you make before the pie?
I think about it. I did not, in my marriage, bake things.
Jason's relationship with home cooking was limited to one pasta dish he made on the second date and then retired.
We ordered things. We went to restaurants.
I cooked practical weeknight meals because someone had to and then stopped doing even that when the schedule made it easier not to.
I made a pie for Thanksgiving and a lemon cake for Sunday dinner, and I've been making Elise's soup for two months and cooking actual meals at this kitchen table, and at some point, in the last twelve weeks the kitchen became mine in a way kitchens hadn't been since I was living alone at twenty-three.
Nothing, for a long time.
The cake is going to be excellent.
You haven't tasted it.
I know you.
I put the phone down and look at Gerald and feel something warm move through my chest that I'm not going to describe as anything other than knowing and being known.
Beck's house is exactly what Beck would have said: solid, functional, warm in the way of a place that's been lived in rather than designed to look like it. Carol comes from the kitchen when I arrive and says: "Good. You're early. He thought you might not be."
"He thought correctly," Ethan says, from behind me.
"He was already here," I tell Carol.
"He's always already here," she says, and goes back to the kitchen.
Beck comes in from the garage and shakes my hand: "Good. You came." Ethan explains later that this is just how Beck is about new people — he says good when he means welcome, and welcome when he means he's decided you're worth the pot roast.
The pot roast is excellent. Carol makes it the way Elise made soup. After dinner Cole and Beck do the dishes — a standing tradition, men clear, Carol and Maya sit — and Ethan finds me at eight.
Not with announcement — just: the group has arranged itself across the living room and kitchen in the after-dinner dispersal, and at some point, he's beside me in the natural way that people find each other when they know where the other person is.
"Walk?" he says, quietly.
I look at the window. It's dark and December. "Where?"
"I want to show you something."
This is how I've learned things happen with Ethan.
Not I've arranged an evening for us — just: I want to show you something.
The destination is already there. He's already thought about it.
He's been thinking about it the way he thinks about things he cares about: thoroughly, specifically, in advance.
"Okay," I say.
We say our goodbyes — Carol hugs me and says same time next week, which I receive as the invitation it is; Beck nods at me in a way that contains a complete sentence; Cole says don't do anything I wouldn't do which receives an identical look from everyone in the room; Maya squeezes my arm.
Outside: the December dark and the cold and the empty Sunday quiet of Elm Lane.
"Where are we going?" I ask.
"My place," he says.
"I've been to your place."
"Not this part," he says.
His house is four houses down from mine and I've been inside it twice — once briefly in October, once last week when we had soup and sat at the kitchen table. But he takes me through the back this time, through a side gate and around to the back porch, which looks over the field.
I knew it looked over the field — he'd mentioned it; it was in the description of the house I'd assembled over months of knowing him. But knowing and seeing are different things.
The field in December dark, under a clear night with stars that are specifically not available in Raleigh or any city, silver and definite. The ground gone frost-silver at the edges. The last of the Millhaven light from the direction of Main Street, just enough to give the field an edge.
"Oh," I say.
"Yeah," he says.
He's set up the porch — not elaborately, nothing performed. Two chairs pulled close together, a small table between them with a thermos and two mugs. The thermos, I find out, contains chamomile tea. Elise's blend, he says when he pours it, Mags gave me the recipe last year.
I sit down with the mug, look at the field and I think: he thought about this.
Not just the thermos. He thought about where I would want to sit.
He thought about what I would want to look at.
He thought about what I'd want to drink on a cold December night on a back porch, and then he got Mags' chamomile recipe, which means at some point he asked Mags, which means he planned this with enough lead time to ask Mags a question.
He planned this for me.
"This is your favorite part of the house.”
“Yeah."
"You've had it for three years and you were waiting for the right time to show someone."
He looks at the field. "I wasn't. I showed Cole."
"Cole doesn't count. Cole is furniture."
A real laugh, short and genuine. "Don't tell Cole that."
"Cole would be delighted." I look at the stars. "Thank you," I say. "For this."
"It's a field."
"It's your field. That's different."
He looks at me in the dark.
"I've been thinking," he says, "about spring."
"The espalier."
"Among other things." He wraps his hands around his mug. "The Castellano family is taking occupancy in February. Once that's done, I've got a lighter schedule until March. I thought we might…well there's a greenhouse in Hendersonville you might like. For the vegetable bed.”
I look at him.
“Mom told me what you were planning," he says. "Last Sunday. She had opinions about the soil amendment." He takes a drink of tea. "I thought we could go to the greenhouse. Look at what they have. You'd want to see it before you order anything."
"You talked to your mother about my vegetable bed," I say.
"She brought it up." He pauses. "I had a follow-up question."
"Ethan." I turn to face him. "You had a follow-up question about my vegetable bed with your mother."
"It's a specific bed," he says. "The soil matters."
I'm staring at him. He just looks back, steady, the blue eyes in the dark doing several things at once.
"What?" he says.
"Nothing," I say. "I just keep noticing you."
"I know," he says. "I keep noticing you, too."
We sit and watch the field for an hour.
We talk about everything and we talk about nothing, the way we have for three months except now there's the tea and the stars and we sit close enough that our arms are touching and neither of us has shifted away.
We talk about the Castellano job and the Arts Center brief and the Nikon film coming back from Asheville this week.
He asks what I'm hoping for from the prints.
"I don't know," I say honestly. "I'm hoping they look like what I saw through the viewfinder. They might not, film is unforgiving."
"What did you see?"
"The wall," I say. "Proud of itself." I pause. "And Gerald looking like he was making a pronouncement, the pear tree in Elise's light…and you."
"On the ladder," he adds.
"On the ladder. You looked like you were exactly where you were supposed to be."
He's quiet.
"That's what I want the prints to look like," I say. "Things that look exactly like what they are."
"Film does that," he says. "Better than digital, sometimes. It's slower. You have to know what you're doing before you press the shutter."
"You said that before," I say. "In October."
"I know."
"You said it might also be a metaphor."
"I believe I said it could be a metaphor," he says. "Technically."
"Very technically."
"I'm a technical person."
"You're a thoughtful person," I say. "That's different."
He looks at me. The night is cold and clear and the field is doing its December thing, and he's looking at me with the full, unguarded version of his attention, the one that takes in everything and doesn't require me to be smaller than I am.
"Jason never planned anything," I say. Not as a complaint, just information, because I'm done being careful about what I say in front of the person I trust most. "I planned everything.
Every dinner, every vacation, and his mother's birthday for eight years.
He wasn't thoughtless on purpose. He just didn't think to think. "
Ethan nods.
"You had chamomile tea," I say. "From Mags' recipe. Because you knew."
"I pay attention," he says.
"I know you do." I look at the field. "I'm not used to it. Being paid attention to, actually. Not in the way of someone who notices things and does something with what they notice."
"You're worth noticing," he says.