2. August Air
Chapter two
August Air
The Grange Hall was everything a Pine Hollow wedding reception was supposed to be.
Loud and warm and full of people who had known each other their entire lives, talking all at once the way people did when they had years of catching up compressed into a single evening even though many of them saw each other on a daily basis.
The wildflowers in the mason jars were perfect.
The cake Jake Peterson had made was a genuine work of art.
The band was better than anyone had expected and Harold Jensen had already claimed a spot near the food table that he showed no signs of vacating.
Julie lasted an hour and fifteen minutes before she needed air.
It was not that she was unhappy. She was genuinely glad to be there, glad for Adam and Hannah, glad for the wildflowers and the white lights strung along the rafters and the particular warmth of a room full of people celebrating something good.
She just needed a few minutes where no one was talking to her or around her or even near her.
Where she did not have to hold her face in the particular arrangement that social occasions required.
Where she could stand still and breathe and be nobody's anything for five minutes.
She slipped out the side door without announcing it to anyone.
The evening air hit her immediately, cooler than the hall by fifteen degrees and carrying the smell of cut grass and something faintly sweet she couldn't name.
The sky was the deep blue of an August evening that hadn't quite decided to become night yet, and the stars were beginning to show at the edges.
She could still hear the band through the walls, muffled and warm, and the occasional burst of laughter from inside, but out here it was quiet enough that she could hear herself think.
She leaned against the outside wall and closed her eyes for a moment.
She thought about Mark. She did that sometimes at weddings, not with grief exactly, not anymore, but with a kind of acknowledgment.
He had been a good man. He had loved her steadily and without complication for sixteen years and she had loved him back and she did not regret a day of it.
She just missed, sometimes, having someone to stand next to.
Someone who would have noticed when she needed air and not taken it personally.
She heard the door open behind her.
She did not turn around immediately. She told herself it was probably Lila, or Ellen, or someone coming out for the same reason she had. She told herself that right up until she heard his voice.
"Sorry," Ethan said. "I didn't know anyone was out here."
She turned then. He was standing in the doorway with one hand still on the door, and in the low light of the August evening he looked the way he had always looked to her, which was a problem she had not entirely solved in eighteen years.
"It's fine," she said. "There's plenty of outside to share."
He let the door close behind him. He did not leave, and she did not tell him to. For a moment they just stood there with the muffled sound of the band between them and the stars coming out overhead.
"Needed a break?" he said.
"I spend most of my days in very quiet rooms," she said. "Pine Hollow at full volume takes adjustment."
Something crossed his face that might have been a smile. "I forgot about that. About the quiet."
"Do you miss it?"
The question came out before she had decided to ask it, and she felt him consider it seriously rather than deflecting with something easy.
"I didn't think I did," he said. "And then I drove into town two days ago and I'm not sure anymore."
She looked out at the dark edge of the parking lot, at the line of trees beyond it, at the particular flatness of the Minnesota horizon that she had looked at her entire life and never once found boring. "Pine Hollow does that," she said. "It gets into you. You can leave but it doesn't leave you."
"Is that why you stayed?"
"I stayed because of the funeral home," she said. "Because my father needed someone to take it on and I was the one who wanted to. That's the simple version."
"What's the complicated version?"
She looked at him then. He was watching her with the careful attention she remembered, the way he had always listened, like what she said actually mattered to him and he was not going to miss any of it.
It had been one of the things she had loved about him at seventeen. It was not making things easier now.
"The complicated version is the same as the simple one," she said. "I just know more about why I made the choice than I did when I made it."
He nodded slowly. The band shifted inside to something slower and the laughter quieted and the evening settled around them.
"I heard about Mark," he said. "I'm sorry, Julie."
She had heard those words hundreds of times in the five years since Mark died, from every person in Pine Hollow and most of the county, and she had received them the same way every time, with genuine gratitude and the careful composure of someone who had learned to accept condolences gracefully.
From Ethan they landed differently. She was not entirely sure why.
"Thank you," she said. "He was a good man."
"I know he was. Adam always said so."
She had not known that, and it caught her somewhere she wasn't expecting. She looked back at the tree line and gave herself a moment.
"What about you," she said finally. "Seattle. What do you do there?"
"Software development. I work remotely so the Seattle part is somewhat arbitrary. I've been in Portland, Austin, a few other places."
"Adam mentioned you might stay in Pine Hollow for a while."
"I'm thinking about it." He said it carefully, like a man who had learned to be cautious about what he committed to out loud. "I'll be in Hannah's old apartment above the Herald. At least for the rest of the summer."
Julie absorbed that. Ethan Walker, living above the Pine Hollow Herald, a five minute walk from the Anderson Funeral Home. Pine Hollow was not a large town under the best of circumstances.
"That'll be different," she said.
"Probably."
Inside the band finished the slow song and the room erupted in applause and someone, it sounded like Lila, let out a whoop that carried clearly through the wall. Julie felt the corner of her mouth pull up in spite of herself.
"I should go back in," she said.
"Yeah." He didn't move immediately. "Julie?"
She looked at him.
"It's good to see you," he said. "I mean that."
She held his gaze. "It's good to see you too, Ethan," she said, and she meant it, which was the part she hadn't quite prepared for.
She went back inside first. He followed a few minutes later, and if anyone noticed they had both been outside she couldn't tell, and Pine Hollow, for once, kept whatever it thought to itself.