3. The Side Door
Chapter three
The Side Door
Ethan had lasted longer at the head table than he expected.
It was not that the wedding was bad company.
Adam was the happiest he had ever seen him, which was something to witness, and Hannah's warmth filled whatever room she was in, and Sarah Erickson, Adam's new sister-in-law, turned out to be easy to talk to in the way of someone who was genuinely happy for her sister and not interested in making the evening complicated.
The food was good. The cake, when it came, was exceptional. Jake Peterson knew what he was doing.
But Ethan had spent eighteen years moving through the world without staying anywhere long enough to feel the weight of it, and Pine Hollow had a weight he had forgotten about.
A density of history and memory and people who remembered him before he was whoever he had become.
After an hour of it he needed ten minutes of just being no one in particular.
He told Adam he was stepping out for air. Adam, who was busy slow-dancing with his new wife and approximately nothing else, waved him off without looking.
He went out the side door.
She was already there.
He almost went back inside. His hand was still on the door and the thought was there, clear and immediate, because the last forty-eight hours had been enough.
The rehearsal dinner and the ceremony and sitting at the head table with a direct sightline to the fourth row where Julie Anderson sat through the whole meal with the careful composure of someone who was not going to let this be a thing.
He had respected that. He had done the same thing from his end.
And now here she was in the August evening leaning against the wall with her eyes closed and he had approximately one second to make a decision.
He said sorry. He said he didn't know anyone was out here.
Both of those things were true. Neither of them was the whole truth.
She told him there was plenty of outside, which was such a Julie Anderson thing to say that he felt something loosen in his chest that had been tight since he drove into Pine Hollow two days ago and maybe longer than that.
He let the door close.
He had told himself, driving up from the Twin Cities, that this was simple.
Adam's wedding. A few days in Pine Hollow.
He would see Julie because Pine Hollow was small and it was impossible not to, and it would be fine because they were both adults and eighteen years was eighteen years and whatever they had been to each other at seventeen was not relevant to who they were now.
He had believed that right up until he saw her in the fourth row during the ceremony and his brain went quiet in the particular way it only went quiet around her.
She asked if he missed the quiet.
He told her he hadn't thought he did. He told her driving into town two days ago had changed his mind about that. He watched her receive that information and file it somewhere he couldn't see.
She said Pine Hollow got into you. That you could leave but it didn't leave you.
He thought about that for a moment. About all the places he had lived and the particular quality of not-quite-home that each of them had carried.
Austin had been warm and loud and full of energy and he had liked it well enough.
Portland had suited him for a while. Seattle was beautiful in the way of places that knew they were beautiful, and it had never once felt like the kind of place where anything important about him had happened.
Pine Hollow was the kind of place where everything important about him had happened. He was not sure what to do with that.
He asked about Mark because it needed to be said and there was never going to be a moment that felt right for it.
He watched her take it the way she probably took everything, steadily and without falling apart, and she said Mark had been a good man, and he said Adam had always said so, and something moved across her face that he recognized as the particular expression of someone who has been caught off guard by kindness.
He had not intended to catch her off guard. He was glad he had.
She asked about his work, about Seattle, the way you asked about things when you were keeping a conversation at a safe distance, and he answered her in the same register.
They stood in the August evening with the band muffled through the wall and the stars coming fully out overhead.
He thought that this was the longest conversation he had managed with her in eighteen years and it was taking place in a parking lot in the dark, which was probably about right.
She said she should go back in.
He said her name.
He had not planned to. It came out of him before he could stop it, just her name, nothing attached to it, but she looked at him and he told her it was good to see her and he meant it with a completeness that surprised him.
She said it was good to see him too.
She went back inside and he stood in the August dark for a while longer, not ready to go back in yet, not ready to be in a room full of people who remembered him and wanted to catch up and ask what he had been doing with himself for eighteen years.
He was not sure he had a good answer to that question.
He had been working. He had been moving.
He had been living a life that looked complete from the outside and felt like a placeholder from the inside, and he had gotten very good at not examining that too closely.
He looked out at the tree line at the edge of the parking lot.
The Minnesota sky was fully dark now, thick with stars the way it got out here away from city light.
The air smelled like late summer and cut grass and the faint sweetness of something he couldn't name.
He had forgotten this too. The sky out here.
The particular quality of dark that didn't exist in Seattle or Portland or Austin, where there was always light somewhere pushing back against the night.
He had forgotten a lot of things about Pine Hollow. He was remembering them faster than was entirely comfortable.
The door opened behind him and he turned, but it was just a couple he didn't recognize stepping out for air of their own, and they nodded at him and moved off toward the far end of the building, and he was alone again.
He thought about the last time he had been in Pine Hollow. Not this trip. The other time. The time he did not talk about and tried not to think about and had mostly succeeded at not thinking about for seventeen years with occasional lapses at inconvenient moments.
He had come back when he was twenty-one.
Two years after he left. He had driven up from the Cities on a Tuesday in October with no particular plan except that he had been thinking about Julie Anderson for two years and had finally run out of reasons not to do something about it.
He had told himself he would find her and talk to her and say the things he should have said before he left, and he would figure out from there what came next.
He had found her. He just hadn't talked to her.
She had been outside Jensen's Feed and Variety with a man Ethan didn't recognize, and she had been laughing at something the man said, and the man had his hand at the small of her back in the easy way of someone who had been doing that for a while and expected to keep doing it, and there was a ring on her left hand that caught the October light when she reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear.
Ethan had sat in his car across the street for approximately four minutes. Then he had driven back to the Cities.
He had told himself he was doing the right thing.
That showing up would only have made things harder for her, complicated something that looked uncomplicated, inserted himself into a life she had clearly moved on to without him.
He had told himself that the kind thing, the decent thing, was to leave her to it.
He still believed that. Mostly.
What he had never quite managed to convince himself of was that waiting two years had been the right call.
That if he had come back sooner, before October, before the ring, things might have gone differently.
He had never let himself sit with that thought for very long because there was nothing useful to be done with it and it cost him every time he picked it up.
He went back inside.
The reception had settled into the comfortable middle portion of the evening, the toasts done and the cake eaten and the dancing ongoing and Pine Hollow in the process of having a genuinely good time.
He got a drink from the bar and stood near the edge of the room and watched the dance floor for a while.
Adam and Hannah were out there, Hannah's head tipped against Adam's shoulder, both of them moving slowly in the way of people who were in no hurry to get anywhere because they were already exactly where they wanted to be.
He found Julie without looking for her, the way he had been finding her all evening without meaning to.
She was at a table near the windows with Lila Monroe and a couple he thought might be the Marshes, Danny and Ellen.
Julie was listening to something Ellen was saying with the focused attention he remembered, her chin slightly tilted, her expression warm and present.
She laughed at something and the laugh was the same as it had always been and he looked away.
He talked to Harold Jensen for a while, who was exactly as Harold Jensen had always been and showed no signs of changing, and to Jake Peterson who asked about his work with the genuine curiosity of a man who had stayed in one place his whole life and found the world outside it interesting rather than threatening.
He asked how Kali was doing and he listened as Jake talked about her in that tender and compassionate way he had always talked about her.
He talked to a few people he remembered from school and a few he didn't. He was good at this, at moving through rooms and being easy company, and none of it required very much of him.
At Midnight he said goodnight to Adam, who pulled him into a hug that lasted longer than either of them would have predicted and said nothing that needed to be said out loud.
Hannah kissed his cheek and told him she was glad he was staying for the summer and he said he was glad too and meant it more than he expected.
He did not say goodnight to Julie. She was dancing with Lila Monroe when he left, the two of them laughing at something, and he watched them for a moment from across the room and then walked out into the August night and got in his car and drove to the motel on the edge of town where he was staying until the apartment above the Herald was ready.
He lay awake for a long time looking at the ceiling.
Pine Hollow was not a large town. He had known that when he decided to stay. He had told himself it was fine, that he was an adult, that whatever history existed between him and Julie Anderson was old enough to have lost its teeth.
He was less certain of that than he had been this morning.
He closed his eyes and listened to the particular quiet of a small town at night, which was not silence exactly but something close to it, and thought about Julie saying Pine Hollow gets into you, you can leave but it doesn't leave you, and thought that she was probably right about that, and that she was probably right about more things than he had given her credit for at nineteen, and that it had taken him eighteen years to end up back where he started.
He was not sorry about that either.
He just wasn't sure yet what he was going to do about it.