6. Where She Would Be
Chapter six
Where She Would Be
The apartment above the Pine Hollow Herald was small and clean and full of light.
He had not known what to expect. Hannah had offered it without hesitation when he mentioned he was thinking about staying in Pine Hollow for the remainder of the summer, and Adam had seconded it with the practical efficiency of a man who liked problems solved cleanly.
Ethan had accepted because it was available and affordable and near a coffee shop, which covered most of his basic requirements for a place to live.
He had not had expectations beyond that.
It surprised him. Not in any dramatic way, but in the quiet way of a place that turned out to be more livable than anticipated.
The front window looked out over Main Street and the back window faced the alley and the rear of the buildings on the next block.
The light came through both of them at different times of day and did different things to the space.
It was small but not cramped and it was his for the summer and that was enough.
Pine Hollow was a good thing to look at from a window. He had not expected that either.
He had been in the apartment for four days and he had established a routine the way he always established routines, quickly and without much deliberation, because routine was the thing that made any place livable regardless of how temporary it was.
He was up by six. Coffee from Hayes Coffee down the street, which Luke Hayes ran with the quiet efficiency of someone who took his work seriously and did not need to talk about it, and which produced the best cup of coffee Ethan had had outside of Portland.
He worked from eight until two at the small table by the front window, his laptop open and the street below him doing the unhurried business of a small town on a weekday. In the afternoons he walked.
He had been walking a lot.
Pine Hollow was exactly the right size for walking.
Small enough that you could cover the whole of it in an afternoon but large enough that there was always something to look at, someone to nod to, some detail of a building or a yard or a stretch of sidewalk that triggered something in the part of his memory that stored the town he had grown up in.
He had walked past the bakery and the feed store and the park where the wedding had been and the cemetery on the east side of town and down every residential street he could find, and with each walk the town was becoming itself again in his mind rather than the abstracted idea of it he had been carrying around for eighteen years.
On the fourth day he walked to the Anderson Funeral Home.
He did not pretend to himself that it was accidental.
He was done pretending things were accidental where Julie Anderson was concerned, at least in the privacy of his own head.
He had been thinking about her since the wedding, which was not new, but the thinking had a different quality now that she was five minutes away rather than six or 16 hours, a specificity and an immediacy that the previous eighteen years of occasional thinking had not had.
She was here. He was here. Pine Hollow was not a large town.
He had used to go to the funeral home when they were seventeen.
That was the thing he kept coming back to, the thing that felt both ridiculous and entirely natural at the same time.
He had spent more hours than he could count in and around this building when they were in high school, sitting in the small office off the main hallway while Julie did whatever needed doing, or helping her with the things she would let him help with, or just being present in the particular way that being seventeen and in love with someone made you want to be present in whatever space they occupied.
He had never been bothered by the funeral home the way some of the other kids were.
It was Julie's place. That had been enough for him.
He stood on the sidewalk in front of it for a moment before he went in.
It looked the same. That was the first thing.
The sign her grandfather had put up, repainted but unchanged in its essential nature, and the white siding and the dark shutters and the careful landscaping that Julie maintained with the same attention she brought to everything else.
It was a well-kept building on a quiet street and it did not announce itself or apologize for itself.
It looked, as it always had, exactly like what it was.
He went up the front steps and knocked.
She opened the door and looked at him, and her expression moved through several things in quick succession before it settled into something careful and composed and not entirely successful at hiding the fact that she was surprised.
"Ethan," she said.
"Hey," he said. "I was in the neighborhood." Just exactly what he said he wasn't going to say. Nice one, he thought.
She looked at him for a moment. "You live four blocks away."
"Pretty much the whole town is my neighborhood."
Something shifted at the corner of her mouth.
Not quite a smile. Close enough. She stepped back from the door and let him in, which he had not been entirely certain she would do.
He came into the front hallway and stood there while she closed the door behind him and the quiet of the place settled around them.
It smelled the same. He had not expected that, had not expected the smell of it to be stored somewhere in him intact after eighteen years, but it was, that particular combination of flowers and something clean and underneath it all the old wood of a building that had been doing the same work for generations.
He stood in the hallway and felt eighteen years compress into something much smaller.
"You used to do this," Julie said. She was watching him with the careful attention he was getting used to, the way she watched everything, like she was taking inventory.
"I did," he said. "Is that all right?"
She considered him for a moment. "Come on back," she said. "I'm doing paperwork."
He followed her down the hallway to the small office he remembered, and it was the same as it had always been, the desk and the two chairs across from it and the window that looked out onto the side yard where an oak tree he remembered as medium-sized had become something substantial and permanent.
Julie sat behind the desk and he took one of the chairs across from her the way he used to, and for a moment neither of them acknowledged how strange and how natural it was to be sitting in exactly these positions in exactly this room.
"How are you settling in?" she asked. She had a pen in her hand and a stack of papers in front of her and she did not pretend she was not going to keep working while they talked. That was also the same.
"Good," he said. "Luke Hayes makes good coffee."
"He does. The whole town depends on it." She made a note on something and set it aside. "Are you finding things to do with yourself in the afternoons?"
"Walking mostly. Relearning the town."
"And how is it? The town."
He looked at her. "Smaller than I remembered in some ways. Bigger in others."
She made a sound that might have been agreement and looked at the next piece of paper on her stack. Outside the window a breeze moved through the oak tree and the light shifted and settled.
"Jake Peterson called me last week," she said, without looking up.
He went still. "I heard Kali wasn't doing well."
"They came in Thursday." She said it simply, without embellishment, the way she said things that were too heavy for extra words. "She knew exactly what she wanted. Down to the last detail."
"That sounds like Kali."
"It does." She set her pen down and looked at him then. "She asked for you as a pallbearer. You and Adam and Luke Hayes and three men from the congregation."
He absorbed that quietly. He had known Kali Peterson his whole life, the way you knew everyone in a town this size, and the idea of her planning her own funeral with the focused thoroughness she brought to everything sat in his chest like something solid and cold.
"Of course," he said. "Whatever they need."
Julie nodded and picked her pen back up. "I'll be in touch when the time comes."
They sat in a comfortable quiet for a while after that, the kind of quiet that had its own texture, not empty but full of the things that didn't need to be said.
He watched her work, the focused way she moved through the papers on her desk, and he thought about seventeen and this office and the hours he had spent in this chair while she did homework or went through her father's files or simply kept him company in the particular way she had always kept company, present and unhurried and not requiring anything from him that he wasn't ready to give.
He had taken that for granted at nineteen. He understood that now in a way he hadn't then.
"You don't have to stay," she said, without looking up. "If you have things to do."
"I don't have things to do until tomorrow morning."
"Then stay," she said simply, and went back to her papers.
He stayed.
The afternoon moved through the window in long slow angles of light and the oak tree moved in the breeze and somewhere down the street Pine Hollow went about its quiet business, and Ethan Walker sat in the chair across from Julie Anderson's desk the way he had sat there twenty-some years ago, and if either of them thought about how much had changed and how much hadn't, neither of them said so.
Some things didn't need saying.
Some things just needed time.