7. Old Habits
Chapter seven
Old Habits
She heard the knock and knew before she opened the door.
She could not have explained how she knew.
Pine Hollow had its share of people who came to the front door of the Anderson Funeral Home without calling first, and most of them came with a specific and serious purpose, and none of them were Ethan Walker.
But she knew anyway, in the half second between hearing the knock and reaching for the door, the way you sometimes knew things that had no logical basis, and she took that half second to arrange herself before she opened it.
He looked exactly as he had at the wedding and outside the Grange Hall and in her dream about Horseshoe Lake that she was not thinking about.
He was wearing a plain grey t-shirt and jeans and he had clearly been walking, and he said he was in the neighborhood with the particular expression of a man who knew how thin that was and was offering it anyway.
She told him he lived four blocks away.
He said pretty much the whole town was his neighborhood.
She let him in because not letting him in would have been a statement she was not ready to make, and because some part of her, the part she was keeping a careful eye on, had been wondering since the wedding whether he would come.
He had used to come. That had been one of the things about Ethan Walker at seventeen, that he had never been strange about the funeral home, never awkward the way some of the other boys were when they came to pick her up.
He had simply walked in and made himself at home and treated it like what it was, the place where Julie lived and worked and was most entirely herself.
She had loved that about him. She had loved a lot of things about him and then he had left and she had spent the better part of two years waiting for him to come back before she had finally accepted that waiting was its own kind of slow damage and she needed to stop.
She led him back to the office and sat behind her desk and told him she was doing paperwork, which was true. She picked up her pen and kept working because working was the thing that kept her hands busy and her face doing what she needed it to do.
He sat in the chair across from her desk.
The chair across from her desk. The same chair he had sat in a hundred times when they were seventeen, sprawled in it with his long legs stretched out in front of him, doing his homework or reading or just talking to her while she did whatever needed doing.
She had glanced up at him from behind this desk so many times that the image of him in that chair was stored somewhere in her so deeply that seeing him in it now felt less like a new thing and more like a memory becoming present tense.
She did not look up from her papers more than was polite.
She asked about the apartment and how he was finding things to do with himself, the ordinary questions you asked someone who had just moved somewhere, and he answered them the way he answered things, without excess.
She kept her pen moving and kept her face where it needed to be and thought about the fact that Ethan Walker was sitting across from her desk in her office on a Tuesday afternoon as though eighteen years were nothing, as though he had simply stepped out for a while and come back, as though leaving was a thing you could just do and then undo without any accounting for the time in between.
She was not angry. She had decided a long time ago that anger was not something she was going to spend on this particular history.
It cost too much and changed nothing and she had more important things to spend herself on.
But she was not going to pretend the time in between had not existed either.
It had existed. She had lived every day of it.
She told him about Jake's call. About Kali.
She told him because she needed to say it to someone and because he was going to be a pallbearer and he needed to know, and because talking about Kali gave her something real and serious to put between them, something that had nothing to do with the two of them and everything to do with the town they both came from and the people in it who deserved better than to be backdrop for whatever this was.
He went still when she told him. That was one of the things she remembered about him, the way he went still when something mattered rather than filling the space with words.
He said of course, whatever they need, and she believed him completely because that was also one of the things she remembered.
He meant what he said. He had always meant what he said.
He had just not always said enough of it.
She picked her pen back up and went back to her papers and the office went quiet in the way it went quiet when there was no service on and the building was just itself.
She was aware of him in the chair across from her with a specificity that she found inconvenient and was doing nothing about because there was nothing to be done about it.
He watched her work. She could feel it without looking up, the quality of his attention, patient and unhurried. It was so precisely what she remembered that she had to set her pen down for a moment and look at the paper in front of her without actually reading it.
Outside the window the oak tree moved in the breeze.
She had watched that tree from this desk her entire life.
It had been her father's tree before it was hers and his father's before that, and it was the most reliable thing she knew, that tree, the way it was bare in winter and full in summer and always exactly itself regardless of what was happening in the office on the other side of the glass.
She found it useful right now.
"You don't have to stay," she said. She kept her voice even and her eyes on her papers. "If you have things to do."
"I don't have things to do until tomorrow morning," he said. "I do my work in the morning until about 2 p.m. and then I do whatever I want to do."
She looked up at him then. He was sitting in the chair the way he used to sit in it, relaxed and present, and he was looking at her with the careful attention she had been trying not to notice since the wedding.
She thought about seventeen and about the two years after seventeen when she had looked at the door of this office every time it opened and felt her heart do something embarrassing and then looked away again when it was never him.
And then it had been Mark coming through that door.
Steady and kind and real and present, everything she had needed when she had finally stopped looking for someone else.
She had not been wrong to love Mark. She had not been wrong to marry him.
She had been right about all of it and she knew that with the same certainty she knew most things.
She just also knew that the chair across from her desk had been empty for a long time and that Ethan Walker sitting in it felt like something she did not have a clean category for.
"Then stay," she said, because not saying it would have been its own kind of statement and she was not ready to make that one either.
She went back to her papers.
He stayed.
The afternoon light moved through the window the way it always did.
The oak tree moved in the breeze and she worked her way through the stack of papers on her desk with the focused attention that had always been her best defense against things she didn't want to feel.
And across from her Ethan Walker sat in the chair he used to sit in and said nothing that needed saying and she was grateful for that even as she mistrusted it.
He was good at this. He had always been good at this, at being present without demanding anything, at filling a room without crowding it. It had been one of the things that made seventeen so easy and leaving so hard and the two years of waiting so quietly devastating.
She knew better now than she had known then.
She was not seventeen anymore and she was not going to let easy become something she leaned on without thinking about what it had cost her the last time.
The wall she had was not made of hostility or coldness.
It was made of the very specific knowledge of what happened when you let Ethan Walker become the thing you counted on.
She knew what happened. She had lived it.
So she worked, and he stayed. The afternoon went on around them the way afternoons did in Pine Hollow, unhurried and golden and completely indifferent to the things people were carefully not saying inside the buildings it moved through, and when the light finally shifted toward evening and she set down her pen and looked up at him, his expression was the same as it had always been.
Like he was right where he meant to be.
She did not know what to do with that. She suspected that was exactly the problem.
"I should finish up for the day," she said.
He nodded and stood, unfolding from the chair with the easy movement she remembered, and for a moment he was just standing there in her office in the late afternoon light and she was sitting behind her desk looking up at him and it was so precisely like being seventeen that she had to look away.
"Thank you for letting me stay," he said.
"Old habit," she said, and picked up her pen again so she had somewhere to look.
She heard him go down the hallway and the front door open and close. She sat at her desk in the quiet that came after and looked at the oak tree and did not move for a long time.
Old habit. She had said it lightly, like it was nothing.
It was not nothing. It was something. That was the problem. With Ethan Walker it had never been nothing, and eighteen years had apparently done less about that than she had counted on.
She picked up her papers and got back to work.
It was what she did. It was, for today, going to have to be enough.