9. Five Before Six
Chapter nine
Five Before Six
He had not been sleeping well.
This was not unusual for him in a new place.
He had moved enough times to know that his body took a week or two to accept a new set of sounds as normal, to stop flagging the particular creak of a settling building or the specific quality of silence on an unfamiliar street as something that required attention.
The apartment above the Pine Hollow Herald had its own sounds, the old building shifting in the heat, the occasional car on Main Street below, the particular way the wind came through the gap at the bottom of the front window that he kept meaning to look at and hadn't yet.
He had been sleeping with the windows open because of the heat, which meant Pine Hollow came in with the night air, the sounds of it and the smell of it, and he had not minded that.
It was one of the things he had not expected about being back, how much the town had its own smell, cut grass and lake water and something underneath it all that was simply itself, and how completely that smell had been stored in him without his knowledge for eighteen years waiting to be useful.
September had arrived without much announcement. And when it had arrived, he had decided to stay for a while longer. He loved that his job let him work from anywhere.
He was enjoying getting to know his new sister-in-law Hannah.
He loved wandering down to the Herald office during his breaks and smelling the newsprint, listening to Dave breathe doom and gloom about the presses and catching glimpses of his brother being truly happy and in love with his bride.
They had opted out of taking a honeymoon right away and were going to take a couple of weeks during the winter months after the harvesting was done.
He loved watching the way that Hannah worked with Claire as she prepared her for running the operation when she and Adam took their honeymoon.
Claire was cute and so obviously in love with Luke who was always bringing over coffees from his shop and pastries from the bakery.
He grinned when he thought of how the women in this town seemed to have some kind of magical ability to make the men around here swoon for them.
That thought brought a grin to his face. He wondered if Julie would be putting a "spell" on him soon. The grin became a full smile as he thought about her.
And then he was thinking about nothing in particular except how September had come into his life the way months and the ways of telling the time of the year by the sights and sounds and smells and temperatures.
He had noticed it first in the quality of the morning light, which had shifted from the flat white heat of August to something cooler and more angular, and then in the air coming through the open window at night, which carried a chill now that hadn't been there two weeks ago.
And then this morning, lying awake before six the way he had been lying awake before six most mornings, he had heard the sounds of the Canada Geese starting to make their departure for the warmer climates.
They weren't leaving just yet but they were starting to gather in larger flocks and they were getting louder somehow beginning to announce their departure dates which could be as late as November if the lakes stayed open that long.
After he got up around 7:15 a.m. he began to hear the children, laughing and giggling as they made their way to school which would start at 8:15 a.m.
He had forgotten about that. About the sound of kids walking to school in a small town, the particular mix of voices and backpacks and the occasional argument about something that echoed up from the sidewalk below with the cheerful indifference of people who did not know they were being listened to.
He had always wished he and Adam had been town kids so they could have made that walk with their friends.
But they had grown up on the farm that Adam and Hannah owned and operated now, so they had always ridden the bus until he got a car and started driving him and his younger brother to school.
He had always imagined what it would have been like to have lived in town and to walk to school with his friends, though.
And now, hearing the sounds of the kids from above in the early September morning had done something unexpected to him that he was still sorting out.
He was still sorting it out when the phone rang.
He reached for it on the kitchen counter and looked at the screen and saw Julie's name.
She said she was sorry to call early. He said just her name because he needed a second and she told him Kali Peterson had passed away, that Jake had called her.
He leaned back against the kitchen counter in the early morning light with the sounds of Pine Hollow coming through the open window and felt the news settle into him the way news like this settled, not all at once but in layers, the first layer the plain fact of it and the layers underneath taking longer to arrive.
He asked how Jake was.
It was the only thing that mattered in that moment, how Jake was, because Jake Peterson was the kind of man who held everyone else up and Pine Hollow needed to know that someone was holding him.
Julie said he was steady the way Jake was always steady but that it would hit him when the steadiness ran out, and he said yeah, it will, because he knew something about steadiness running out and what waited on the other side of it.
She told him what he needed to know about his role, practical and clear and professional, and he listened and said he understood and would be there for whatever was needed.
She was doing the thing she did, he had seen it at the funeral home that afternoon in her office, the way she moved through the necessary things with a competence so complete it looked effortless from the outside.
He knew it was not effortless. He had watched her face when she told him about Kali's arrangements, the almost imperceptible moment when the professional composure had cost her something before she put it back in place.
He said her name before she could end the call.
He asked if she was all right.
She said she was fine, that this was what she did, and he told her that was not what he had asked, because it wasn't, because fine and all right were not the same thing and he was not going to let her collapse the distance between them the way she had been collapsing it since the wedding, keeping everything at the surface where it was manageable and safe and didn't cost anything.
She thanked him and ended the call.
He sat on the edge of his bed for a while after, in the early morning, with the phone in his hand and the sounds of Pine Hollow coming through the open window around him.
The children who were lagging behind were still making their way down the sidewalk below, their voices drifting up intermittently, ordinary and unhurried, the sound of a town going about the business of a September morning without knowing that one of its own was gone.
Kali Peterson was gone.
He had known her his whole life. That was the thing about growing up in a town this size, you knew everyone your whole life, you grew up alongside them and their children and their parents and their particular place in the fabric of the town, and when one of them was gone the fabric changed.
You felt the change even if you had been away for eighteen years because some things were stitched into you before you had any say in the matter.
He thought about Jake Peterson's eleven children, nine of whom had been walking to school this week and maybe even starting to do that today and then catching themselves, remembering, turning back.
He thought about the bakery on Main Street and who was going to run it and how Jake was going to get through the next week and the week after that and all the weeks that followed.
He thought about Kali at the wedding, the blue scarf and the brightness of her eyes and the way she had laughed at something Jake said with the ease of a woman who had been laughing at that particular man's particular humor for thirty years and had not tired of it.
He got up.
There was no point sitting around doing nothing.
Yes, Kali Peterson had died. Yes, he had a duty to fulfill, but he also had a job that he had to keep doing.
So he made coffee in the small kitchen, the coffee he had bought at the grocery store on his second day because he was not going to walk to Hayes Coffee every morning but mostly did anyway.
He stood at the front window while it brewed and looked out at Main Street in the early September light.
He thought about what Julie had said on the phone. That it would hit Jake when the steadiness ran out.
He knew about that. He had been steady for eighteen years, had built a life around the particular discipline of forward motion, and there had been moments when the steadiness had run out without warning, usually at night, usually in whatever city he happened to be living in at the time, and what was underneath it was not what he expected.
It was not regret exactly, or not only regret.
It was more like the feeling of a question he had never properly answered, something left open that wanted to be closed.
He had driven into Pine Hollow almost five weeks ago and the question had gotten louder.
He drank his coffee and watched the street and thought about Julie's voice on the phone, professional and steady and doing the thing she did, and the moment at the end when he had asked if she was all right and she had said fine the way people said fine when they were holding something that had weight to it and had decided they were going to keep holding it alone.
She had been doing that a long time. He understood that now in a way he had not understood at nineteen.
The funeral home and the work and the careful management of everything, it was not just who she was, it was the structure she had built around herself after Mark, after everything, the thing that kept the days organized and purposeful and moving forward.
He recognized it because he had his own version of it, different in its particulars but the same in its function.
He wondered if she had been actually building this structure since he had left. She had not always been like this.
But they were both very good at forward motion. They were both very good at not stopping long enough to notice what they were moving away from.
He called Adam at 8:45 a.m..
Adam answered on the second ring, which meant he was probably just finishing up with the barn chores before he would be heading out to the fields for the day. It also probably meant someone had already called him, which meant Pine Hollow's information network was operating at its usual efficiency.
"I know," Adam said. "Jake called me an hour ago. Hannah is already over there."
"Good," Ethan said. "That's good."
"You doing all right?"
"Yeah. Julie called me about the pallbearing."
A pause on Adam's end that lasted just a beat too long. "Julie called you."
"She's the funeral director, Adam. She called all the pallbearers."
"Right," Adam said, in the voice of a man who was going to leave that alone for now and come back to it later. "You want to come out to the farm for breakfast? Hannah will be back by nine and she's going to need to cook something. She always needs to cook something when she's upset."
He thought about the apartment and the quiet of it and the question that had gotten louder since he drove into Pine Hollow and showed no signs of getting quieter on its own.
"Yeah," he said. "I'll be there."
He showered and dressed and drove out to the Walker farm on roads he had driven his entire childhood, past fields that were turning from the deep green of summer to the first pale gold of September, the crop rows running out to the horizon the way they always had, steady and certain and indifferent to the particular sorrows of the people driving past them.
The farm looked the same as it always had, the house and the barn and the long gravel drive, except that there were flower boxes on the porch that had not been there before, Hannah's addition, and they were full of something yellow and cheerful that seemed exactly right.
Adam was waiting on the porch steps with two cups of coffee and the expression of a man who had things to say and was deciding how many of them to say.
Ethan took the coffee and sat down beside him and they looked out at the farm together in the morning light the way they had sat on these steps their whole lives, and neither of them said anything for a while. It was the most like home Ethan had felt in eighteen years.
"She was a good woman," Adam said finally.
"She was the best kind," Ethan said.
They sat with that for a while, the two of them and the September morning and the particular quiet of a day that had started with loss and was still figuring out what to do with itself.
Ethan thought about pallbearers and gravesides and Julie Anderson doing the hardest parts of her job with the steadiness that cost her more than she let anyone see.
He thought about asking her again if she was all right.
He thought he probably would.