12. Wife and Mother
Chapter twelve
Wife and Mother
He had carried people before.
Not like this. He had helped friends move furniture and carried sleeping children from backseats to beds and once, in Austin, helped carry an injured coworker down three flights of stairs when the elevator was out.
He knew the weight of things. He knew the particular responsibility of carrying something that mattered and not putting it down until it was where it needed to be.
He had not known it would feel like this.
The casket was not heavy, not with six of them bearing it, but the weight of it was not the point and he understood that the moment they lifted it in the church and began the slow walk down the aisle with Pine Hollow standing on either side.
The weight of it was Kali Peterson, who had brought muffins to Julie's funeral home on Tuesday mornings and raised eleven children and made a life in this town that had changed the shape of the town, and carrying that out of the church and into the September morning and across the grass of Pine Hollow Cemetery to the place that had been prepared for her was the most serious thing Ethan Walker had done in a long time.
He was glad to do it. He wanted to do it right. The weight of this responsibility had meant something. And being asked to be one of those who bore the weight by the one who he was doing it for added extra meaning to the entire thing.
Adam was in front of him and Luke Hayes was behind and the three men from the congregation, good steady men who had known Jake and Kali since before most of the children were born, moved with them in the careful measured way that the moment required.
They set the casket on the lowering device with the precision of men who understood that this was the last thing they would do for her and they were going to do it correctly, and then they stepped back and took their places with the rest of Pine Hollow gathered around the grave in the September morning.
The cemetery was on the east side of town, next to the church, which meant Pine Hollow's living and Pine Hollow's dead had always been neighbors, which seemed right to Ethan in a way he had not thought about until he was standing in it on a morning like this one.
The grass was still green but the trees at the edges were beginning to turn, the first suggestions of color in the leaves, and the sky was the particular blue of a September day that had decided to be beautiful regardless of what was happening underneath it.
He moved to stand near Julie.
He did not announce it or make a decision about it that he was aware of making.
He simply finished his duty and found himself moving to the place where she was standing at the edge of the gathered crowd, a little apart the way she was always a little apart at these things, and he stood beside her and she glanced at him briefly and looked back at the grave.
Pastor Cole began.
Ethan had been to graveside services before, not many, but enough to know the basics of them, the particular compression of grief that happened when you moved from the church to the ground, when the space got smaller and the sky got bigger and the thing you were doing became undeniable in a way that four walls could sometimes soften.
Nathan Cole did not try to soften it. He stood at the head of the grave and spoke the words that needed speaking with the same steady grace he had brought to the service inside, and Pine Hollow stood in a half circle around him and received it.
Jake was at the front with the children arranged around him, the little ones closest, Lily with her hand in his and Wren pressed against his leg, his thumb in his mouth, an old habit that he had nearly been broken of until this past week.
His thumb had taken up nearly permanent residency in his mouth since he had understood that his mommy was not just sleeping and was not coming back.
Josiah stood at his father's shoulder and Jessica beside him and the rest of them in a line that Ethan had to look away from after a moment because the sight of it, all those children in a row saying goodbye to their mother, was more than he could look at directly for very long.
He looked at Julie instead.
She was holding a small bundle of flowers, roses mostly, deep red.
He did not know where they had come from yet but she was holding them with the careful attention she brought to everything.
Her face was composed in the way it was composed at these things, present and steady and professionally contained, but her eyes were doing something different.
They were doing what they had done in the church during Josiah's song, present in a way that had nothing to do with her professional role, fully there, fully feeling it, and not pretending otherwise.
He had watched her cry in the church and it had affected him more than he expected.
Not because it was unexpected exactly, he had held her while she sobbed in the preparation room and understood then what this cost her, but because of what it meant to see Julie Anderson stand in her professional place and let Pine Hollow see her grieve.
That was not a small thing. He understood that intuitively even without knowing the full history of it.
He had stood along the side wall of the church with the other pallbearers and watched her and felt something shift in his chest that had not shifted back.
Standing near her now, he still felt it in his chest. That odd feeling of seeing her so differently now.
Her professional manner partially stripped away, pulled back slightly so the world, or at least the world of Pine Hollow, was seeing the Julie he had known when he was a teen and a young man.
Pastor Cole read from the twenty-third psalm and Pine Hollow listened and the September sky went on being blue above them.
Somewhere in the tree line at the edge of the cemetery a bird was doing something completely indifferent to the occasion.
It was tweeting a sweet tune that almost sounded like a love song.
"A love song?" Ethan wondered. He wasn't sure where that thought came from, but it made sense and it stuck in his head for the next few minutes.
When Pastor Cole finished the formal words he stepped back slightly and nodded to Julie.
She moved forward.
She went to Jake first. She separated one of the roses from the bundle and held it out to him and he took it and looked at it for a moment and then closed his hand around it.
Something in his face moved and then steadied and he nodded at her and she nodded back and that was the whole of it and it was enough.
Then she went to the children.
She went to Josiah first, the oldest, and gave him his rose and said something to him quietly that Ethan could not hear, and Josiah received it with the solemnity of a young man doing the hardest thing he had done in his nineteen years.
Then Jessica, who had been holding herself together all morning with the fierce determination of a seventeen year old who had decided how this was going to go, took the rose from Julie's hand and held it against her chest and closed her eyes and the tears came anyway and she let them.
Caleb took his without looking up. Abby and Marcus together, the two of them still holding hands, each taking a rose with their free hand.
Noah who was ten and had been trying not to cry since the church, took his and smelled it the way his mother had probably taught him to smell flowers, deliberately and with attention, and something about that made Ethan's throat tighten in a way he had not anticipated.
Grace at nine, took hers and held it carefully in both hands like something that might break. Sam at eight, looked at Julie when she gave him his and said thank you in a voice that was very small and very certain and Julie touched the top of his head briefly with her free hand and moved on.
Tyler at six, took his rose and looked at it with the focused concentration of a child trying to understand something that was beyond understanding, and Ethan watched him turn it in his small hands and thought about what it meant to be six years old and standing at your mother's grave in the September morning with a rose in your hands and a father beside you who was holding eleven children together through the sheer force of love and will.
And then the twins.
Julie crouched down to Lily and Wren's level the way she had crouched down to Wren in the private room before the service, and she gave them each a rose, Lily first and then Wren, and she said something to them that made Lily look at her flower and then look at the casket and then back at Julie, and Julie nodded at whatever Lily said in return and touched her small face briefly with her hand before she straightened.
Then she turned to the rest of Pine Hollow and offered the remaining flowers to anyone who wanted one, moving through the gathered crowd quietly and without ceremony, and people took them or didn't and thanked her or didn't and she received all of it the same way, with the steady warmth that was simply who she was.
She came back to stand beside him when the flowers were gone. This time, she stood beside him, close enough to hear her breathing.
He did not say anything. Neither did she.
They stood together at the edge of the crowd while Pastor Cole said the final words and the lowering device did its slow and dignified work.
Jake Peterson stood at the edge of the grave with Lily in his arms and watched his wife go into the ground with the expression of a man who was going to be all right eventually and knew it and also knew that eventually was a very long way from today.
As the casket passed the earth, Jake gently tossed his rose onto the casket.
Lily did the same. The other children followed suit.
All except Wren who was holding the flower against his face in the same hand that had the thumb that was in his mouth.
His free hand was clutching one of Lily's hands.
Ethan thought about all the things that had brought him to this moment.
The wedding and the apartment above the Herald and the afternoon in Julie's office and the phone call four mornings ago and the preparation room and the church and now this, standing beside Julie Anderson in Pine Hollow Cemetery on a September morning with the leaves just beginning to turn.
He thought about the question that had been getting louder since he drove into town and whether he was any closer to answering it.
He thought he might be.
Julie's hand was at her side, close enough that he could have taken it without reaching far, but he did not take it because this was not the moment for that, this was Kali Peterson's moment and Jake's and the children's, and some things had to wait their turn.
But he was aware of her hand. He was aware of it the whole time they stood there, and when it was over and Pine Hollow began to move toward the church hall for the meal, he walked beside her and she let him, and neither of them said anything about it.
Some things could wait.
Not forever, though. He was fairly certain of that now.
Not forever.