13. Aftercare
Chapter thirteen
Aftercare
She waited three days.
That was standard. Three days after the service before the first follow up call, enough time for the immediate crush of casseroles and visitors and well-meaning neighbors to thin out, enough time for the family to begin to feel the particular silence that settled in after everyone went home and the real work of grief began.
She had learned that from her father and her father had learned it from his, and it was one of the things about this job that never changed regardless of how many years you did it.
She waited three days and then she picked up the phone and called Jake Peterson.
He answered on the fourth ring, which meant he had probably been doing something with his hands, the way people did in the first weeks, keeping themselves moving because stopping was where the grief lived and movement was the only reliable way to stay ahead of it.
She could hear something in the background, children, the particular layered noise of a house full of them, and underneath it the sound of something being washed or dried or put away.
"Julie," he said.
"Jake. I'm just calling to check in. See how you're all doing."
A pause. Not a bad pause, just the pause of a man deciding how honest to be. "We're getting through it," he said. "The kids have been back in school since Monday. Josiah went back to work at the bakery yesterday. He's been such a good help to me. Kali would be…would have been proud of him."
"Good," she said. "That's good for him. And yes, she would have been very proud of him."
"He needed something to do with himself." Another pause. "We all do."
She understood that completely. She thought about saying so and decided just to listen instead, because Jake Peterson did not need her to understand, he needed her to be on the other end of the phone while he figured out what he was going to say.
"The little ones are the hardest," he said finally, his voice dropping in the way it dropped when he was saying something that cost him.
"Lily keeps going to the door of our bedroom in the morning.
Kali always had her in with us by six, just the two of them while I got up to go to the bakery, and Lily doesn't understand why the door is just a door now. "
Julie closed her eyes for a moment.
"Tyler asked me yesterday when mama was coming back," Jake continued.
"I told him she wasn't and he looked at me like I had said something in a language he didn't speak yet.
Like the words were there but the meaning hadn't landed.
" He was quiet for a moment. "I don't know how to help him with that.
I don't know how to help any of them with something I don't know how to help myself with. "
"You're doing it by being there," Julie said. "That's the whole of it right now, Jake. Just being there."
"Kali would have known what to say to each of them," he said.
"She always knew. She had eleven different ways of knowing because they were all different and she paid attention to every one of them.
" His voice was steady but the steadiness was doing a lot of work.
"I pay attention. I know my kids. But she knew them in a way I'm still learning. She just knew things."
Julie looked out the window at the oak tree.
The leaves were turning in earnest now, the green giving way to gold and orange and brown at the edges.
She thought about September becoming October and October becoming the long Minnesota winter and Jake Peterson learning a new language of parenthood without his partner beside him.
"How are you sleeping?" she asked.
A short sound that might have been a laugh. "I'm not, much. The bed is too quiet."
She did not say anything to that because there was nothing to say to that, nothing that would help, and she knew better than to fill silence with words that were just noise.
"The lemon bars are gone," Jake said after a moment, and his voice changed when he said it, went softer and more particular the way it had in her office when Kali had talked about wanting people to eat something that tasted like him.
"The kids ate them over the first two days.
I saved one. I don't know why I saved it.
I just put it in the back of the refrigerator behind everything else and I keep not eating it.
I'll have to throw it out soon, but I just can't bring myself to eat it.
It's like…it's like if I eat it, I'm really admitting and accepting that she is gone, that my Kali is really gone. "
Julie felt the back of her throat tighten.
"Rachel made them exactly right," Jake said. "She called me for the recipe herself, didn't ask Josiah or anyone else, called me directly and wrote down every word I said and made them exactly right. Kali would have approved of that."
"Kali approved of people who paid attention," Julie said.
"She did." A pause. "She paid attention to you, you know.
She talked about you. About how you needed someone to fuss over you a little because you never fussed over yourself and she had appointed herself to the job.
" Something in his voice shifted, warm and tired and genuine all at once.
"She said you were the most capable person she knew and also the most alone, and that those two things were connected and somebody needed to do something about it. "
Julie sat very still at her desk.
She had not known that. She had known about the muffins and the Wednesday phone calls and the particular quality of Kali's friendship, the way it saw her clearly and chose her anyway, but she had not known that Kali had talked about her to Jake, had named the thing that Julie herself had only recently begun to look at directly.
"She wasn't wrong," Julie said finally, because Kali had never been wrong about things like that and saying otherwise would have been dishonest.
"She rarely was," Jake said, and she could hear the smile in it underneath the grief, the particular smile of a man who had spent thirty years being known by someone and was still finding the edges of what that meant now that they were gone.
They talked for a while longer, the ordinary things, the bakery and the older children and the practical questions of the coming weeks, and Julie listened and asked the right questions and made a note to follow up again in another week.
When they said goodbye she sat at her desk for a long time after with the cell phone still in her hand.
She thought about what Jake had said. About Kali paying attention to her. About the most capable person she knew also being the most alone and those two things being connected.
She had been alone for a long time. She had built her life around being alone in a way that worked, that was productive and purposeful and full of meaning, and she had told herself that was enough because most of the time it was enough and the times it wasn't she was too busy to notice.
She was noticing now.
She set the phone down and looked at the oak tree and thought about Kali Peterson appointing herself to the job of fussing over Julie Anderson, showing up with muffins on Tuesday mornings and calling on Wednesday afternoons and paying attention in the way that only the truest friends paid attention, and she felt the loss of it with a specificity and a completeness that made the professional part of her brain step back and let the personal part have the floor for once.
Outside the window the oak tree was fully gold now, brilliant and certain, doing what it had always done in October, being entirely itself regardless of the weather or the season or anything happening on the other side of the glass.
She glanced at the ground below the tree and saw that many of the leaves were already taking up residency under the tree.
She thought about Ethan.
She had not let herself think about him directly since the funeral, had kept him in her peripheral vision the way she kept things that were too bright to look at head on, but Jake's words had done something to her careful management of that particular subject.
The most capable person she knew and also the most alone and those two things were connected.
Ethan had been showed up at her funeral home a couple of afternoons the way he used to.
Not every day. Not even every few days. He just came in and sat in the chair across from her desk and kept her company without making a production of it and she let him because she had told herself it was just an old habit reasserting itself and that was true as far as it went and she had not let herself examine how far it went.
Kali would have had opinions about that.
She could almost hear them.
Julie picked up her pen and pulled the next piece of paperwork toward her and got back to work, because that was what she did and it was what she was good at and it was not nothing, it was genuinely not nothing, to be the person who showed up for other people's worst moments with steadiness and grace.
But she thought, pulling the paper toward her, that maybe Kali was right.
That maybe capable and alone did not have to be the same sentence forever.
That maybe the door of the room she had kept closed for a very long time did not have to stay closed just because closing it had once seemed like the only reasonable thing to do.
Maybe.
She was not ready to do anything about it today.
But she was thinking about it, which was more than she had been doing a month ago, and that felt, quietly and without fanfare, like something.