14. The First Crack
Chapter fourteen
The First Crack
He had not planned to go to the funeral home that afternoon.
That was becoming a pattern he was aware of, the not planning of it and the going anyway.
He had stopped pretending it was anything other than what it was.
He wanted to see her. That was the whole of it, simple and inconvenient and apparently not something he was going to talk himself out of regardless of how many reasonable arguments he marshaled on the side of leaving her alone.
He had only gone over two more times since the day he had held her in the preparation room when she had broken down, but those two times had felt important, like they had meant something. She hadn't asked him to leave. That meant something.
He finished his work at two, closed the laptop, stood at the front window of the apartment for a few minutes looking down at Main Street in the October afternoon.
Then he put on his jacket and went out. He stopped in the Herald office and greeted Hannah and Claire.
In the back pressroom he could hear Dave both cursing and praising the old press in the same sentence.
His brother was not in the office. He would probably be out in the fields.
Ethan had told Adam he would help him this weekend.
He thought about going out to help now, too, but the call of Julie was just too much for him.
The town had gone fully autumn while he wasn't paying attention.
The trees along Main Street were doing the thing Minnesota trees did in October, committing entirely to standing bare for the most part, the way they committed to everything.
The air had the particular smell of fallen leaves and coming cold that he had not smelled in eighteen years and recognized immediately and completely.
He walked with his hands in his jacket pockets and nodded to Harold Jensen who was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the feed store with the unhurried efficiency of a man who had been sweeping that same sidewalk for forty years and saw no reason to rush.
The Anderson Funeral Home was quiet when he knocked.
She took longer than usual to answer, long enough that he was considering whether to knock again when the door opened and she was there.
He knew immediately that something was different.
She was composed the way she was always composed, the professional surface intact, but underneath it something was closer to the top than it usually was, visible in the slight tension around her eyes and the way she looked at him for just a half second longer than she normally did before she stepped back to let him in.
"You look like you've had a day," he said.
She turned and walked down the hallway without answering, which was its own kind of answer. He followed her to the office and she sat behind her desk and he took the chair across from it and waited.
She did not pick up her pen.
That was new. She always picked up her pen.
The pen was the thing that gave her hands somewhere to be and her eyes somewhere to go that was not him.
She always had it in her hand within the first thirty seconds.
But this time she did not pick it up and she did not look at her papers.
She simply sat behind her desk and looked at the oak tree out the window for a moment before she looked at him.
"I called Jake today," she said.
"How is he?"
"Getting through it." She paused. "He told me something Kali said. About me."
He waited. He had learned that waiting was the only thing that worked with Julie Anderson, that filling the space with questions or prompts or anything that required her to manage his response was the thing that made her pull back, and so he waited and let the space be there and let her decide what to do with it.
"She told him I was the most capable person she knew," Julie said. "And also the most alone. And that those two things were connected."
She said it plainly, the way she said things that cost her, without embellishment or qualification, and then she looked at the oak tree again and he looked at her and thought about Kali Peterson sitting across from this desk with her list in her cardigan pocket and paying attention to Julie the way Julie paid attention to everyone else, and feeling something fierce and sad and grateful all at once for a woman he had known his whole life and would not see again.
"She wasn't wrong," Julie said.
"No," he said. "She wasn't."
She looked at him then, directly, the way she rarely looked at him directly, and he held it because looking away would have been the wrong thing to do.
"I have been alone for a long time," she said. "I built it that way. After Mark. After." She stopped and started again. "I built my life so that everything that needed me had a place and everything I needed could be managed and that worked. It has worked for a long time."
"But," he said.
She looked at the oak tree. "Kali brought me muffins on Tuesday mornings," she said.
"She called on Wednesday afternoons just to talk.
She knew about Mark, really knew, not just the facts but the texture of it, and she never once tried to fix it.
" Her voice was steady but it was the steadiness of someone who was choosing it carefully rather than someone for whom it came naturally.
"I didn't understand until Jake said that, how much of the ground under my life was her.
How much I counted on her without knowing I was counting on her. "
He thought about the ground under his own life.
About eighteen years of cities and apartments and work that could be done from anywhere, which meant it was done from nowhere in particular just not here, and the particular quality of not-quite-home that had followed him from one place to the next.
He thought about driving into Pine Hollow six weeks ago and feeling something loosen in his chest that had been tight for longer than he wanted to examine.
"I know something about not knowing what you're counting on until it's gone," he said.
She looked at him. He had not meant it to land the way it landed, had not intended the weight of it and the way it felt inside his mouth and inside his head when the words came out, but it was true and she received it the way she received true things, steadily and without deflecting.
"Ethan," she said. Just his name. But the way she said it was different from the careful composed way she had been saying it since the wedding, different from the professional warmth she wrapped around everything.
It was the way she had said his name when they were seventeen, like it meant something specific to her, like it was not just a word.
"I know I don't have any right to show up here every few days and sit in this chair," he said. "I know that. I'm not pretending I don't know that."
"I keep letting you in," she said.
"I know that too."
She looked at her hands on the desk, not at her pen, just at her hands, and he watched her think about whatever she was thinking about and did not try to hurry it.
"Kali would have had opinions about you," she said finally. "About you being back. About you sitting in that chair."
"What kind of opinions?"
The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile but closer than she had been all afternoon. "The kind she kept to herself until she decided you needed to hear them and then said completely directly with no warning."
"She sounds like she was remarkable," he said.
Even though he knew who Jake and Kali had been when he had left Pine Hollow, the years between them had made him not really "know" them anymore.
It was like how when you went away from a place, you expected everyone to be the same when you came back to the place.
The people were seldom the same, but it was always a shock when you came back to the place and saw they had changed.
"She was the best kind of person," Julie said, and her voice went quiet on it and she looked at the window. He let her have the moment because it belonged to her.
They sat in the October afternoon with the oak tree going from gold to brown and to bare outside the window and the particular quiet of the funeral home around them and he thought about what she had said, about building her life so everything that needed her had a place and everything she needed could be managed.
He thought about how long she had been doing that and what it had cost her and what Kali Peterson had understood about it that Julie herself was only just beginning to look at directly.
He thought about what he wanted to say and whether he was going to say it.
"I came back," he said. "Two years after I left. I drove up from the Cities."
She went still.
"I saw you outside Jensen's," he said. "It was October. Kind of like today. You were with someone. You had a ring."
The office was very quiet.
"I drove away," he said. "I told myself it was the right thing. That showing up would only have made things harder." He looked at his hands and then at her. "I've been telling myself that for eighteen years."
She was looking at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before, not in the last six weeks and not when they were seventeen, something unguarded and complicated and not yet named.
"You came back?" she questioned.
"I came back," he said.
The oak tree moved in the October wind outside the window shedding more leaves as it blew through. The afternoon light shifted and settled and neither of them said anything for a long time.
It was not the whole conversation. He understood that.
There was more to say and she had more to say and none of it was going to happen in one afternoon in her office with the first crack barely open between them.
But it was something. It was the first true thing that had been said out loud between them in eighteen years and it was in the room now and neither of them could put it back.
He did not try to say anything else.
Neither did she.
But when he left that evening and walked back up Main Street in the October dark with the leaves moving around his feet, he felt lighter than he had in seventeen years, which was approximately how long he had been carrying that particular piece of truth around without putting it down.
He had put it down.
Whatever came next was up to her.