15. What Comes Next
Chapter fifteen
What Comes Next
She sat at her desk for a long time after he left.
The oak tree was doing something extraordinary in the last of the October light, the remaining gold of it catching the late afternoon sun and holding it. She watched it without really seeing it and thought about what Ethan had said.
I came back. Two years after I left. I drove up from the Cities.
She had not known that. She had spent eighteen years not knowing that, had built a significant portion of her understanding of what had happened between them on the foundation of his not coming back, and now that foundation had shifted and she was sitting at her desk in the October afternoon trying to figure out what was underneath it.
He had come back and he had seen her with Mark and he had driven away.
She turned that over carefully the way she turned difficult things over, methodically and without rushing, looking at it from different angles.
He had come back. He had seen her and made a decision based on what he saw and had not asked her anything, had not given her any information, had simply looked at the situation from across the street and concluded and left.
She could be angry about that. She had some right to be angry about that.
But she also knew something about the decisions you made when you were young and certain and trying to do the right thing by someone you cared about and not entirely sure what the right thing was.
She had made a few of those herself. She had married Mark in that particular spirit, not without love, never without love, but with the specific determination of a woman who had decided that waiting was over and living was what came next and Mark was real and present and good and that was enough to build on.
It had been enough. She did not regret it.
But she sat at her desk in the October light and thought about October sixteen years ago and a younger version of herself standing outside Jensen's Feed and Variety with Mark's hand at the small of her back, and she thought about Ethan sitting in a car across the street watching that and driving away.
She felt the loss of it in a way she had not been able to feel before because she hadn't known there was anything to lose.
What might have been.
She had never let herself think about that directly.
It was the kind of thinking that led nowhere useful and cost a great deal and she had always been too practical for it, too grounded in the actual living of her actual life to spend much time in the hypothetical.
But she sat with it now, just for a moment, because Kali was gone and Kali would have told her to sit with it and stop managing everything into something she could handle.
What might have been if he had come back sooner. If she had not yet met Mark. If Ethan had crossed that street instead of driving away.
She did not know. She could not know. That was the nature of the road not taken, it stayed hypothetical forever, and whatever life existed on the other side of it was not a life she had lived and therefore not a life she could grieve with any specificity.
She could only grieve the not knowing, which was its own particular ache, quieter than she expected.
What still could be.
That was the thought that arrived after the others, quieter than she expected and more persistent.
She was forty one years old and she was sitting in her office on an October afternoon and Ethan Walker had just told her he came back once and saw her and drove away and had been carrying that for sixteen years.
Now he was living four blocks away above the Pine Hollow Herald and coming to sit in the chair across from her desk every few days and she was letting him, and Kali Peterson had said she was the most capable person she knew and also the most alone and those two things were connected.
What still could be.
She sat with that for a long time and then she reached for her phone, and her first thought was Kali, the Wednesday afternoon phone calls, the particular quality of Kali's listening which was complete and unsentimental and always arrived at the truth eventually, and the loss of that hit her fresh and clean the way it kept doing, arriving without warning at odd moments and taking her breath briefly before she found it again.
She could not call Kali.
She sat with that for a moment too, because it deserved a moment, and then she scrolled to Rachel Carter's name and pressed call.
Rachel answered on the second ring with the particular energy of a woman who ran a restaurant and was therefore always in the middle of something but had learned to answer the phone anyway.
"Julie." Warmth immediate and genuine. "Hold on, let me get out of the kitchen."
Julie heard the sounds of the restaurant in the background, the particular noise of a dinner prep that was getting underway, and then a door and relative quiet.
"Sorry," Rachel said. "Tuesday nights are never as slow as I think they're going to be. How are you doing? I've been thinking about you since the funeral."
"I'm all right," Julie said, and then stopped, because she had told Ethan that fine and all right were not the same thing and she was not going to be a hypocrite about it. "Actually I've had a day. I called Jake this morning."
"How is he?"
"Getting through it. The little ones are hard." She paused. "He told me something Kali said. About me."
"Tell me," Rachel said simply, in the way of someone who had time for this and was making that clear.
So Julie told her. About capable and alone and those two things being connected, and Rachel listened the way she always listened, without interrupting, without rushing to fill the space. When Julie finished there was a brief silence that felt like Rachel thinking rather than Rachel being absent.
"Kali was right," Rachel said.
"I know."
"You're the person everyone calls and nobody thinks to call to check on."
"I know that too."
"Do you?" Rachel said, not unkindly. "Because knowing something and actually letting it change anything are two different things, Julie, and you have been knowing that particular thing for a while without it changing much."
Julie looked at the oak tree. The last of the light was leaving it now, the gold fading as the sun dropped, and the tree was becoming its evening self, darker and more settled.
She watched the fallen leaves swirl around the tree and then watched as some of them looked like they were running down the street. She imagined them giggling as they ran.
"Ethan came by this afternoon," she said.
A pause on Rachel's end that had a quality to it. "And?"
"He told me something. He said that he came back once, two years after he left. That he saw me with Mark and drove away."
The pause this time was longer. "Julie."
"I know."
"That man has been carrying that around for what? Seventeen years?"
"I know. About sixteen years, yeah."
"And you've been carrying around the version where he never came back."
"Yes."
Rachel was quiet for a moment. In the background Julie could hear the faint sounds of the restaurant, someone laughing, the clatter of something in the kitchen, the ordinary noise of a Tuesday evening in Pine Hollow. "What are you going to do about it?" Rachel said.
"I don't know yet."
"That's honest at least." A pause. "Eli asked about you yesterday, by the way. He wants to know if you'll come to his Halloween thing at school. He's been telling his class his friend Julie works with dead people and apparently this makes him very popular at this particular time of year."
Julie felt something loosen in her chest. "Of course I'll come."
"He'll be insufferable about it." Rachel's voice carried the particular warmth of a mother who found her child's insufferability completely charming. "He made me promise to ask you. He wants you to sit next to him."
"Tell him I'll sit next to him," Julie said.
"Good." A pause. "Julie. Whatever you're thinking about Ethan. Don't think too hard. You've been thinking hard your whole life and look where it's gotten you."
Julie almost laughed. "That's either very wise or very reckless."
"With you it's the same thing," Rachel said. "I have to get back to the kitchen. Call me tomorrow."
"I will," Julie said. "Thank you, Rachel."
She set the phone down and sat in the quiet of the office as the October evening settled around the funeral home and the oak tree became a dark shape against the darkening sky.
She watched Pine Hollow moved through its Tuesday night without particular awareness of Julie Anderson sitting at her desk thinking about what still could be.
Don't think too hard. You've been thinking hard your whole life and look where it's gotten you.
She was going to go to Eli Carter's Halloween thing at school and sit next to him, which was the easiest decision she had made in weeks, and she was going to call Rachel tomorrow, and she was going to let Ethan Walker sit in the chair across from her desk when he came by and she was not going to manage it quite so carefully as she had been managing it.
That was as far as she was willing to go today.
It was further than yesterday.
For now that was probably enough. Probably.