16. Not Where They Left Off
Chapter sixteen
Not Where They Left Off
He gave her three days.
That was not a decision exactly, more an awareness that what he had said in her office on Tuesday needed room around it before anything else could happen.
He had put something true into the space between them and she needed time with it and so did he, and showing up at the funeral home the next afternoon the way he had been doing would have been the wrong thing regardless of how much he wanted to.
So he worked. He got up at six and made coffee and sat at the table by the front window and worked until two and then walked, the way he had been walking since he arrived in Pine Hollow, covering the same streets and the same routes with the town doing its October thing around him, the leaves coming down now in earnest, the air carrying the particular cold that Minnesota air carried when it was done being polite about the changing season and had decided to get on with it.
He was actually getting into better shape than he had been in a while with all the walking.
He was hearing a lot of talk about the coming winter and whether they would get snow early this year.
He went out to the farm and helped Adam with a field of corn.
It took him a while to get the feel for the machinery again, but it was a lot like riding a bike, once the muscle memory kicked in, you were able to do the thing quickly and easily.
He'd had to ask Adam a few times on a few things, but soon he was out in the field with the tractor and the corn picker and was getting the work done which would help Adam out a lot.
Two "hands" were better than one in this case.
He also walked past the funeral home twice in three days without stopping.
He was aware of how that looked and did not particularly care because there was no one inside his own head, except himself, to look at it and he had stopped performing for the audience of himself somewhere around the second day after he told Julie the truth and felt the particular lightness of having put something down that he had been carrying too long.
He thought about what came next.
That was the thing he kept returning to, sitting at his window in the evenings with the Herald building quiet below him and Main Street doing its October business outside, the question of what came next.
Not in the abstract, not in the way he had been thinking about it since he drove into Pine Hollow seven weeks ago, but specifically and practically.
What did he actually want and was he prepared to do what it took to get there and what did it take and was he the kind of person who could give it?
It was a lot of questions and he was not sure he had good answers to any of them.
He knew what he wanted. That part was simple, had been simple since the wedding if he was honest, had probably been simple for longer than that if he was willing to go back further than was comfortable.
He wanted Julie Anderson. Not the seventeen year old version of her that he had left behind and not some hypothetical version of her that existed in the years he had missed, but this one, the forty-one year old woman who ran the Anderson Funeral Home alone and cried at Kali Peterson's funeral and said "old habit" in a voice that was trying to be lighter than it was and let him sit in the chair across from her desk because some part of her that she was not quite ready to name wanted him there.
That was what he wanted.
What it took was the harder question.
He had spent eighteen years being good at leaving.
That was the blunt truth of it, the thing he had been circling around since he got here and had not yet said out loud to anyone including himself.
He was good at arriving somewhere and setting up a routine and doing his work and being pleasant company and then, when the not-quite-home feeling became something he could not ignore, moving on to the next city and the next apartment and the next version of the same life in a different location.
He had gotten very efficient at it. He had told himself it was freedom and sometimes it had felt like freedom and sometimes it had felt like something else entirely that he did not examine too closely.
Pine Hollow did not feel like somewhere he was going to be able to leave easily.
That was new. That was genuinely new, in a way that the other cities had never been new, and he was trying to understand what it meant and whether he trusted it or whether it was just the particular pull of familiarity, of coming back to the place where everything important about him had happened and feeling the weight of it and mistaking that weight for belonging.
He did not think he was mistaking it. He thought about Kali and the weight of responsibility he had taken there.
He thought about Adam and the commitment he had made to his brother to be his best man knowing it would mean seeing Julie again.
He thought about belonging again. He had never felt like he had belonged in any of the previous places he had lived.
He thought about his work, which could be done from anywhere, which had always been the thing that made leaving easy.
It had never before occurred to him that the same fact could make staying easy.
That anywhere included here. That the apartment above the Herald with its two windows and its view of Main Street was as valid a place to open a laptop at eight in the morning as Seattle or Portland or Austin, and considerably more interesting to look out the window of.
He thought about Adam and the farm and the particular ease of being around his brother again, the two of them on the porch steps with coffee in the September morning, the thirty years of shared history that required no explanation and no performance.
He had not understood how much he had missed that until he had it back.
He thought about Hannah stopping him in the hallway of the Herald on his way out one morning and asking how he was settling in with the specific quality of attention that meant she was actually asking and not just being polite, and him saying fine and her looking at him for a moment and saying Pine Hollow agrees with you, you know, and moving on before he had to respond to it.
He thought about Kali Peterson naming him as someone who should carry her, and what that had meant, and the weight of the casket in his hands and what it had felt like to do that right.
He thought about Julie.
He could not think about Pine Hollow without thinking about Julie, which was probably information.
On the third day he walked to the funeral home and knocked.
She answered more quickly than she had on Tuesday, which meant she had either been expecting him or had been close to the door.
She looked at him with the expression she had been wearing since Tuesday, the one he did not have a clean name for yet, something between careful and open, like a door that was not all the way closed anymore and had not yet decided how far it was going to go.
"Ethan," she said.
"Hey," he said. "I brought coffee."
He held up the two cups from Hayes Coffee and she looked at them and then at him and something moved at the corner of her mouth.
"Come in," she said.
He followed her to the office and she sat behind her desk and he sat in the chair he always sat in.
He put one of the cups on her side of the desk and kept the other.
For a moment neither of them said anything.
It was the same comfortable quiet it had always been and also completely different from what it had always been, because Tuesday had happened and the thing he had said was still in the room with them and both of them knew it.
"I've been thinking," he said.
"So have I," she said.
He grabbed his cup in one hand. He moved it closer to his mouth, but then pulled it away again. "I don't think we can go back," he said. "To where we were. To seventeen."
"No," she said. "We can't."
"Too much happened."
"Too much happened," she agreed.
He looked at her across the desk. She was looking back at him with the clear steady attention he had been trying to get used to for six weeks and had not gotten used to, was not sure he was going to get used to, was not sure he wanted to.
"I'm not interested in going back," he said. "I want to be clear about that. I'm not here because I want to recover something we lost. I don't think you can recover something like that and I don't think trying would be good for either of us."
She was very still in the way she went still when she was listening completely.
"I'm here because of who you are now," he said.
"Because of what I've seen in the last six weeks.
Because you cried at Kali's funeral and you gave roses to eleven children at a graveside and you called Jake three days later to check on him because it was your job and also because he mattered to you.
Those two things are not the same thing even when they look like it from the outside.
" He stopped. "I'm here because of who you became while I was gone.
Not despite the years. Because of them."
The office was very quiet.
Outside the oak tree moved in the October wind and a few of the remaining leaves came loose and drifted past the window. Julie sat behind her desk and looked at him with that expression he did not have a name for. He waited and let her have the silence because it was hers and she had earned it.
"That is possibly the most honest thing anyone has said to me in a very long time," she said finally.
"I'm done not being honest," he said. "I was not honest when I was nineteen and I drove away from Pine Hollow without saying what needed saying and I spent eighteen years paying for that in ways I didn't fully understand until I came back here and sat in this chair and remembered what it felt like to be in the same room as you. "
She looked at her coffee cup. Then at him.
"I'm not ready," she said. "I want to be clear about that too. I'm not ready for whatever this is or whatever it might become and I don't know when I will be and I can't promise you anything about that."
"I'm not asking you to promise me anything," he said. "I'm asking you to let me bring you coffee sometimes and sit in this chair and be honest with you and let you be honest back. That's the whole of what I'm asking right now."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"I can do that," she said.
He nodded and this time he put the cup to his mouth and drank. Julie picked up hers, too, and let herself enjoy the moment. Outside the October wind moved through the oak tree and Pine Hollow went about its afternoon and neither of them said anything else for a while.
They did not need to.
They were not where they had been at seventeen.
They were not going back there and they were not trying to.
They were two people in their forties sitting across a desk from each other in the October afternoon with coffee and honesty and the particular possibility of something that had not existed yet, and that was enough.
It was, Ethan thought, more than enough.
It was a beginning.