17. The Farm Table
Chapter seventeen
The Farm Table
Hannah had set the table before he arrived, which meant the kitchen smelled like roasted chicken and something with butter and the particular warmth of a house that had been lived in and cooked in and was entirely itself, and Ethan stood in the doorway for a moment before he came in because there was something about it that required a moment.
He had eaten at this table his whole childhood.
His mother's table, then after she had passed away, just his father's table, and then for a long time just Adam's table, and now it was Adam and Hannah's table with the flower boxes on the porch outside and a quilt on the back of the sofa that had not been there before and the particular quality of a house that had someone happy in it, which changed a house in ways that were hard to name but immediately felt.
"Sit down," Hannah said, coming in from the kitchen with a dish of green beans. "Adam is washing up."
He sat. Hannah moved between the kitchen and the table with the ease of someone who knew exactly where everything was and had opinions about where it should go.
He watched her and thought about what Adam had said at the wedding, that Hannah fixed that, and thought that was probably the most accurate and least adequate description of what Hannah had done for his brother that it was possible to give.
Adam came in from the back of the house, still rolling down his sleeves, and sat across from Ethan and looked at him the way Adam had always looked at him, steady and direct and not particularly interested in preamble.
"You look better than you did in August," Adam said.
"I feel better than I did in August."
"Pine Hollow agrees with you."
"Hannah said the same thing." Ethan laughed easily. It was easy to laugh with Adam and Hannah.
Adam glanced at his wife with the expression of a man who had gotten used to his wife being right about things and had made his peace with it.
Hannah set the chicken on the table and sat down and they passed the dishes the way families passed dishes, without ceremony, and for a few minutes the only conversation was the ordinary negotiation of a shared meal.
It was, Ethan thought, one of the better things he had done in eighteen years, sitting at this table.
"How's the work going?" Adam said.
"Good. The remote setup is solid. I've actually been more productive here than I was in Seattle, which I did not expect."
"Fewer distractions," Hannah said.
"Different distractions," Ethan said, and Adam looked at him and said nothing. That was its own kind of statement.
They ate for a while in the comfortable quiet of people who did not need to fill every moment with words.
Outside the kitchen window the October dark had settled over the farm and the yard light was doing its small useful work against it and somewhere in the barn something shifted, a cow mooed and a calf answered and was quiet again.
Adam set down his fork.
"How are things with Julie?" he said.
Not "how are things going" or "how is Julie doing," but "how are things with Julie," which was a specific and intentional phrasing and they both knew it.
Ethan picked up his water glass. "Complicated."
"They were always going to be complicated. Just you coming back here was a complication that Julie probably never saw coming," Hannah said, putting herself into the conversation and giving a woman's point of view.
"I know that."
Adam leaned back in his chair the way he leaned back when he was settling in for something, the particular posture of a man who had decided to say what needed saying and was going to take the time to say it right.
Ethan recognized it. Adam had been doing that since he was twelve years old and it had driven their father crazy and Ethan, who was eight years older, had always found it oddly reassuring.
"You know I was here," Adam said. "When you left. And after."
"I know."
"I watched her." He said it simply, without accusation, just information.
"Not in any particular way. Just the way you watch people you've known your whole life in a town this size.
She married Mark and she ran the funeral home and she was good at both of those things and she was fine. " A pause. "She was always fine."
Hannah was back to eating quietly in the way of someone who had heard some of this before and was letting it go where it needed to go.
"Fine is a word that covers a lot of ground," Ethan said.
"It is," Adam agreed. "Julie Anderson has been covering a lot of ground with it for a long time." He looked at his brother. "She cried at Kali's funeral."
"I know. I was there."
"I've known Julie my whole life," Adam said.
"I have never seen her cry at a funeral.
Not once. Not even at Mark's." He let that sit for a moment.
"Whatever you're doing by showing up at the funeral home and sitting in that office, it's doing something.
I don't know if she'd admit that but it's true. "
Ethan thought about Tuesday and what he had told her and the way she had looked at him after, the expression he still did not have a clean name for.
"I told her I came back," he said. "That first time. That I saw her with Mark and drove away."
Adam was quiet for a moment. "How did she take it?"
"She didn't fall apart. She didn't get angry. She just." He stopped. "She sat with it. The way she sits with things now apparently. I honestly didn't know what to think because she didn't really react at all."
"That's Julie," Hannah said quietly. It was the first thing she had said in a while and they both looked at her.
"She processes things slowly and completely and privately and by the time she tells you what she thinks she has already been through the whole of it by herself.
" A pause. "That can look like composure from the outside. It is not always composure."
Ethan thought about that.
"She told me she wasn't ready," he said. "That she couldn't promise anything."
"Did you expect her to be ready?" Adam said. It was not a pointed question. It was a genuine one.
"No," Ethan said honestly. "No I didn't. I just wanted her to know the truth. I was tired of her not knowing the truth."
Adam nodded slowly. He reached for the bread in the middle of the table and broke a piece and looked at it and then at his brother.
"You know what I think about you leaving," he said.
"I've never said it directly and I'm not going to turn it into a thing tonight.
But I want you to know that I think you leaving was the right thing for you at nineteen and I think the leaving after that, the staying away, that was something else. "
Ethan looked at his plate.
"You were running," Adam said. "Not from Pine Hollow.
From the version of yourself that existed here.
The one that had made a mistake and didn't know how to come back from it.
" He said it without heat, the way he said things that were true and did not need to be dramatic about it.
"That version of you is still here, Ethan.
He's been here the whole time waiting for you to come back and deal with him. "
The kitchen was quiet. Outside the wind moved through the yard blowing the leaves in small tornadoes of movement. The yard light held its small circle against the dark. Hannah refilled Adam's water glass without being asked.
"I know," Ethan said.
"I'm not saying it to make you feel bad," Adam said.
"I'm saying it because you're my brother and you're sitting at my table and you look like a man who is trying to figure out if he's allowed to stay and I want to be clear that you are.
Pine Hollow is still yours. It didn't stop being yours because you left. "
Ethan looked at him. Adam was thirty-three years old and he had never lived anywhere but this farm and he was the most settled person Ethan knew and also, he was realizing, one of the wisest, which was the kind of thing you missed when you were the older brother and had spent too long assuming you knew more.
"You're younger than me," Ethan said.
"I know," Adam said, with the small satisfaction of someone who had been waiting a long time to be right about something in front of his older brother.
Hannah laughed, a genuine delighted laugh, and the tension in the kitchen broke into something warmer and easier.
Adam refilled everyone's plates, this time the plates being passed instead of the food dishes, and the conversation moved to other things, the farm and the winter coming and the Herald and Hannah's plans for a special edition in November.
Ethan sat at the table where he had grown up and ate chicken and potatoes and green beans and felt the particular weight of being known by people who had known him before he became whoever he was now.
It was a good weight.
The drive back to Pine Hollow was twenty minutes through the October dark and he made it with the windows down despite the cold because the air smelled like the farm and fallen leaves and he was not ready to give that up yet.
He thought about what Adam had said. About the version of himself that had made a mistake and didn't know how to come back from it. About Pine Hollow still being his.
He thought about Julie saying I'm not ready and meaning it completely and also not closing the door.
He thought about patience. About the difference between waiting and choosing to stay, which he was only just beginning to understand were not the same thing at all.
He was choosing to stay.
That was new. That was the newest thing, newer than the apartment and the coffee from Hayes and the afternoon walks and all of it, the simple fact of choosing rather than just not leaving yet.
He turned onto Main Street and parked behind the Herald building. He sat in the car for a moment looking up at the dark windows of the Herald and the lit windows of the apartment above it and thought that this was, improbably and completely, home.
He went upstairs.
He had work to do in the morning and Julie Anderson was not ready and that was all right. Pine Hollow was still his and he was staying.
That was enough for tonight.
That was still more than enough. At least for now.