18. Two Popcorns
Chapter eighteen
Two Popcorns
She had said yes before she fully thought it through.
That was not how she usually did things.
She was a person who thought things through, who considered and weighed and arrived at decisions deliberately and with full awareness of what she was deciding.
It was how she ran the funeral home and how she managed her days and how she had built the life she had, carefully and with intention, and it had served her well for a long time.
Ethan had knocked on the door on a Thursday afternoon with his coffee from Hayes and his jacket and that expression, the one she still did not have a name for.
He had sat in the chair and they had talked about nothing in particular for a while the way they had been talking about nothing in particular for weeks.
Then he had said there was a movie playing in Alexandria on Saturday evening and he thought she might like it and would she want to go, and she had said yes.
Just like that. Yes.
She had thought about it afterward, naturally, had turned it over in the careful way she turned things over, and she had arrived at the conclusion that yes was the right answer and that the speed of it was not recklessness but something else, something closer to what Rachel had said about thinking too hard and where it had gotten her.
She had decided to leave it at yes and not examine it further.
It was a movie. It was Alexandria. It was two people who were being honest with each other about what they were and were not, which was more than she had managed with most people in her adult life.
He picked her up at six.
She had changed three times, which she was not going to tell anyone, not even Rachel, whom she considered a good friend, and had ended up in dark jeans and a green sweater that Kali had told her once brought out her eyes.
She had stood in front of the mirror for a moment thinking about that and then reached for her coat.
It had been a warmer day than October usually managed, the kind of day that felt like a gift and probably wasn't going to last. She had stood in her closet for a moment looking between her heavier coat and the light jacket and chosen the light jacket because the day had earned it.
She would probably be fine.
He was at the door in a jacket and jeans and he looked at her the way he had been looking at her since the wedding, like she was something he was paying attention to, and she received that and did not look away from it the way she might have a month ago.
"You look nice," he said.
"Thank you," she said. "So do you."
They drove to Alexandria in his car, which was a forty minute drive through the October dark on roads that were familiar to her from her whole life, the flat Minnesota landscape doing its evening thing on either side of them, the occasional farm light punctuating the dark.
They talked easily the way they had been talking easily, about the town and the Herald and something funny Harold Jensen had done at the feed store that week that Claire had told Hannah who had told apparently everyone.
It was comfortable in a way that she noticed and did not entirely trust and also did not want to give up.
The theater in Alexandria was not large.
It was the kind of theater that had been there for decades and had been updated just enough to keep going and not enough to lose its particular character.
Julie appreciated that they had switched all the theater seats to recliner seating which made watching a movie comfortable.
On this particular Saturday evening in October it was doing a reasonable business, enough people that they were not conspicuous and not so many that it felt crowded.
Ethan held the door.
At the concession stand he turned to her and said what do you want and she said popcorn and a diet soda and he nodded and ordered hers and then ordered his own, a separate bag, a separate drink.
She watched him do it with the deliberate care of a man who had thought about this.
She wasn't sure what she felt for sure about this, but she knew she was feeling something that felt like kindness toward him.
He was being careful with her. He had been being careful with her since the night outside the Grange Hall and she had been receiving that care with the wariness of someone who had learned that care could be withdrawn.
But standing in the concession line of a movie theater in Alexandria watching him order two separate popcorns she felt the wariness ease slightly and something else take up a little of the space it left.
They found seats in the middle of the theater, not too close and not too far, and they sat down next to each other.
She settled her popcorn in her lap and her drink in the cupholder and looked at the screen.
She was aware of him beside her with a specificity that had nothing to do with the movie and everything to do with the fact that there were approximately four inches between his arm and hers and she was conscious of every one of them.
When they were seventeen they had shared a popcorn.
She remembered that without deciding to, the specific memory of the bag between them and reaching in at the same time and their hands finding each other in the dark, which had been the whole point of the shared popcorn, both of them knowing it and neither of them saying so.
She had been seventeen and her heart had been doing something ridiculous.
She had thought that holding hands in a movie theater in the dark was possibly the best thing that had ever happened to her.
She looked at her own popcorn in her own lap.
She was forty one years old and she was at the movies with Ethan Walker and they each had their own popcorn and their own drink and there was four inches of careful space between them and it was completely different from being seventeen and also, in the particular way that some things were, exactly the same.
The movie was good. She did not remember afterward what it was about in any specific way, which she suspected said something about the quality of her attention, but she laughed at the right moments and followed the story well enough and was present for it in the way she was present for most things, which was to say competently and with part of her mind somewhere else entirely.
The somewhere else was the four inches between them.
He did not move to close it. She had half expected him to, some gradual and deniable shift toward her in the dark the way men sometimes did, but he did not, he sat exactly where he had sat when they sat down and kept his eyes on the screen and his popcorn in his own lap.
She found that the not-moving was somehow more significant than moving would have been.
He was letting her set the pace. She understood that clearly and it was doing something to her in a quiet way she had not anticipated, because she was so accustomed to managing everything herself, to being the one who made the decisions about what she could handle and what she couldn't, and here was someone simply waiting for her to decide without making her feel the weight of the waiting.
Halfway through the movie she became aware that her right hand was resting on the armrest between them.
She had not put it there deliberately. Or she had and had not been deliberate about the deliberateness, which was its own kind of information.
It was just resting there on the armrest in the dark and Ethan's left hand was in his lap and there were still four inches between them but the armrest was shared territory and she had claimed half of it. She left her hand where it was.
He glanced at her once, just briefly, and she kept her eyes on the screen and he looked back at the screen and neither of them said anything and her hand stayed where it was for the rest of the movie.
It was not hand holding. It was an armrest. It was nothing.
It was not nothing at the same time.
Afterward they walked out of the theater and into the October night and she understood immediately that she had miscalculated with the light jacket.
The temperature had dropped while they were inside, the way October temperatures in Minnesota dropped when the sun went down and its heat no longer took the nip out of the air.
When the air hit her with a cold that the light jacket was simply not equipped for, it momentarily took her breath away.
She did not say anything. She pulled the jacket a little tighter and kept walking and told herself it was only forty minutes and she was fine. The car would have heat and she could make it to the car across the lot without acting like she was a baby who needed a blanket.
Ethan looked at her after a few seconds.
"You're cold," he said.
"I'm fine."
He stopped walking and shrugged off his jacket without discussion and held it out to her. She looked at it for a moment and then at him standing there in just his shirt in the October cold and took it because not taking it would have been stubborn to the point of absurdity.
She put it on.
It was warm from him, which she had expected, and it smelled like him, which she had not prepared for, or had not prepared for adequately.
Something clean underneath and something warmer underneath that, the particular smell of him that apparently had also been stored somewhere in her for eighteen years without her knowledge.
She pulled the jacket around herself and kept walking and did not say anything because there was nothing to say that she was ready to say.
She did say, "Thank you," as she pulled the coat tighter around herself against the biting wind and cold.
They walked to the car and he unlocked it and she got in.
He went around to the driver's side and they drove back to Pine Hollow through the dark and she was wearing his jacket the whole way and the smell of him was around her the whole way.
She kept her eyes on the dark road ahead and talked about ordinary things and was aware of almost nothing else.
He walked her to her door, which she had not expected and which she received without comment. They stood on her front step in the October cold and she looked at him and he looked at her.
She started to take the jacket off.
"Keep it," he said. "It's cold. I'll get it another time."
She looked at him for a moment. "Thank you," she said. "For the jacket. For the movie. For." She stopped.
"For the popcorn," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved.
"For the popcorn," she agreed.
He took a small step back and put his hands in his jeans pockets. "Goodnight, Julie."
"Goodnight, Ethan," she said.
She went inside and closed the door and stood in her hallway still wearing his jacket and listened to his footsteps going down the front walk and then the sound of his car starting and pulling away.
She stood there for a while in the quiet of her house and breathed in the smell of him that was still all around her.
She thought about what that cost him. Ordering two popcorns. Not moving across four inches. Taking a step back on her front porch. Telling her to keep the jacket.
She thought it probably cost him more than she knew.
She went upstairs and hung his jacket carefully over the chair in her bedroom and got ready for bed and lay in the dark and did not think about Horseshoe Lake at all, which was its own kind of progress.
But she thought about his jacket on the chair. She thought about the smell of it and the warmth of it for a long time before she slept.