19. Four Inches
Chapter nineteen
Four Inches
He had thought about the popcorn for three days before he asked her.
That was the part he was not going to tell anyone, not Adam, not anyone, the fact that he had stood in the apartment on a Wednesday evening thinking about whether to get one popcorn or two and what each of those choices meant and what she would make of each of them, and had arrived at two with the certainty of a man who understood that the small things were not small and that Julie Anderson would notice the small things and know exactly what they meant.
Two popcorns. Two drinks. No presumption. No reaching across the space between them before she was ready for reaching.
He had asked her on Thursday and she had said yes before he finished the sentence and he had walked back to the apartment above the Herald and sat at the table by the window.
He felt something in his chest that he had not felt in a very long time, which was the particular lightness of having asked for something and been given it.
Saturday had taken its time arriving.
He picked her up at six and she came to the door in dark jeans and a green sweater and a light jacket.
She looked exactly like herself, which was the thing he kept noticing about her, how completely and entirely herself she was in a way that most people weren't. He told her she looked nice because she did and she thanked him and they walked to the car and he reminded himself to breathe normally.
He noticed the light jacket and thought about it briefly and said nothing.
It was a warmer day than October usually managed and she had made her choice and it was not his place to second guess it.
Besides there was something in the back of his mind that noted the information and filed it away without telling him exactly why.
The drive to Alexandria was forty minutes through the October dark and it was easy the way things between them had become easy, the conversation moving without effort through the ordinary things, Harold Jensen and the Herald and the town doing its October thing.
He drove and talked and was aware of her in the passenger seat beside him with the specific awareness he had been carrying since the wedding and had stopped pretending was anything other than what it was.
The theater was the kind of theater that had been there for a long time and intended to keep being there.
He held the door and she went in ahead of him.
He bought their tickets and at the concession stand she said popcorn and a diet soda and he ordered hers and then ordered his own.
He felt her watching him do it and did not look at her while he did it because some things were better said without being said.
Two popcorns. He hoped she understood. He was fairly certain she understood.
They found seats and settled into them while the theater filled around them.
He put his popcorn in his lap and his drink in the cupholder and looked at the screen and was aware of the four inches between his arm and hers with a precision that would have been funny if it hadn't been so completely serious.
He had sat next to Julie Anderson in a movie theater when he was seventeen and he had spent the first twenty minutes of whatever they were watching working up to the shared popcorn maneuver, which had been entirely transparent and she had known exactly what he was doing and had let him do it anyway, and when their hands had found each other in the bag she had laughed quietly and he had held her hand for the rest of the movie and walked out of that theater feeling like the whole world had rearranged itself into a better configuration.
He was not going to do the shared popcorn maneuver tonight.
He was going to sit in his seat with his own popcorn and watch the movie and let her set the pace because she had told him she was not ready and he had told her he was not asking her to be ready.
He had meant that, and meaning it and sitting four inches away from her in the dark were two different kinds of discipline but he was capable of both.
The movie was good. He watched it with the part of his attention that was available for watching movies, which was not the majority of his attention, and laughed at the right moments and followed the story and was present enough that he could have told someone afterward what it was about.
He noticed when her hand moved to the armrest.
He did not look at her when it happened.
He kept his eyes on the screen and registered it with the peripheral awareness he had been developing for Julie Anderson since late August, the particular attention that had learned to track her without making her feel tracked.
Her hand on the shared armrest in the dark, not reaching toward him, not quite, just present in the shared space between them.
He left his hand in his lap.
This was possibly the hardest thing he had done since he carried Kali Peterson out of Pine Hollow Community Church, which he recognized was an extreme comparison and also felt accurate.
He left his hand in his lap and kept his eyes on the screen and let her hand be where it was without doing anything about it, because she had put it there on her own terms and on her own timeline and that was exactly where it needed to stay.
He glanced at her once. Just once. She was looking at the screen with the focused attention she brought to things and her hand was on the armrest and her popcorn was in her lap and she did not look at him when he looked at her and he looked back at the screen.
Her hand stayed on the armrest for the rest of the movie.
He was aware of it the entire time. The four inches had become something less than four inches, the shared territory of the armrest doing something that four inches of air had not done, and he sat with that and the movie and his own popcorn and thought about patience and what it meant to choose it rather than just endure it.
He was choosing it. That was the difference. He was not sitting four inches away from Julie Anderson because he had to, because there was nothing else to do, but because she was worth the patience and he knew that with a completeness that he had not known anything with in a very long time.
They came out of the theater and into the October night and he felt it immediately, the drop in temperature, the air doing what October air in Minnesota did when it decided the warmth had gone on long enough.
He looked at Julie in her light jacket and watched her pull it tighter without saying anything and gave it about five seconds.
"You're cold," he said.
"I'm fine," she said.
He stopped and took off his jacket and held it out. She looked at it and then at him and then took it, and he stood there in just his shirt in the October cold and felt the cold not at all. Which he supposed meant something although he was not coming up with a suitable answer.
She put it on.
He watched her put it on and pull it around herself almost like a warm hug.
Then he turned and 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.
He kept his eyes on the road and talked about ordinary things and was aware that she was wearing his jacket the entire way, that the smell of it, of him, was around her.
He did not say anything about that either because some things were better left in the space between people where they could do their work without being named.
Besides, him mentioning his smell to her might seem a little creepy and concerning.
He almost laughed aloud at the absurd thought.
He walked her to her door.
They stood on her front step and she started to shrug the jacket off and he told her to keep it, that it was cold, that he would get it another time, and she looked at him for a moment with the expression he still did not have a clean name for and said thank you, for the jacket and for the movie and for something she did not finish saying.
He finished it for her. For the popcorn.
And she almost smiled, the real one, the one that was not managed or composed but just hers.
He took a step back and put his hands in his pockets.
The urge to do more than say "goodnight" was strong, but he knew nothing else would be appropriate at this time.
"Goodnight, Julie," he said.
"Goodnight, Ethan," she said.
He walked back to his car and drove the four blocks to the Herald and parked around the back.
He sat for a moment before he went upstairs.
He thought about two popcorns and four inches and a hand on an armrest and his jacket around her shoulders and the smell of him that she was going home with whether she wanted to think about that or not.
He thought about patience and what it was building toward and whether he was reading this right and whether it mattered if he was reading it right because he was staying regardless.
He had decided that, and whatever happened between them was going to happen at whatever pace it happened and he was going to be here for it.
He went upstairs.
The apartment was quiet and the street below was quiet and Pine Hollow was doing its Saturday night thing with the particular low key energy of a small town that knew how to be at rest. He made himself a cup of coffee he probably did not need at this hour and stood at the front window and looked out at Main Street in the dark.
Four inches.
It was nothing. It was the distance between two people sitting in a theater watching a movie. It was not a declaration or a promise or anything that could be pointed to and named.
It was not nothing.
He drank his coffee and looked at the dark street and thought that for a man who had spent eighteen years being very good at leaving, he was becoming surprisingly good at staying still.
He thought that was probably progress.
He was fairly certain Julie Anderson thought so too.