25. Hannahs Table
Chapter twenty-five
Hannah's Table
Hannah Walker set a beautiful table.
Julie had known this about her in the abstract, had heard it from people around Pine Hollow and had seen the evidence of it at the wedding, but sitting at the farmhouse table on a November evening with the good dishes and the candles and the bread basket and the particular warmth of a house that had been cooked in all day, she understood it in a more specific way.
Hannah did not set a table to impress. She set a table because she believed that the people sitting at it deserved something beautiful to look at while they ate, which was a different thing entirely and considerably more meaningful.
Julie had brought wine, a red she had picked up in Alexandria on Thursday without knowing exactly why, and Hannah had opened it immediately and poured four glasses with the ease of a hostess who made every contribution feel expected and welcome.
They had settled in the living room while Adam and Ethan went out to the grill.
The farmhouse did its November evening thing around them, warm and unhurried and smelling like everything good.
Everything seemed so perfect down to the crackling fire in the fireplace.
She had been in this farmhouse before, over the years, the way you had been in most places in a town the size of Pine Hollow, for one occasion or another, a harvest gathering when Adam's father was still alive, a potluck the church had organized one winter, the kind of event that brought Pine Hollow through each other's doors with enough regularity that most houses felt at least partially familiar.
But she had not been here since Hannah, and Hannah had done something to the place that was hard to name precisely but immediately felt.
The quilt on the back of the sofa. The books on the side table with their cracked spines that meant they had been read rather than merely displayed.
The small framed photographs on the mantle, Adam and Hannah at the wedding, Hannah with a woman who was probably her sister, a landscape that looked like it might be somewhere Hannah had been before Pine Hollow.
The flower boxes she could see through the window even in the November dark, empty now but still there, waiting for spring.
Hannah had put herself into the walls of this house and it had become something different from what it had been before.
Julie looked around the living room and thought about what it meant to do that.
To make a place yours so completely that it changed the nature of the place.
She had done it with the funeral home, she supposed, had been doing it her entire life without thinking of it that way, but the funeral home was her work and her inheritance and her obligation all at once and it was hard to know where she ended and it began.
She had never done it anywhere else. Had never made anywhere else entirely hers.
She thought about that without quite knowing why and then knew exactly why and looked at her wine glass.
Hannah tucked her feet under her on the armchair and looked at Julie with the expression Julie had come to recognize as Hannah about to say something direct.
"You look different," Hannah said.
"Different how," Julie said.
"Lighter," Hannah said. "Like you put something down that you had been carrying for a long time and your posture hasn't caught up with the fact that it's gone yet."
Julie looked at her. "That's a very specific observation."
"I notice things," Hannah said, without apology. "It's why Adam married me. Well. One of the reasons." Hannah laughed. It was a lighthearted laugh which immediately brought a smile to Julie's face. Or maybe she was just thinking about the reason she was lighter now.
Outside she could hear the low murmur of the men's voices on the porch, not the words, just the particular sound of two brothers talking in the way that brothers talked when they had things to say that required the cover of an outdoor task.
She had heard that sound before, years ago, Adam and Ethan's father on this same porch with one of his brothers, and the familiarity of it moved through her in a way that was not quite grief and not quite nostalgia but something in between.
It had been the day she had come to pick up Ethan's mother when she had passed away during the night.
She let the memory fade and came back to the immediate conversation with Hannah.
"I might have put some things down," Julie said.
"Good," Hannah said simply, as though that was the whole of what needed saying, which it probably was.
They sat in the comfortable quiet of two women who had enough between them not to need to fill every moment.
Julie let the warmth of the room and the wine and the smell of Hannah's cooking, and the smell of the steaks being grilled do what they were doing, which was making her feel like a person who was allowed to be somewhere warm on a November evening without having anywhere else to be.
That was rarer than it should have been. She was aware of that.
"Can I ask you something?" Julie said.
"Always," Hannah said.
"When you came to Pine Hollow," Julie said. "When you first came. Were you scared?"
Hannah considered that with the seriousness it deserved, setting her wine glass on the side table and looking at the fire that Adam had built before they arrived, because of course he had, because Adam Walker built fires before his guests arrived in November without being asked and without mentioning it.
"Yes," she said. "Not of Pine Hollow. Pine Hollow was easier than I expected, which surprised me because I had heard things about small towns and how they received, or didn't receive outsiders.
But Pine Hollow was warmer than any of that.
" She paused. "I was scared of what I was feeling.
Of how fast it was happening and how certain it felt and how little I trusted that certainty because I had been wrong about things before and being wrong about this felt like something I could not survive. "
Julie thought about certainty and what it felt like at seventeen and what it felt like at forty one and the difference between them, the way certainty at seventeen had been absolute and unexamined and certainty now came with the full knowledge of everything that could go wrong and the decision to proceed anyway.
"How did you know you weren't wrong?" she said.
"I didn't," Hannah said. "Not for a long time.
I just decided that being wrong about this was a risk I was willing to take because not taking it was a certainty I wasn't willing to live with.
" She looked at Julie steadily and with the particular attention of a woman who chose her words carefully and meant all of them.
"You have been living with that certainty for a long time, Julie.
The certainty of not taking the risk. The certainty of the life you have built around not needing anyone to show up for you because you have made yourself so capable that needing feels like weakness. "
Julie was quiet for a moment. The fire crackled and the farmhouse settled around them and outside the voices on the porch had gone quieter, more serious, and she wondered what they were saying and thought she might have an idea.
"He makes me feel like myself," she said.
It came out simpler than she expected, simpler than the complicated thing she had been carrying around since late August, and the simplicity of it surprised her and then did not surprise her because the simplest true things were always the ones that had been waiting the longest to be said.
"Not the funeral director version of myself or the capable version or the version that has everything managed.
Just myself. The version that is not performing anything for anyone. "
"That's everything," Hannah said.
"It's terrifying," Julie said.
"That's how you know it's real," Hannah said. "The things that are not terrifying are the things that are not asking anything of you. The things worth having always ask something."
Julie sat with that for a moment and then said, "I know," which was true, and then said, "I have known that for a long time and have been finding ways not to act on it," which was also true and more honest than she usually was with people she had not known for very long.
But Hannah had a quality that made honesty feel like the natural register of conversation rather than something you had to work up to.
They went to the kitchen then, the natural migration of women toward the work of a meal, and Julie helped Hannah with the gravy while the potatoes finished in the oven and the corn stayed warm on the back burner and the bread came out golden and fragrant and filling the kitchen with the smell of it.
They worked side by side in the easy way of women who were becoming friends without having made a decision to, the friendship simply arriving the way certain things arrived, without announcement or ceremony.
They talked about the Herald and the Peterson children and the way Pine Hollow changed in November when the tourists who had come for the summer were gone and the town was entirely itself again.
Underneath the ordinary things was the warmth of the conversation from the living room sitting in Julie's chest like something she was going to carry home and look at more carefully in the quiet of her own house.
The men came in from the porch with the steaks and brought the cold air in with them.
Adam set the platter on the table and looked at Hannah with the expression he always had when he looked at Hannah, which was the expression of a man who knew exactly how lucky he was and had not for a single day taken it for granted.
Julie glanced at Ethan and found him already looking at her.
He smiled. The real one. The one that was not managed or performed or offered as anything other than exactly what it was.