30. The Space Between
Chapter thirty
The Space Between
She had asked for time and he was giving it to her and she was not entirely sure what to do with that.
That was the thing she had not anticipated, the particular discomfort of having exactly what she asked for.
She had asked for space and he had given her space.
She had expected to feel relieved and instead she felt the absence of him like a weather change, something in the atmosphere of her days that was different and noticeable and not entirely welcome.
She had managed alone for five years after Mark and had been managing alone considerably longer than that in every way that mattered, and she had been fine. She had always been fine.
The fine felt different now and she did not entirely know what to do with that either.
She got up on Friday morning and made her coffee and stood at the window looking at the Anderson Funeral Home sign and thought about everything he had said in the back booth of Rachel's and thought about the house on Elm Street and thought about him saying, "I am not going anywhere," and then her phone lit up on the counter.
She looked at it.
Still here. Have a good day.
That was all. No pressure in it, no expectation, no question she was required to answer.
Nothing that said she had to answer at all.
Just those six words sitting on her screen in the early morning light.
She stood at her kitchen window with her coffee and looked at them and felt something happen in her chest that she was not going to examine too closely yet.
She had asked for time and he was giving her time.
But it appeared that he was also making sure she knew that the giving was not the same as leaving.
She understood the difference and she appreciated it more than she was ready to say.
A small smile perched on her lips for a brief moment.
Brief, but there. She acknowledged it and went back to thinking in the more abstract.
She did not text back. She had asked for time and she was going to take it properly, which meant not letting a six word text pull her back before she was ready. But she did not put the phone face down either, which was its own kind of story.
The days had a different quality that week.
She went to work and she handled the things that needed handling and she made her calls and did her paperwork and was steady and professional and competent in all the ways she had always been steady and professional and competent, and underneath all of that she was thinking about Ethan Walker with a constancy that she found both inconvenient and impossible to stop.
Having two funerals to prepare for and one cremation helped keep her mind focused on other things.
However, her mind would drift back to the prep room and the time a couple of months earlier when Ethan had held her and let her fall apart as she prepared her friend Kali for the grave.
She thought about the fear. About him being seventeen and terrified of how much he felt and leaving because the feeling was too large to stay inside.
She had known that feeling, too. It had been nearly overwhelming.
At seventeen and then eighteen and then nineteen and wanting more than she had ever wanted from another human being and feeling that he had wanted the same as her.
She turned that over carefully, the way she turned difficult things over, and she found that she understood it more than she wanted to and less than she needed to.
She understood it because she had been afraid too, was afraid right now, was sitting in her office on a Friday afternoon with the oak tree bare outside the window thinking that letting Ethan Walker all the way in was the most frightening thing she had considered doing since she decided to keep running the funeral home alone after Mark died.
She understood fear. She had built her entire adult life around managing it.
What she could not entirely forgive was the silence. The fear she understood. The eighteen years of nothing she was still working on.
She thought about the house on Elm Street more than she thought about anything else.
The Hendricks place. She knew that house.
She had known it her whole life the way she knew most things in Pine Hollow, thoroughly and without having to think about it.
The porch had been sagging on one side for at least three years.
The maple tree in the backyard was the kind of maple that turned the particular orange-red in October that made people stop on the sidewalk and look.
She had driven and walked past it a thousand times and never once imagined that it would become the most significant piece of real estate in her life.
But here she was thinking about it every morning with her coffee and what it meant that he had not rented it or leased it but bought it, actually bought it, signed papers and taken on a mortgage in Pine Hollow, Minnesota in December which was not the behavior of a man who was planning to leave when things got difficult.
She knew that. She was sitting with that. She was just not ready to do anything with it yet.
Saturday his text said Thought about you today. Nothing new there.
She read it twice and set the phone down and went back to what she was doing and picked the phone up again twenty minutes later and read it one more time.
She thought about what it meant that he had been thinking about her and had said so plainly without asking her to do anything about it, without making it a question or a pressure or a thing she owed him a response to.
Just a simple statement of fact. He had been thinking about her.
Nothing new there. She set the phone down and did not pick it up again for two hours, which was progress of a kind.
Sunday: The Herald building makes interesting sounds on Sunday mornings. Thought you should know.
She smiled at that one. She put the phone in her pocket and went to make her tea and stood at the kitchen window and thought about the apartment above the Herald and Ethan in it on a Sunday morning listening to an old building talk to itself.
She thought about what it meant that he had thought to tell her that, the specific detail of it, the way it was so entirely him, and she stood at the window for a long time before she made herself go back to what she was doing.
She called Rachel on Sunday afternoon.
Rachel answered on the second ring with the particular alertness of a woman who had been expecting the call and was not going to say so.
"How are you doing?" Rachel asked.
"I don't know yet," Julie said, which was the most honest answer she had at the moment.
"That sounds about right for where you are," Rachel said.
Julie sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the grain of the wood and thought about all the conversations she had had at this table, with Mark and before Mark and after Mark, and thought that this kitchen had seen a significant portion of her adult life and had kept its own counsel about all of it, which was more than could be said for most things in Pine Hollow.
"He bought the Hendricks place," she said.
Rachel was quiet for a moment. "The one on Elm Street?"
"Yes."
"That's a real house, Julie. That's not a summer rental."
"I know that."
"That's a man who is telling you something with his actions rather than just his words," Rachel said.
"Not that his words weren't something. Eli came home that night and told me that Ethan looked at you like you were the only person in the restaurant and wanted to know if that meant you were going to get married.
I had to fight the smile. Then I told him that was a conversation for another time, and he accepted that and went back to his T-rexabot.
" Rachel paused. "He also informed me that if you did get married he expected to be the ring bearer and that his T-rexabot could carry the rings because it had remote controlled arms and that would be more interesting than a pillow. "
Julie felt the corner of her mouth pull up despite herself. "That child." Then just the thought of a T-rexabot carrying the rings at her wedding, her wedding to Ethan, made her laugh out loud.
Rachel laughed, too.
"Eli loves you," Rachel said simply. "He has always loved you.
He would like you to be happy, and frankly so would I, and so would the rest of Pine Hollow which has been watching this situation develop since August with the patience of people who have absolutely nothing better to do. " Rachel laughed, again.
"That is not comforting," Julie said.
"It's not meant to be comforting," Rachel said. "It's meant to be accurate." A pause. "What are you afraid of?"
It was not a question exactly, just an opening, the way Rachel made openings, clean and direct and leaving plenty of room for whatever needed to come through it.
Julie looked at the table. "That it won't be different this time. That I will let him all the way in and build something real with him and one day Pine Hollow will start feeling small again and he will just." She stopped. "Go."
"That loving me will scare him too much. That he will leave without a word again."
"He bought a house," Rachel said.
"People sell houses. Or just leave them to rot away all the time."