30. The Space Between #2
"Julie." Rachel's voice was warm and direct and slightly exasperated in the way of a friend who had been listening carefully and had arrived at a conclusion and was not going to pretend otherwise.
"You have spent twenty years being the person who shows up for everyone else's worst moments.
You have been steady and capable and present for every hard thing this town has handed you and you have done it alone because doing it alone felt safer than needing someone who might leave.
" She paused. "Ethan Walker came back. He told you the truth about why he left and what the silence cost him too.
He is sending you a text every morning that asks nothing of you except to know he is still there.
And he bought a house two blocks from the funeral home.
" Another pause, longer this time, with the weight of someone who has said the important part and is giving it room to make sense.
"At some point, Julie, you have to decide whether being safe is worth being alone. "
Julie sat with that thought for a long time.
The kitchen was quiet around her and the late November afternoon light came through the window at its low winter angle.
She thought about safe and alone and whether she had been confusing the two for longer than she wanted to admit.
She thought about Kali bringing muffins on Tuesday mornings and saying she was the most capable person she knew and also the most alone and about those two things being connected.
She thought about what it would look like to stop being afraid.
She thought about whether she even knew how to do that anymore, whether twenty years of managing everything alone had made her incapable of the particular vulnerability of letting someone else carry part of the weight.
Even though she had been married to Mark, she still held everything on her own.
She hadn't known how to let him into that part of her life.
She thought about the maple tree in the backyard of the Hendricks place turning orange-red in October. She thought about not living above the funeral home anymore. The only home she had known for 41 years.
They talked for another half hour about smaller things, the diner and Eli's latest project and what Rachel was planning for the community Thanksgiving.
When they hung up, Julie sat at the kitchen table in the quiet of her Sunday afternoon and thought about safe and alone and the house on Elm Street and what it meant to choose something instead of just surviving it.
On Monday his text said Mondays are blue at the Herald. Dave has opinions about the press.
She laughed out loud at that one, alone in her office, and then covered her mouth like someone might have heard her, and then laughed again because there was no one to hear her and that was exactly the problem.
She thought about Dave in the back of the Herald building with his opinions and his press and his colorful vocabulary and she thought about Ethan upstairs at his table by the window listening to all of it and finding it worth telling her about.
She thought that nobody had ever sent her texts like these before, small and specific and entirely without agenda, and she was not sure what to do with that except to keep reading them and keep not putting the phone face down.
Tuesday: Saw Harold Jensen sweep the same six inches of sidewalk four times this morning. Pine Hollow is well.
She smiled at that one too. She was smiling at his texts more than she was ready to admit.
When she went to get her hair done that afternoon, she was fairly certain Lila Monroe had noticed something because Lila noticed everything, but Lila had the grace not to say anything directly which Julie appreciated enormously.
Wednesday: The maple on Elm Street is doing something interesting in the wind today. Thought you should know.
She read that one at her desk and felt it touch her differently than the others.
He was driving past the Hendricks place.
He was looking at his maple tree in the late November wind and thinking about her and telling her about it, not the oak tree outside her office window but his own tree, the tree in the yard of the house he had bought.
The house he had bought in Pine Hollow because he was staying.
She sat at her desk for a long time looking at those words and feeling the thing in her chest that she had been carefully not examining all week get considerably harder to ignore.
Thursday was Thanksgiving.
The Annual Pine Hollow Community Thanksgiving Gathering was held in the Grange Hall the way it had been held in the Grange Hall for as long as Julie could remember, the tables pushed together end to end and the town bringing whatever they brought and the whole room smelling like every good thing anyone had ever cooked in a Minnesota November.
Julie brought her grandmother's sweet potato casserole and arrived early to help set up.
She told herself very firmly that she was not thinking about whether Ethan would be there.
He was there.
Of course he was there. He was Pine Hollow now, or he was becoming Pine Hollow again, and the Annual Pine Hollow Community Thanksgiving Gathering was not optional for people who lived here and intended to keep living here.
He had signed papers on a house on Elm Street to prove it.
He came in with Adam and Hannah and was wearing a dark green sweater.
He looked exactly like himself, which was the thing that kept getting her, how completely and entirely himself he was in this town, how naturally he moved through the room shaking hands and talking to people and bending down to say something to one of Jake's children that made the child laugh.
She felt him notice her from across the room the way she always felt him notice her, that particular quality of attention that had her name on it and always had.
They did not go to each other.
That was the agreement, not stated but understood, the agreement that she had asked for and he was honoring with the same deliberateness he brought to everything.
They spent the afternoon on opposite sides of the Grange Hall being perfectly pleasant to the town that had known them both their entire lives and being excruciatingly aware of each other the entire time.
It was, Julie thought, one of the more demanding things she had done in recent memory, and she had spent twenty years sitting with people in the worst moments of their lives.
Lila Monroe appeared at her elbow approximately forty minutes in with a plate of something and the expression of a woman who had been observing and had opinions she was about to share whether asked for or not.
"He keeps looking over here," Lila said, without preamble.
"Lila."
"I'm just observing," Lila said, with the satisfied expression of someone who had made their point and intended to stand by it. "I'm allowed to observe."
"You are always observing," Julie said.
"Someone has to," Lila said, and went back to her food with the air of a woman who had done her civic duty.
Julie ate some of her own sweet potato casserole and watched the room and thought about what Rachel had said about safe and alone, and thought about the maple tree on Elm Street moving in the December wind, and once, just once, she let herself look directly at Ethan across the hall, and he was already looking at her, and neither of them looked away for a moment that lasted longer than it should have and less long than she wanted, and then Harold Jensen said something to him and he turned and she turned and Pine Hollow went on around them and she was glad for the noise of it because the quiet between them was becoming something she could not ignore much longer.
She went home alone through the November dark and stood in her kitchen and her phone lit up on the counter.
Thankful for this town. Thankful you were in the same room today.
She stood in her kitchen for a long time looking at that text and not putting the phone down. She thought about the house on Elm Street and the maple tree in the wind and eighteen years and the answer she was not ready to give yet but was getting closer to every single day.
She was getting closer.
She could feel it.
And she thought that was probably enough for tonight.