31. Eleven Days
Chapter thirty-one
Eleven Days
He had thought carefully about every text.
That was the thing he was not going to tell anyone, not Adam, not anyone, the fact that he sat at the table by the front window of the apartment above the Herald every morning with his coffee and thought about what to say to Julie Anderson in ten words or less.
He had decided on ten words or less the first morning, standing in the kitchen before six with the November dark outside and that certain stillness and quiet of a building that was mostly empty and the full weight of what he had said the night before still in the room with him.
He had almost called her. He had picked up his phone twice before he put it down because calling was pressure and she had asked him not to push and he was not going to push, but he was also not going to let a full day go by without her knowing he was still here, that he had meant what he said, that the house on Elm Street was not a metaphor but an actual house with an actual porch that needed actual work and he intended to do that work and intended to do it in Pine Hollow for the rest of his life regardless of what Julie decided, though what Julie decided mattered more than anything else on that list.
Ten words. Small and true and asking nothing of her.
Still here. Have a good day.
He sent it and set the phone down and opened his laptop and worked and did not check to see if she had responded because she had asked for time and time meant not hovering over a phone waiting for a reply that she had not promised to give.
He got through three hours of solid work before he checked the phone.
There was nothing from her and he put it back down and told himself that was fine and went back to work and checked it again an hour later.
Still nothing.
He made more coffee and stood at the window and looked down at Main Street doing its Friday morning thing and thought that he had said everything he needed to say and the rest was not his to manage.
He was going to have to find a way to be all right with that because being not all right with it was not going to change anything except the quality of his days.
He had promised her he would give her the time without making her feel like she was punishing him and he intended to mean every word of that promise.
He talked to Adam on Saturday.
He drove out to the farm in the morning and found his brother on the porch with coffee, his threadbare barn jacket and the particular expression of a man who had been expecting this visit and was not going to make anything of it.
Hannah's car was gone, which meant Adam had arranged to be alone, which was its own kind of thing to notice about his younger brother.
"How did it go?" Adam said. His expression said he had already heard how it went from Hannah who had undoubtedly heard it from Lila who would have talked to Rachel about it.
Ethan sat down on the steps and held his coffee mug in front of him.
He looked out at the farm in the December morning, the fields bare and the sky low and grey and the particular stillness of the Walker property in winter that he had grown up with and had not understood he missed until he came back and felt it again like something returning to its proper place.
"I told her everything," he said.
"How did she take it?"
"She told me she didn't love Mark."
Adam was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet when something had more weight than he had anticipated. "Wow. That's a big thing to say out loud."
"It is."
"How did you take it?"
Ethan thought about sitting in the booth and hearing those words come out of her mouth, the particular steadiness of her voice when she said them, the way she had not looked away from him.
"Like it deserved to be taken," he said.
"She built her whole life out of what I left her with and she told me that plainly and directly and I sat with it because I owed her that.
All of it. Every word." He looked at the fields.
"She also said she thought Mark might have died of a broken heart that just had the name cancer attached to it. "
Adam was quiet for a longer moment this time.
"That's a hard thing to carry," Adam said finally.
"She's been carrying it alone," Ethan said. "That's the thing. She has been carrying all of it alone because that is what she does and I am the reason she learned to do it that way. I have to live with that."
Adam nodded slowly. He looked at his coffee and then at the fields and then at Ethan with the steady unhurried attention of a man who had learned that rushing toward conclusions was never as useful as waiting for them to arrive on their own schedule.
"What did she say at the end?" Adam said.
"She said she needed time. That she wasn't saying no but she needed to sit with it before she could tell me what she thought and felt about all of it.
" Ethan wrapped both hands around his mug and brought it slowly to his lips.
"She said she needed me to still be here when she came back. " He took a drink.
Adam looked at him. "And you said?"
"I told her I bought the Hendricks place."
The farm was quiet around them. Somewhere in the barn something shifted and settled, and a crow landed on the fence post at the edge of the yard and looked at them with the frank assessment of a creature that had no opinion about human complications and then flew off.
Adam sat with his coffee and said nothing for a moment in the way he did not say things when he was deciding which of several true things needed to be said first.
"The house on Elm Street," Adam said.
"Yes."
"With the porch that needs work?"
"And the maple tree in the backyard."
Adam looked at him with the expression that meant he had arrived at a conclusion and was deciding how directly to state it. "You know what that is?" he said.
"What is it?"
"That is you finally doing the thing you should have done at twenty-one," Adam said.
"Coming back and staying. Except this time you are doing it right and she knows it.
She just needs to catch up to knowing it the way she knows everything, which is thoroughly and completely and on her own timeline and not yours.
" He picked up his coffee. "Give her the time. She will catch up."
"And if she doesn't?" Ethan said. A serious question. The question that lived underneath everything else and needed to be said out loud occasionally.
Adam looked at him. "She will," he said. "But even if she didn't, you still bought the right house in the right town and you still made the right decision and your life is still better here than it was anywhere else you tried." He paused. "She will though."
They sat on the porch for a while longer and talked about the farm and the winter coming and Hannah's plans for the spare room that Adam was still pretending not to know about.
Ethan drove back to Pine Hollow through the grey December morning and felt the particular steadiness of having said everything out loud and having had it received clearly.
He sent her Thought about you today. Nothing new there. on Saturday evening.
He had written six versions of that one before he felt like he had gotten it right.
The first two were too long. The third was too earnest in a way that felt like pressure even though it was not intended as pressure.
The fourth was too light, almost jokey, and this was not a jokey situation.
The fifth was closer but still not right.
The sixth was the one he sent, and it was true and simple and asked nothing of her and still managed to say the thing he wanted to say, which was that she was on his mind the way she was always on his mind.
It said she had been on his mind for eighteen years and that was simply a fact of his existence that she was not required to do anything about.
Even though she didn't have to do anything about it, he was not going to pretend it was not true.
He did not check to see if she replied.
She did not reply.
He was choosing to be all right with that. Some mornings that choosing was easier than others but he was doing it because he had told her he would give her the time without making her feel like she was punishing him and he intended to mean every word of that.
Sunday: The Herald building makes interesting sounds on Sunday mornings. Thought you should know.
That one had come to him at seven when the building made a particular low settling sound from somewhere in the walls and he had thought of her immediately, the way he thought of her constantly.
Without planning to, he had sent it before he had time to second guess it.
It was the most spontaneous text of the week and he thought it was probably the best one, the one that was most purely itself without any deliberateness attached to it.
Monday: Mondays are blue at the Herald. Dave has opinions about the press.
He had been at his table working when the sound of Dave's particular vocabulary came up through the floor from the pressroom below.
He had sat listening to it for a moment with genuine appreciation for the specificity of Dave's feelings about mechanical equipment, and he had thought of Julie and sent it because he wanted her to laugh and because making her laugh from four blocks away with a text about Dave's creative use of language seemed like exactly the right kind of thing to be doing with his Monday morning.
He walked past the Hendricks place on Wednesday morning on his way back from Hayes Coffee, which he had been doing regularly since the offer was accepted, the way you went past something that was becoming yours to make it feel real.
The maple tree in the backyard was visible over the roofline and the late November wind was doing something significant to its upper branches and he had thought of Julie immediately and sent her The maple on Elm Street is doing something interesting in the wind today. Thought you should know.
It was a few more words than ten, but he had hit send anyway because he wanted her to know that he was trying to include her into every part of his existence.
He had stood, lightly shivering, in front of the house for a moment after he sent it, looking at the porch that needed work and the front windows and the particular solidity of a house that had been standing on that street for sixty years and intended to keep standing.
He had thought about what it was going to look like in the spring when he got the porch fixed and the yard came back.
He had thought about Julie's face when she said she was not saying no.
He had walked back to the Herald and gone upstairs and made himself work.
Thanksgiving was the hardest day.
Not because it was difficult to be in the same room as her, though it was, but because the difficulty was not the kind he had expected.
He had expected to feel the distance of it acutely, the careful space they were both maintaining out of respect for what she had asked for, and he did feel that.
But underneath it he felt something else entirely, the particular comfort of being in the same room as Julie Anderson even when they were on opposite sides of it, the way a room was different when she was in it, fuller somehow, more itself.
He thought that he had spent eighteen years in rooms that did not have that quality and he was not going to take for granted what it felt like to be back inside one that did.
He watched her from across the Grange Hall.
He watched her talk to Lila Monroe and eat her own sweet potato casserole and manage Harold Jensen and crouch down to say something to one of Jake's younger children that made the child laugh.
He thought about all the Thanksgivings he had spent in other cities with people he liked well enough and how none of them had felt like this, like being exactly where he was supposed to be in the company of exactly the person he was supposed to be near, even when that person was on the opposite side of the room honoring the space she had asked for.
He caught her looking at him once.
He had been half listening to Harold Jensen's opinions about the county road situation, which Harold had strong feelings about and expressed at length.
He had felt her look the way he always felt her look, and he turned and she was already looking at him and neither of them looked away for a moment that was less long than he wanted.
But then Harold said something else and Ethan turned back giving his full attention to Harold's rant about the county road situation.
When he looked again she had turned away and Pine Hollow went on around them and he was grateful for it and for her and for the fact that she was still in the same room as him and had not run.
He had not run either. That was new. That was the thing he kept coming back to, sitting in the apartment in the evenings with the December dark outside and the Herald building quiet below him, except on Mondays.
He had sat across from Julie Anderson in a diner and told her the most difficult true things he had ever said to anyone and she had told him things back that were going to stay with him for a long time, and he had not run.
He had walked her to the door and said goodnight and walked back to the Herald through the dark and gone upstairs and sat at the window and felt, underneath the difficulty of all of it, the particular solidity of someone who had finally stopped moving.
That evening he sent her Grateful for this town. Grateful you were in the same room today.
He sent it and set the phone down and did not look at it again that night, and when he woke up in the morning it was the day after Thanksgiving and the closing on the Hendricks place was ten days away.
The porch needed work and the maple tree in the backyard was waiting and Julie Anderson had not said yes but she had not said no either and he was going to keep sending her small true things every morning until she was ready.
He was a patient man.
He had not always been a patient man but he was learning, and Pine Hollow was a good place to learn patience. The house on Elm Street was waiting and he had all the time she needed.
He made his coffee and sat at the table by the window and looked out at Main Street in the late November morning and thought about what to say today.
Ten words or less.
Small and true.
Asking nothing.
He picked up his phone.