32. The Hendricks Place
Chapter thirty-two
The Hendricks Place
The closing took forty five minutes.
It happened in a small conference room at one of the title companies in Alexandria, which was where these things happened when Pine Hollow needed a title company.
Ethan signed his name in the places the closing agent indicated and initialed the things that needed initialing and wrote a check that was the largest check he had written in his life, and when it was done the closing agent shook his hand and said congratulations and handed him two keys on a plain metal ring and that was that.
He sat in the parking lot for a few minutes before he drove back.
He had not expected it to feel the way it felt.
He had bought things before, cars and equipment and the various practical acquisitions of an adult life, and he had signed leases on apartments in Seattle and Portland and Austin and none of them had felt like anything in particular, just the administrative business of establishing himself in a new place temporarily.
This was different. He sat in the parking lot with the keys in his hand and looked at them and felt the particular weight of something permanent, something that was going to be true about his life from this day forward regardless of anything else that happened.
He thought that was probably what it felt like to stop running.
He had been running for eighteen years. Not constantly, not obviously, not in a way that looked like running from the outside.
He had been working and moving and building a life that looked complete from a certain angle, and underneath all of that he had been running from the version of himself that had existed in Pine Hollow, the one who had loved someone completely and been terrified by it and handled that terror badly.
That version of himself had been waiting here the whole time, patient and unresolved, and Ethan had been carrying him around in every city he had lived in without quite understanding that was what he was doing.
He looked at the keys in his hand.
He drove back to Pine Hollow through the December afternoon, the sky low and grey and the fields on either side of the county road devoid of crops and snow covered, the particular flatness of the Minnesota landscape in winter that he had grown up inside of and missed without knowing he missed it.
He thought about the house waiting for him on Elm Street and what it meant that it was waiting for him specifically, that he was the one who was going to unlock the door and walk through it and start the process of making it his.
He hadn't told anyone that he had paid for the house in full.
When he had been traveling and working for 18 years, he had saved everything he could in the hope that one day that money would be used for something important.
He couldn't think of anything more important than this house in this town with a broken porch and maple tree that said particular things through its shape and the way it reacted to the wind.
He parked in front and sat in the car for a moment looking at it.
The Hendricks place was a craftsman style house, solid and well proportioned, built in the 1940s by a man who had apparently believed in doing things correctly because the bones of it were still excellent despite the sagging porch and the dated kitchen and the general air of a house that had been lived in thoroughly and not updated recently.
The previous owners had been an older couple who had moved to the cities to be closer to their children.
They had left behind certain things that old houses accumulated over decades, hooks by the back door worn smooth by sixty years of coats and jackets, a scuff on the kitchen floor in front of the stove where someone had stood every morning of their adult life making coffee, a flower bed along the south side of the house that was dormant now but would come back in the spring with whatever had been planted there, perennials that did not know the house had changed hands and would simply keep doing what they had always done.
He got out of the car and unlocked the front door and went in.
The house was cold. The real estate agent had turned the heat down when he did the final walkthrough last week and had not turned it back up.
The empty rooms had the particular chill of a space that was between one life and the next, waiting to be inhabited again.
His footsteps were loud on the hardwood floors without furniture to absorb the sound.
He stood in the front hallway and looked at the staircase and the doorway to the living room and the light coming through the front windows at its low December angle.
He thought that this was his house and he was going to live in it and that was a sentence that felt entirely different from any sentence he had said about any place he had lived in the last eighteen years.
He hoped he would not be living in it alone.
He walked through the rooms slowly.
The living room had good light, the front windows facing east and the side windows south.
He stood in the middle of it and thought about what it was going to look like with furniture and bookshelves and the particular evidence of a life being lived in it.
He thought about fires in the fireplace that the previous owners had left in good working order, the kind of fireplace that was built for Minnesota winters and took a proper log and threw real heat.
He thought about winter evenings and the particular quality of a room that was warm and lit while the December dark pressed against the windows outside.
He thought about Julie.
He thought about her the way he thought about her constantly, specifically and without being able to stop.
He thought about what this room would look like with her in it, sitting in a chair by the fireplace with her tea the way she sat with her tea at home, her feet tucked under her and her face doing the quiet attentive thing it did when she was thinking about something.
He thought about her in the kitchen making coffee in the morning with the window above the sink looking out at the backyard and the maple tree.
He thought about her in the hallway and on the porch that needed work and in all the rooms that were waiting to become something.
He thought about all of it and let himself think about it because he was standing alone in a house he had just bought and there was no one here to see him do it and no reason to manage it.
He was not going to say any of that to her. Not yet. She had asked for time and he was giving her time and the house was going to be here when she was ready and so was he.
He went upstairs.
The bedrooms were small by modern standards and exactly the right size for what a bedroom needed to be.
The master bedroom had a window that looked out over the backyard at the maple tree, which was bare now but substantial, its upper branches doing the particular December thing bare trees did in the wind, moving with the certainty of something that had been doing this for a very long time and intended to keep doing it.
He stood at the window and looked at the tree for a long time and thought about the text he had sent Julie about it and wondered if she had stood at her own window when she read it, and thought that she probably had because that was the kind of person she was, the kind who paid attention to specific things and let them mean what they meant.
He went back downstairs and stood in the kitchen.
He thought the kitchen would be where he did his work.
He had debated this often. He thought that maybe he would end up taking his laptop to the funeral home most days, but some days he would just want to sit and concentrate and do it right here in their, correction, his kitchen.
The kitchen was going to need work eventually, the cabinets were dated and the countertops worn, but the bones of it were right, the layout functional and the window above the sink exactly where a window above a sink should be, looking out at the backyard and the maple tree and the fence along the back that was in better shape than the porch.
He turned the faucet on and off. He opened the cabinets and looked at the empty shelves.
He stood in the middle of the kitchen and listened to the house around him, the particular sounds of an old house in December, the furnace coming on below and the wind finding the edges of things and the occasional settling of walls that had been settling for eighty years and would keep settling long after he was gone.
He thought about Jake Peterson standing at the bakery prep table in Morning Light on the morning he took ownership of it, his hand flat on the worn surface, taking inventory and finding everything present.
He thought about what Jake had said to him that morning in the bakery, the simple true thing and letting it be enough, and he thought that he had said the simple true thing to Julie and now he was standing in an empty kitchen in Pine Hollow in December waiting for her to be ready, and that was exactly where he was supposed to be.
He thought about Earl Hansen walking out of that same bakery thirty-one years ago with his coat over his arm and not looking back, and he thought about what it meant to hand something over to the right person and trust that they were going to take care of it.
He thought about Pine Hollow and the people in it who had trusted him with things since he came back, Jake asking him to be a pallbearer because Kali wanted that, Adam making coffee and drinking it on the porch steps, Hannah saying Pine Hollow agrees with you.
He thought about a town that had taken him back without requiring him to earn it first, that had simply absorbed him the way Pine Hollow absorbed its own, and he felt the gratitude of that in a way that was specific and complete.
He took his phone out of his pocket.
Closed on the house today. The maple tree is bigger than I remembered.
He sent it and put the phone in his pocket and did not check to see if she replied or if she had even read it.
He went back to walking through the house, room by room, taking his time, letting it become real the way things became real when you were present with them and not managing them from a safe distance.
The spare bedroom at the back would get the morning light.
The bathroom had its original tile, small white hexagons on the floor and white subway tile on the walls.
He decided that was exactly right and he was going to keep it.
The linen closet in the hallway was deep and well built and smelled like old cedar and years of laundered things.
He stood in the hallway at the top of the stairs and looked down at the front door and thought about coming home to this house, the specific physical act of putting a key in that lock and walking through that door at the end of a day, and felt the reality of it settle into him with a completeness that he had not felt about anything in a very long time.
He was home.
Not the apartment above the Herald, which had been fine and which had served its purpose and which he was grateful for.
This. This house on Elm Street with its sagging porch and its maple tree and its worn kitchen floor and its original bathroom tile.
This particular address in this particular town where everything important about him had happened and where he had finally, after eighteen years, come back to stay.
He went back downstairs and out through the front door and locked it behind him.
He stood on the porch that needed work in the December cold and looked at Elm Street, at the familiar houses and the familiar trees and the particular stillness of Pine Hollow on a December afternoon, the kind of stillness that was not empty but full, full of the accumulated weight of a town that had been doing this for generations.
He thought that he had been looking for this feeling in cities that could not give it to him and had driven away from it at nineteen without understanding what he was driving away from.
He understood now.
He walked back to his car and sat in it for a moment looking at the house from the outside, the way you looked at something that was now yours and the thought was still becoming real.
The light was going grey and low the way December light went in the late afternoon and the house sat on its lot exactly as it had always sat, solid and certain and entirely itself.
He thought that he was going to be happy here and that happy was not a small thing and he was not going to pretend it was.
He drove the four blocks to the Herald and parked and went upstairs and made himself a cup of coffee and sat at the table by the window and looked out at Main Street in the December afternoon and thought about Julie who was also four blocks away doing whatever she was doing, and thought that she was getting closer, he could feel it the way you felt weather coming, a change in pressure, something in the air that was different from what had been there before.
He was going to be here when she arrived.
He picked up his phone and looked at it.
No reply yet. He really hadn't expected one. Not yet.
He set it down and opened his laptop and got back to work and thought that this was what choosing looked like from the inside, not dramatic, not complicated, just a man at a table by a window in a town he had come home to, doing his work and waiting for the person he loved to be ready, and finding that the waiting was not the hardship it would have been eighteen years ago because he was finally, completely, exactly where he meant to be.