34. Two Muffins
Chapter thirty-four
Two Muffins
She had not planned to go to the bakery. She had thought she would just give Jake a call later.
It was Ethan who suggested it, standing in the doorway of the apartment above the Herald with his coat on and his keys in his hand.
He said it casually the way he said most things, without making a production of it, just that they could stop at Morning Light on the way.
She had looked at him and understood immediately what he meant even though he had not said it directly.
Kali would have brought muffins.
She put on her coat and they went down the stairs together and out into the December morning and she thought about the first time she had walked into a room with Ethan Walker publicly, the wedding reception in August when Lila Monroe had gone very still beside her and Danny Marsh had pretended not to watch, and she thought about how much had happened since then and how different this felt, walking down Main Street beside him in December with the town around them and not managing any of it, just walking.
Pine Hollow noticed. Of course it noticed. That was simply what Pine Hollow did, and she had made her peace with that somewhere between the snow on Main Street and Halloween and the back booth of Rachel's diner. She walked beside Ethan and let the town notice and did not do anything about it.
Lila Monroe was coming out of the hardware store across the street and stopped on the sidewalk and looked at them and Julie raised a hand in greeting and Lila raised both hands in a gesture that managed to convey complete vindication without a single word.
Julie looked straight ahead and felt the corner of her mouth pull up.
The Morning Light was warm and smelled like everything good, bread and sugar and coffee and the particular sweetness of something with cinnamon that was coming out of the oven in the back.
The bell above the door announced them the way it announced everyone.
There were three people at the counter and two at the small table by the window, the usual Tuesday morning regulars, and they looked up the way people looked up in small town bakeries when the door opened, the automatic assessment of who had come in, Julie felt the quality of that assessment shift when they registered who it was and who she was with.
She did not manage it.
Josiah was behind the counter and he looked at them and something moved in his expression that was warm and uncomplicated, the expression of a young man who had grown up watching his mother pay attention to people and had inherited the habit.
"Hey," he said. "The usual?"
"Two muffins," Ethan said. "Whatever your dad made this morning."
"Blueberry," Josiah said. "He's been making them on Tuesdays."
Julie looked at him. "Since when?"
Josiah met her eyes and held them for a moment. "Since about a month after..." He did not finish the sentence and he did not need to. "He said mom always said blueberry muffins were the right thing for a Tuesday morning and he figured someone should keep making them."
Julie stood at the counter of Morning Light Bakery and felt the back of her throat tighten and did not look away from Josiah and did not try to manage what her face was doing.
"Two blueberry muffins," she said. "Please."
Josiah boxed them carefully the way his father had taught him to box things, with attention and without rushing.
He handed the box across the counter and when Julie reached for it he put his hand briefly over hers on the box and said thank you quietly enough that only she could hear it.
She understood that he was thanking her for Tuesday mornings and for muffins and for showing up and for all the things that did not have a clean name but mattered anyway.
She squeezed his hand once and took the box.
Jake came out of the kitchen.
He came through the swinging door the way he always came through it, wiping his hands on his apron.
He stopped when he saw them and looked at them the way he had looked at things his whole life, with the complete focused attention of a man who read situations the way other people read text, clearly and without missing anything.
He looked at Julie.
He looked at Ethan.
He looked at the two of them standing together at the counter of his bakery on a Tuesday morning in December with a box of blueberry muffins between them and something in his expression moved through several things before it settled into something she recognized because she had seen it on his face before, at the arrangements meeting and at the graveside and in the phone call three days after, the expression of a man who was carrying something heavy and had just found a small piece of ground to set it down on.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," Ethan said.
Jake looked at Julie and she looked back at him and she thought about Kali sitting across from her desk with her list in her cardigan pocket saying I want people to leave thinking about the good parts.
She thought about Jake making blueberry muffins on Tuesday mornings because Kali always said they were the right thing for a Tuesday, and she thought that Kali Peterson had paid attention to everything and everyone around her and had known things about people that they did not always know about themselves and had acted on that knowledge with the quiet confidence of someone who trusted her own instincts completely.
Kali had known this was coming.
She had probably known it before Julie did.
"She would have been insufferable about this," Julie said. "You know that."
Jake looked at her for a moment and then something happened in his face that she had not seen since before Kali got sick, something lighter than grief and quieter than joy but in the same family as both, and he made a sound that was almost a laugh.
"She absolutely would have," he said. "She would have called it from the wedding and reminded everyone of that fact at regular intervals for the rest of our lives.
" He looked at Ethan. "She liked you. She told me so after she asked for you as a pallbearer.
She said you had the right kind of steady about you. "
Ethan was quiet for a moment. "I liked her too. I wish I had known her better."
"She knew you well enough," Jake said simply. "That was always enough for Kali. She didn't need a lot of time to know what she thought about a person."
They stood in the bakery for a few more minutes and talked about the ordinary things, Josiah and the bakery schedule and the younger children and how the Petersons were getting through December, and Julie listened and watched Jake move through the conversation the way he moved through everything since Kali died, steadily and with the focused presence of a man who had decided that presence was what he had to offer his children and he was going to offer it completely.
He was going to be all right. Not today and not easily and not without cost, but he was going to be all right because he was Jake Peterson and he had eleven children who needed him and a bakery that opened before dawn and a town that had been showing up for him since September in the particular quiet relentless way that Pine Hollow showed up for its own.
Kali had chosen well. She had always chosen well.
They said goodbye and went back out into the December morning and Julie carried the box of muffins and Ethan walked beside her.
They turned off Main Street onto Elm Street and walked the two blocks to the Hendricks place in the December cold and she thought about blueberry muffins on Tuesday mornings and about the right kind of steady and about all the things Kali had known that Julie was only just catching up to.
Ethan unlocked the front door and pushed it open and stood back to let her in first.
She stepped into the hallway and stopped.
It was cold, the particular cold of a house between one life and the next, and it was empty, and her footsteps were loud on the hardwood floors, and the light came through the front windows at its low December angle and caught the dust in the air and did something with it that was almost beautiful.
She stood in the front hallway of the Hendricks place, no, of Ethan's place, on Elm Street in Pine Hollow and felt it immediately, the rightness of it, the particular quality of a space that was waiting to become something and knew it.
She turned and looked at Ethan.
He was watching her with the expression she finally had a name for, hope, careful and earned and not taken for granted, and she thought about the house becoming theirs and about the porch that needed work in the spring and the maple tree in the backyard and all the ordinary future things waiting to happen, and she thought that she had been afraid for a very long time and she was done with it.
"It needs curtains," she said.
Something in his face changed. "It does," he said.
"And the kitchen needs work eventually."
"I know."
"The fireplace is good though."
"The fireplace is excellent," he said.
She looked around the hallway and then back at him and she thought that she was standing in a cold empty house on a December morning with a box of blueberry muffins and the man she had loved since she was seventeen years old and that was, by any reasonable measure, exactly enough.
She held out the box.
He took a muffin and she took a muffin and they stood in the hallway of the Hendricks place and ate their Tuesday morning muffins in the December cold and neither of them said anything for a while because there was nothing that needed saying that the house and the muffins and the December light were not already saying for them.
It was enough.
It was, Julie thought, exactly what Kali would have wanted.