Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ETHAN
The Hendricks job punches out on a Thursday.
Mrs. Hendricks cries a little when she sees the finished kitchen.
I pretend not to notice, because that's the correct move, but I notice. I always notice. It's the part of the job that isn't in any invoice, the moment someone sees what their house can be when you stop apologizing for it.
Cole is loading equipment into the truck when I come out, whistling with the energy of a man who considers a completed job a personal triumph, which it is, collectively, though I'll never tell him that at a volume he could use against me.
"Good job," I tell him.
He looks up. "Yeah?"
"You ran it well."
He stops whistling. Receives this with the seriousness it deserves. "Thanks, man, that means something."
"Don't make it weird."
"I'm not making it weird. You are, because you only say that when you mean it and it's somehow more intense because of how rarely you?—"
"Cole."
"Loading the truck," he says, and goes back to loading the truck and we do what we always do after a big job wraps— we go to Bellamy’s.
It's a Thursday afternoon in mid-November and Bev brings coffee before we're settled and Cole orders something with eggs and sausage and some kind of skillet situation that I have concerns about, and I get eggs and toast because Denny's does eggs and toast correctly and that's still the ceiling I expect from this place.
Cole debriefs the job with the enthusiasm of someone who could write a dissertation on window installation. I listen and contribute and drink my coffee, and when he finally winds down, he eats for a minute in comfortable silence and then says, without looking up from his plate:
"You texted her today."
I pause as I’m picking up my toast. "What?"
"After the walkthrough. You were standing by the truck, and you looked at your phone, and you smiled." He cuts something on his plate. "You smiled at your phone, Ethan."
"I receive a variety of texts."
"Not like that."
"You don't know what I look like receiving texts." I roll my eyes.
"I've known you for thirty-two years," Cole says.
"I know what you look like receiving texts.
I know what you look like receiving a text from the lumber yard about an order.
I know what you look like receiving a text from Mom about Sunday dinner.
I know what you look like receiving a text from Beck about the level you keep leaving there.
" He points his fork. "And I know what you look like receiving a text from Delaney. "
I eat my toast.
"Different," he says. "That's what you look like."
Delaney
Gerald had an opinion about the grind setting this morning. We had a disagreement. He won.
That's it. That's the entire text. A coffeemaker update. There is no rational reason this would cause any particular facial expression in a grown man on a job site.
Gerald usually does.
This feels like something you knew and didn't warn me about.
I thought you had him handled.
I thought so too. He's more complex than he appears.
And then she sent a photo of the coffee, which was very dark, which looked like Gerald had won an argument about roast levels.
He also made an excellent cup. I think the argument was worth having.
I looked at this exchange standing next to my truck outside the Hendricks’ house while Cole loaded equipment. What I was aware of: the clarity of the morning, the sound of the equipment, the weight of the phone in my hand, and that I was in no hurry to put it back in my pocket.
Something in my chest did something uncomplicated and warm. Uncomplicated and warm. The kind that doesn't ask anything of you, just sits there being true.
Cole apparently saw my face during this experience and decides to comment as soon as we sit down in the booth at Denny’s.
"It's a text about a coffeemaker," I say.
"Sure it was.”
"She was telling me about a coffeemaker."
"Mm, I’m sure. You have a specific face for those texts. Just so you know."
"I have a face when I receive texts."
"Not like that one." He tosses a pair of gloves in the backseat. “The job's-done face, the dad-said-something face, the lumber-order face. I know all of them. This one's different."
“Bullshit. That's not…that's a completely normal kind of text to send someone." My defense is supremely weak and we both know it.
“It is,” Cole nods seriously. “You know that ‘cause you’ve been texting about that coffee maker for ages. And about her pipes, a pear tree, that Asheville thing, you know the name of her client project. That’s not something a contractor would know, Ethan.
That's paying attention. When did you last know the name of a client's work project? "
I think about it. I can give you a lot of information about a lot of clients. Their houses, their preferences, what they were trying to build. I'm less certain I know what any of them do for a living in the specific, ongoing, updated way he's implying.
"The Galveston’s are teachers," I say.
"You know that because she told you when she hired you, not because she texts you about her day.” Cole takes a sip of his coffee. “I’m not saying anything. I'm just noticing.”
"You're saying plenty."
"I'm noticing," he repeats, with the serenity of someone who knows he's right and is comfortable waiting.
He's right. I know he's right.
The thing about having a brother who's known you since you were four years old is that there's no version of your face he hasn't seen. He was there when Claire left for New York, and I said I'm fine, it's mutual, it's better this way and he didn't believe me then either.
He was right then, too.
I order more coffee from Bev and eat my toast and think about what I'm actually going to say about this, which is: nothing useful. Probably. Maybe.
"She's going through a divorce," I say.
"I know."
"She's been in Millhaven for a couple of months.”
"I know."
"She doesn't need someone making things complicated.”
"Ethan." Cole sets his fork down. "I'm not suggesting you do anything. I'm observing that you already feel something, and that you are currently doing what you always do, which is to identify fifteen reasons why acting on it would be irresponsible and use them to avoid feeling the thing."
I look at him.
"That's not a criticism. That's a description." He picks up his fork again. "You're a thoughtful person. I respect it. I'm just saying there's a version of thoughtful that becomes a reason not to let things happen, and you've been in that version before."
He means Claire, but doesn't say Claire. He doesn't have to.
"She needs time," I say. "That's not an excuse. That's true."
"I know it's true. I'm not arguing with it." He eats something. "I'm just noting that when that time is up, you should be ready to say something instead of having found seventeen more reasons."
I consider this. "When did you get this perceptive?"
"Maya," he says simply. "She has opinions about emotional avoidance."
"How convenient."
"It's been genuinely inconvenient, actually." He doesn't look sorry about it at all. Cole has noticed the thing I've been not-saying, even to myself, for the past few weeks—I’m halfway there.
I don't mean in the falling for her sense, although that's also increasingly accurate and increasingly difficult to have a neutral relationship with.
I mean in the sense that the version of eventually my father mentioned has a shape to it now.
It's not abstract. It's a Tuesday morning at Bellamy's, and a text about Gerald's grind setting and a woman who researched paintbrush bristle density for a porch railing.
She asks what I couldn't unsee.
That's what I keep coming back to. Not the laugh, or the way she pushes back on an estimate, or that she bought good paint at Beck's the first week she was here.
It's that when I told her about the 1920s bungalow — about finding the original structure under all the wrong layers, about the feeling of reading what a house wants — she said you went to school for the large-scale version and came back to the version where you actually know what the house wants.
Like she'd already understood the thing I'd been trying to explain to myself for five years.
People rarely do that. I notice this. I've been noticing it since Tuesday on the roof and haven't stopped since, which is a longer streak of noticing than I've had about anyone since Claire left for New York and I realized too late that fine with it and okay with it were two different things.
I'm at the lumber yard Saturday morning when I see her.
Not at the lumber yard specifically — on Elm Lane, as I'm driving back.
She's in the front garden, wearing Elise's gardening gloves and a coat that looks like it was bought for a different climate, crouching next to a section of the garden border with what I'm fairly certain is a trowel. Very focused.
She hasn't seen my truck yet.
I slow down — not to a stop, just the natural deceleration of someone navigating a residential street, and in the three or four seconds before I pass, I just see her.
Not the job. Not the client. Not the situation.
Her.
Her hair pulled up in the approximate manner of someone who put it up in a hurry on the way outside, a streak of soil on her jacket sleeve, frowning at the garden border with the expression she gets when she's solving a problem.
The morning light is the low November kind that does particular things to auburn hair.
She looks up and sees me.
She raises a hand, the gardening-glove wave, which is its own thing, and I lift mine through the windshield and keep driving.
I keep driving at exactly the right speed.
I don't slow down to tell her about the smudge on her cheek, because there's no reason to slow down, and I'm not slowing down.
I drive home, park and sit in the truck for a moment.
There it is. That's the thing I've been not-naming: the shift from her being someone I respect and find interesting to I drove past her front garden and all I wanted was to stop the truck.
Those are different things. I know they're different things.
I've been pretending they might be the same thing for about three weeks, which has been useful fiction and is now used up.
I'm attracted to her.
I'm also more than attracted. I like her. In the way you like someone whose mind works in a direction you want to follow, whose company makes you more present in whatever you're doing, who texts you about a coffeemaker's opinions and means something by it.
I go inside and stand at the kitchen window with my coffee, the one that doesn't face Elm Lane, and I think about what Cole said and what my mother said on Sunday.
Patient is good. As long as patient doesn't become a reason not to try.
She's a couple of weeks out of a marriage that spent years making her too small for her own life.
She came here to figure out what the right size is.
She's doing that — I can see it in the Asheville project and the painted porch railing and the spring bulbs and the way she asks questions now with more authority than she did in October.
She's building something. It requires her full attention. It should have her full attention.
I'm not going to walk into the middle of that because I slowed down on Elm Lane and the November light was doing something to her hair and I wanted to stop the truck.
That's not who I want to be for her.
I want to be, if I'm anything, the person who shows up correctly. Who gives her honest assessments, fixes Gerald and tells her it's okay to laugh and asks what she couldn't unsee and doesn't require anything from her before she's ready to give it.
This version of love isn't about my timeline.
I drink my coffee and think about the pear tree in late November, which is two weeks away now, and the fact that I've been looking forward to it, and I decide that looking forward to things is allowed, as long as you're honest about what you're looking forward to and why.
I'm looking forward to a Saturday morning in the garden with someone I want to spend Saturday mornings in gardens with.
That's allowed.
That's patient without hiding. The rest of it can wait until she's ready.
If she ever is. That's a real if and I know it, and I'm keeping it where I can see it.
Maya calls Sunday afternoon, which is unusual — she usually talks to Cole, who talks to me, which is the standard information distribution system of our family. When Maya calls me directly, it means something specific.
"Cole told me,” she says. Not sorry about it.
"I assumed."
"I have a question."
"Okay."
"When she talks about her ex," Maya says, "is it still grief? Or is it the kind of talking about someone where you're processing them out of your system?"
I think about it. About the photography conversation at Bellamy's. The way she said I was thinking about my own house, not that house — not with sadness, but with the clarity of someone who can now see something they couldn't before. About the Asheville project.
"The second one, I think. Mostly."
"Good," Maya says. "That matters."
"She still needs time."
"She does. But there's a difference between needing time and needing someone to wait her out like she's a weather event. You're not doing that, are you?"
"I'm giving her space."
"Are you giving her space, or are you just standing still and hoping she notices?"
I open my mouth. Close it.
"Because," Maya says, "there's a version of patient that reads as indifferent from the outside. She's been around someone who made her feel like she wasn't worth pursuing for a long time. I'm just saying, sometimes people need to know they're being chosen."
"I'm not going to pursue a woman eight weeks out of her marriage," I say. "That's not what she needs."
"No," Maya agrees. "But ten weeks is different from eight. And twelve is different from ten." She pauses. "I'm not telling you to do anything. I'm telling you not to leave her wondering if anyone sees her."
The call ends shortly after, and I think about that for the rest of the afternoon.
She's already seen. She's been seen since Tuesday on the roof when she said Walk me through it. I want to understand what I'm dealing with. Since Gerald. Since it was like reading what the house wanted to be. Since the November light on her hair and the gardening-glove wave.
She's been seen.
I'm just waiting until the timing is something other than inconvienent.