As the train pulled up to the station he saw his dad was the one who come to pick him and his siblings from the station. Ron then told his dad and had gone directly from the train station to the Alley via to get a few things needed for his summer trip. He would be taking the Knight bus back
His mother knew he was arriving even before he had barely cleared the garden gate. The kitchen door opened and she was there, in her work apron, with the expression she wore when she had been expecting someone and was glad the expectation had been met.
She looked at him.
Not in the checking way — not the way she checked Ron's brothers for injury or illness or evidence of questionable decisions. In the way she had been looking at him since Christmas, when something had shifted in how she held herself around him, the quality of someone who had noticed that the person in front of them had changed and was still deciding what to do with the noticing.
'You're thin,' she said. Not as criticism. As observation, the way she observed everything about her children — with the specific attention of someone for whom the physical state of the people she loved was information she needed to have.
'End of term,' he said. 'I'll eat.'
'You will,' she agreed, in a tone that made it a statement of intent rather than prediction.
She stood back to let him through the door, and he went past her into the kitchen, which smelled of the bread she had been making and of the particular accumulated warmth of a room that was always occupied and always in use, and something in his chest that had been slightly compressed since approximately March released.
'Sit,' she said, moving to the stove. 'I'll make something.'
He sat.
She made eggs, which she did with the efficiency of someone who had fed large numbers of people for a very long time and had reduced the problem to its most reliable solutions. She set the plate in front of him and made tea and sat down across from him with her own cup and looked at him with the attention she gave things she was thinking carefully about.
'How was the end of term?' she said.
'Good,' he said. 'The exams went well. The year went well.'
'You wrote you had a dinner.'
'In January,' he said. 'I cooked for friends and some staff.'
She looked at him with the expression he was coming to recognize — the one that was not surprise exactly but its quieter cousin, the expression of someone whose model of who their child was kept finding it had insufficient information.
'You cooked,' she said. 'For Professor Dumbledore.'
'And others,' he said.
She was quiet for a moment. He ate his eggs, which were exactly what he had wanted without knowing he wanted them, and watched her face do the thing it did when she was sitting with something she could not quite contain in the usual ways.
'Ron,' she said. And then stopped.
He waited.
'You have become,' she said, with the careful precision of someone who had been thinking about a sentence for a long time and had finally decided to say it, 'someone I am still getting to know. And I am' — a pause — 'very glad to be getting to know you. I want you to understand that.'
He looked at her.
'I understand it,' he said.
She nodded once, with the quality of someone who had said the important thing and did not need to add to it. She picked up her tea. Outside the kitchen window the garden was doing what it did in July — too much of everything, green and overflowing and entirely itself.
'Uganda,' she said.
'Three weeks,' he said. 'I'll write when I arrive.'
She looked at him for another moment with the specific expression she had — the one he had photographed at the kitchen table in the afternoon light without her knowing, the one that would be in the album. Then she went back to her tea, and he went back to his eggs, and the kitchen settled into the particular quiet of two people who did not need to fill the space between them.
The Burrow still had the comforting quality it had after long absences — the house asserting itself, the sounds and smells that were so completely themselves that arriving back into them felt less like returning than like being reminded of something he had always known.
He put his trunk in his room and stood at the window for a moment.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then he unpacked.