Chapter Twenty-Nine — Wade
I called my mother on a Wednesday evening from the secondary building room.
Not from the south step, not from the meeting room. From outside Nora's door, standing in the hall with my phone, which was the proximity that felt right, being near the room she was in while I made the call.
My mother picked up on the third ring. She said: Wade. Her voice had the specific quality it always had when I called, present and unsurprised, the way she received everything.
I said: I want you to meet someone.
She was quiet for a moment. Then: The woman at the compound.
I said: Yes.
Another pause. She said: Are you happy.
I thought about that the way she'd taught me to think about things, fully and without the quick answer.
Yes, I said. That's what this is.
She said: Good. She was quiet for a moment. Bring her to Bakersfield. Not for a visit. For dinner. I'll cook.
I went back to the south step and told Nora. She looked at me and said: When.
I said: Weekend after next if that works with Sacramento.
She said: I'll make it work.
The dinner was on a Saturday.
We drove down to Bakersfield in the morning and I showed her the neighborhood I'd grown up in, the streets I'd known, the car shop that was still there under different management.
She looked at everything with the quality she brought to places she was seeing for the first time, taking inventory, filing, moving on.
She didn't perform interest. She was actually interested.
At the car shop she said: How old were you.
Sixteen, I said. Summer after sophomore year.
She said: What did you like about it.
I thought about that. Something comes in broken and you figure out why and you fix it and then it works, I said. There's a completeness to it.
She said: That's what I like about the numbers. Something doesn't match and you figure out why and you correct it and then the picture is accurate. The same completeness.
I looked at the shop. Yeah, I said.
She said: We're the same kind of person operating in different domains.
I said: I noticed that around day two.
She said: I noticed it around day four. I was slower.
I said: You were also checking for angles.
She said: I was. She looked at the shop. I'm done checking for angles.
I know, I said.
She said: I want you to know I know you know. I'm saying it explicitly because I don't want it to be implied. I'm done.
I held her eyes.
She said: Explicitly.
I said: I heard you.
She said: Good. Let's go meet your mother.
My mother opened the door before we knocked. She looked at Nora for a moment with the assessing quality that I recognized because Nora had it too, and Nora looked back at her the same way, and they stood there for two seconds in mutual assessment and then my mother said: Come in. Food's at one.
We went in and my mother put us to work and at the table she asked Nora the three questions. Are you safe. Are you eating. Are you doing something worth doing.
Nora looked at her. Yes to all three, she said.
My mother looked at her for a moment. Then she nodded and passed the bread.
After lunch my mother shook Nora's hand at the door. She said: Come back.
Nora said: I'd like that.
My mother said: Good. She looked at me. Call more often.
I said: I will.
She said: Don't just say it.
I said: I won't just say it.
She nodded and went back inside.
We drove north on the valley road toward the compound and the fall afternoon was doing the specific thing it did in this part of California, the light going gold and long across the flat land, and Nora was quiet for a while.
Then she said: She's remarkable.
Yeah, I said.
She said: She asked me if I was doing something worth doing.
Yes.
She said: I've been asked that question twice in my adult life. Once by her and once by Olsen after the findings. Both times I knew the answer immediately.
I said: What's the answer.
She said: Yes. Obviously yes. That's not the interesting part. The interesting part is how immediately I knew it. Both times. No hesitation.
I said: What does that tell you.
She said: That I'm in the right place doing the right work. She looked at the valley going past the window. Both things simultaneously. The place and the work.
I said: Both things.
She said: Both things.
We drove the rest of the way in the specific comfortable quiet of two people who didn't need to fill the space between them, and the valley went from gold to amber to the early dark of the October evening.
That night in the room she came to me different than she usually did, which was to say she came with less management, more of the thing underneath the management, the specific quality of a woman who had spent an afternoon being seen clearly by someone she respected and had come home feeling seen.
She kissed me and I kissed her back and she said: She liked me.
Your mother, I said.
She liked me, she said again, like she was confirming a finding.
Yeah, I said. She did.
Nora pulled back and looked at me and then she did something she didn't usually do, which was just look at me for a sustained moment without cataloguing anything, just looking.
Then she got my shirt off and put her mouth on my chest and I got my hands in her hair and we moved to the bed and took our time with each other the way we'd learned to take our time, which was to say deliberately and without rushing toward the finish because the finish wasn't what either of us was hurrying toward.
She got my jeans off and took me in her hand and stroked me slowly until my hips pushed forward and I said her name, and she watched my face while she did it with the focused attention she brought to everything she wanted to understand, and I let her look because there was nothing here I was managing.
I got her undressed and she lay back against the pillow and I went down on her and she grabbed my hair with both hands and held on, making sounds that weren't quiet, her thighs around my head, her hips moving, until she came hard and loud and pulled me up by the hair and said inside me and I gave her that.
We moved together in the dark and she had her hands on my back and her mouth at my ear saying things that were specific and accurate, this, yes, there, harder, and I gave her everything she asked for because she'd asked and that was enough.
She came twice more before I did and when I came it was with her name in my throat and my face in her hair and the full weight of what this was, which was not a version of something, which was the real thing.
After, she was quiet for a while against my chest.
Then she said: Your mother is going to want to come to the compound.
I said: Probably.
She said: I'll make sure Garrett knows she has opinions about bread.
I almost laughed. He'll appreciate the company, I said.
She said: Both things.
I said: Yeah. Both things.
I held her in the dark and the valley was quiet outside and the compound was what it always was around us and I thought: this is the right life. Every part of it. This specific combination of things.
It was right and it was real and it was going to keep being both.
That was everything I'd ever wanted to be able to say.