7. Vacancy
Vacancy
NORA
"I heard from the fire investigator."
Ian was leaning against Gracelyn's kitchen counter with a glass of water in his hand. He looked up.
"They're calling it arson. They think it was neighborhood kids." I set my coffee down. "You've been staying with Jesse's family since the fire. Have you heard anything? Anyone talking about it?"
"No." He said it without hesitation. "I don't know anything about that, Nora."
I looked at him. He looked back.
I believed him. Ian had never given me a reason not to.
"I got a job at Rudy's."
I picked my coffee back up. "Rudy's. The auto shop?"
"Yeah. Jesse's brother and his friends run it. They said they could use someone this summer."
Jesse's brother. Wayne. The black Civic in our driveway, the cigarette at seven in the morning, the gold chain, the smile that hit all the right marks and still left something sitting wrong in my chest. I remembered standing on the porch watching that car pull away and not being able to name what bothered me about the man behind the wheel.
"Wayne runs it?"
"Yeah. You met him."
I had met him. And if I was being honest, nothing he'd done was wrong. He drove his brother and his friends to school. He was polite. He smiled at me and said he'd have Ian home after class. The unease I'd felt that morning on the porch was mine, not his.
I set my coffee down.
"Ian, you don't need a job. I'm still sending you money every week. And I've got a shortlist of apartments for us. There are three two-bedrooms I'm looking at this week."
"You're looking at apartments you can't afford."
"Let me worry about that."
"That's all you do. You worry about everything so I don't have to, and I'm tired of it." He was calm about it, which was worse, because it meant he'd thought about this before he walked through the door. "I'm almost seventeen. Summer starts in a few weeks. I can work."
"So this is a summer job."
"Yeah. A summer job." He set his glass down. "And you need all the help you can get right now. The fire wiped us out. You lost everything. I don't want to be a burden anymore."
I looked at my brother. He was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed, his shoulders filling out a borrowed shirt that still didn't quite fit him.
When did he get so tall? In my mind, he was still the twelve-year-old who needed help understanding his math homework.
Now he was standing in someone else's kitchen with a plan and a set jaw, telling me he wanted to contribute because he thought he owed me something.
"You have never been a burden to me, Ian. Not once."
"You might think that. But I do. I think I am." He paused. "You're twenty-six and you're single."
"Hey!"
"Seriously. When's the last time you went on a date?" He was looking at me with that face he made when he knew he was about to land one. "Have you ever even dated someone?"
"Oh my God, Ian."
"I don't want to be the reason you're an old maid, Nora."
I closed my eyes and exhaled through my nose. He wasn't wrong about the dating. He was wrong about everything else, but he'd found the one angle I couldn't argue with, and he knew it.
"Alright," I said. "This summer. Just this summer. And promise me that earning money isn't going to make you drop out of school. Because that's what happens sometimes, Ian. A kid gets used to a paycheck and decides school isn't worth the trouble, and I am not going to watch that happen to you."
"Don't worry about it."
"Ian."
"I said don't worry about it."
I held his gaze. He didn't flinch.
"There's one more thing." He picked his glass back up. "Jesse's family offered me a room. It's part of the deal. I work at the shop, they give me a place to stay."
I went still. "So you're not moving back in with me?"
"Nora, how many times do I have to remind you? I'm not twelve anymore." He shrugged. "It's weird for a grown man to still be living with his sister."
"You are not a grown man yet, Ian."
"I'm almost seventeen."
I wanted to tell him that he was my little brother and the fact that he could grow a patchy mustache and cook his own eggs did not qualify him to live on his own in someone else's house.
But I looked at him standing there with his shoulders square and his chin up, and I saw the boy who rinsed his plate without being asked and left me half the chicken and thanked me for breakfast on his way out the door.
He wasn't running from me. He was trying to stand on his own.
"Just this summer," I said again. "Then you come back. You finish senior year. And we find a place together."
"Yeah. Senior year. I'll be there."
I hugged him at the door. Pulled him in tight, my arms around his shoulders, my chin against his chest. He let me hold on for a few seconds before he patted my back and stepped away.
"I'll see you, Nora."
"See you."
After he left, I sat on Gracelyn's couch with my coffee going cold and tried to sort out what I was feeling.
Relief was part of it. My little brother was growing up.
He wasn't quite a man yet, but he was getting there, and I could see the shape of the person he was becoming.
Someone who wanted to carry his own weight, who showed up with a plan instead of waiting for me to make one.
For six years I had done the math every single month, and for the first time, I could see a day when I wouldn't have to.
But underneath the relief was something emptier.
I raised him. I checked his homework, made his lunches, wrote his name on the brown bags even after he told me to stop.
I sat at a parent-teacher conference pretending I knew what I was doing.
I taught myself to cook his favorite meal.
Every choice I made for six years was shaped around keeping him safe and keeping us together, and now he was walking out the door because he was ready.
I was supposed to be happy about that. I was happy about it.
I was also sitting alone on a borrowed couch, and the boy I had built my whole adult life around didn't need me to build it around him anymore.
The shortlist of two-bedrooms Knox had sent me was still open on Gracelyn's laptop. I looked at it for a long time, then closed the tab.
It took three weeks to finish all the paperwork after the fire. Three weeks of hold music, case numbers, and government offices that needed a document I didn't have before they could issue the one I came for.
On my first shift back, Lori spotted me from across the huddle room and made a sound I'd never heard her make. She crossed the room in three steps and pulled me into a hug so tight my badge dug into my ribs.
"You're back. Oh my God, you're back."
"It's good to be back."
"Are you okay? How are your lungs? Did Josie really clear you?"
"I'm fine, Lori. I promise."
Kip appeared a few minutes later with a coffee and held it out to me. "Welcome back, Nora. Figured you could use something better than the break room stuff on your first day."
"Thanks, Kip."
Liz and Jen came in together. Liz touched my arm. "So glad you're okay, Nora. We were worried about you."
"Really good to have you back," Jen added.
I thanked them and kept moving. They sounded like they meant it. They also sounded like Liz and Jen, which meant I'd never quite know for sure, and today wasn't the day I was going to try to figure it out.
The shift moved the way first shifts back always do.
Everything was familiar and everything was slightly off, like coming home to furniture someone had rearranged by two inches.
My hands remembered the work. My body remembered the pace.
But I was half a step behind all morning, recalibrating, finding my rhythm again.
Harlan caught me at the nurses' station around ten.
"Avery. Good to see you upright." He leaned against the counter. "Are you sure you're ready to be back on this floor?"
"Josie cleared me."
"That's not what I asked."
I looked at him. "I'm ready, Dr. Harlan."
"Good. Bay twelve needs a second set of vitals before I discharge him. And welcome back."
By the afternoon, the half-step had closed. The rooms came and went. The work filled in around me the way it always did, and by four o'clock I'd stopped thinking about whether I could do this and started thinking about what was next.
I finished my charting at seven and gave bedside report to the night nurse taking my bays. By the time I got to the locker room, Liz and Jen were already leaving because Jen apparently had a "hot date."
"So are you still looking for a new place?" Lori was changing her shoes when I sat down across from her.
"Yeah. A friend's been sending me listings for two-bedrooms, but my brother just told me he's not moving back in for a while. He took a summer job and they're giving him a room."
"So you just need something for yourself?"
"For the summer, at least. Until Ian comes back for school and we can find a place together."
Lori stopped lacing her shoe and looked up. "One of my roommates just moved out. She went to live with her boyfriend. There's a free room in our house."
"Are you serious?"
"I can talk to our landlady if you want it. She hasn't started looking for anyone new yet."
"Lori, that would be amazing."
"Fair warning, it's a little far from the hospital, so the commute takes some getting used to.
But it's worth it. The landlady is really nice, keeps the house well maintained.
There are some repairs here and there, but nothing major.
And there's a backyard with a garden, so it actually feels like a real home. "
I could picture it already. A room that was mine. A garden. Someone who kept the place up instead of letting it fall apart.
"I love it."
Lori smiled. "I'll tell her not to look for new tenants."
"Thank you, Lori. Seriously."
"Of course." She finished tying her shoe and stood up. "I'll let you know. Maybe you can come by next time we're both off so I can show you the room?"
"That's great! Thanks, Lori."
The next time we were both off, Lori drove me to see the room.
The house was on a street I never would have found on my own.
Quiet neighborhood, set back from the main road, a block where families walked their kids to the park after dinner and people left their porch lights on for each other.
The houses were older but kept up, with trimmed hedges and cars in the driveways and the feeling of people who had been there a long time.
Lori pulled up to a pale yellow house at the end of the block. Five bedrooms, she'd told me on the drive over. The front porch had flowers lining both sides of the steps, bright and deliberate, and the walkway was swept clean.
"This is it."
The landlady met us at the front door. She was older, maybe mid-sixties, with silver hair and reading glasses hanging on a chain on her chest. She shook my hand with both of hers.
"You must be Nora. I'm Barb. Lori's told me about you. Come in, come in."
The house smelled like fresh laundry and something baking.
The common areas were clean and lived-in, mismatched furniture that somehow worked together, a bookshelf in the hallway, a kitchen with a long table and enough chairs for everyone.
It felt like a house where people actually sat down together.
Barb led me down the hall to the empty room and opened the door.
It was bigger than my bedroom at home. That thought landed harder than I expected, because the truth was, my bedroom at home was a twin bed in the room I'd slept in since I was a child.
When my parents died, I could have moved into the master bedroom.
It was the bigger room, the better room, the one that made sense.
I never did. Moving into that room meant they were really gone, and leaving it untouched gave me just a little more comfort than I could afford to let go of.
So I stayed in my twin bed with my crystals on the shelf and pretended that was a choice and not a thing I couldn't face.
This room had a full bed, a dresser, a window that looked out onto the backyard. I could see the garden Lori had mentioned. Tomatoes on a stake, herbs along the fence line.
"The window frame is stuck, but I can have someone come and fix it for you," Barb said.
"It's perfect, Barb. Thank you."
"Will you be moving in soon?"
"I just need to gather my things. Well, the little that I have." I tried to smile. "Then I'll move right in."
Barb's face softened. "Lori mentioned that your house burned down. I'm so sorry to hear that."
"Thank you, Barb."
"I'm going to waive the first month's rent. Don't worry about it."
"Oh, please, you don't have to do that."
"It's my way of helping." She said it simply, like it was already settled. "I live with a firefighter and a cop. I hear about how hard it gets."