16. What’s Still Standing
What’s Still Standing
Morgan
The scaffolding went up next door on a Monday, and Morgan listened to it from under the Hendersons’ Corolla for the better part of an hour before she let herself come out and look.
It was a sound she knew—metal couplers, the flat clang of a board dropped into place, men calling measurements to each other in the shorthand of people who’d done it a hundred times.
She finished the brake job first. The Corolla needed it and the scaffolding wasn’t going to un-build itself based on her attention, and there was a particular satisfaction in torquing the last bolt to spec while something she couldn’t control assembled itself twenty feet away.
When she rolled out from under the car and strode to the bay door, wiping her hands, she found the hoarding already half up.
White panels, a blue logo she didn’t need to read twice because she’d seen it on enough manila envelopes.
COMING SOON, the letters said, and below that a rendering—glass and clean lines and small bright trees, a building that had nothing to do with the street it was going to replace.
Morgan regarded it. Rusty came and stood beside her, leaning his gray-muzzled weight against her shin, tongue lolling.
“It’s a sign,” she told him. “People put them up.”
He glanced at the hoarding, then up at her.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know what it means.”
She’d known what it meant for months. The building had sold, the new owners had plans, and the plans did not include a one-woman auto shop that had been hers for eleven years.
She’d stopped opening the letters somewhere around the fourth, because she knew what they said, and kept all but one in her drawers.
What she had not done—what she kept not doing—was anything about it. She hadn’t called the three other shops within an hour’s drive to ask if they were hiring or selling. She hadn’t checked commercial listings. She hadn’t started boxing up the life she’d built with her own two hands.
She went back inside and started on the next car.
Ethan turned up around nine without warning, and without a real reason, a coffee in each hand.
“Morning, boss lady.” He set her coffee on the bench and leaned in the bay door, surveying the street. “They’ve gone and uglied up the neighborhood, I see.”
Morgan came out from under the hood. “Started this morning.”
“Twelve units.” Ethan read it off the hoarding, sipping his coffee. “Ground-floor retail.” He was quiet for a moment. Then, not quite to Morgan, not quite to the street, he said, “Whole block’s going to be worth a fortune once that thing’s up.”
He didn’t know the building had sold out from under her, because she… hadn’t told him.
The bay was quiet. It was just the two of them, the radio low, twenty years of trust standing in the room.
She opened her mouth.
“Anyway,” Ethan said, already moving on, because that was Ethan too, “I’m not gonna keep you away from your work. Just wanted to make sure you got some decent coffee.”
He said his goodbyes without much ado—no lingering, no second glance at the hoarding, no look that said you can tell me. Just a lifted hand and he was gone. Morgan stood there with the moment behind her now, the thing unsaid.
Around mid-morning a car she didn’t recognize pulled into the lot—a newer sedan, city plates—and a young woman got out who very clearly did not have a car problem. She had her phone half-raised before she’d even cleared the door.
“Are you Morgan Livingston? From the—” She gestured vaguely, brightly. “The photo? The Bean There one? You’re her, right? The mechanic?”
“Can I help you with your car?” Morgan said.
“Oh—no, I just—” The phone came up another inch. “Could I get a quick picture? My friend is obsessed with the Nora Carter, and you two are so cute, the comments are going crazy—”
“I’m working,” Morgan said, and turned back to the Outback, and after a moment of hovering the woman took the hint and left, though Morgan caught the flash of her phone going off anyway, aimed at the shop sign, at the bay, at the gray dog under the desk.
Documentation of something. Evidence that she’d been here.
Morgan stood with her hands flat on the engine for a moment after the car pulled out.
It had been happening ever since the photo.
A comment here, a stranger there. Someone had geotagged the shop.
Livingston Auto, where it all started, with a string of little hearts, as if her life was a set piece in a story that belonged to other people.
She’d started parking the truck where it blocked the sightline from the road.
She’d stopped letting Rusty out front in the afternoons.
Small adjustments that added up to rearranging her whole shape to stay unseen.
She didn’t have words for how much she hated it.
That was the trouble with it—it wasn’t a thing you could fix or fight or even name without sounding ridiculous.
Strangers are being nice about me on the internet.
Who complained about that? But every photo was a small theft, a piece of her taken without asking and handed to people she’d never meet, and she’d spent years building a life where this shouldn’t happen, and now it was happening, and the reason it was happening was the person she’d let up the stairs.
She didn’t finish that thought either. She got back under the Outback.
Nora came by a little after eleven, with two coffees from Bean There, a sandwich, and a smile.
“Morning,” she said, setting the cups on the workbench in the spot that had become the coffee spot. She noted the previous Bean There cup. “Already had company?”
“Ethan came by,” Morgan said.
“You mean to say I’m not original in bringing you coffee?” Nora asked with a smile.
Morgan came over and took the coffee left for her. “Originality is overrated.”
Nora snorted. Then she glanced out the bay door at the half-built hoarding next door. “What’s that all about?”
Morgan shrugged.
“I’ve been hearing about new developments around here,” Nora said.
Another shrug, because what was Morgan supposed to say?
“The little trees are a nice touch though,” Nora said, considering. “Very ‘we thought about your feelings’.”
Morgan huffed, not quite a laugh. “They always draw trees.”
“Do they ever plant the trees?”
“No idea.”
Nora handed her a coffee and didn’t ask anything else about the sign, which Morgan noticed and was grateful for and didn’t think too hard about.
Nora pulled up her stool and took out her notebook, and Morgan went back to the Outback. The radio played, and Rusty resettled himself under the desk with a sigh, and Nora wrote and crossed things out and hummed under her breath, all while Morgan worked.
Or tried to work.
It turned out, Nora was distracting.
Morgan would be tightening a fitting and she’d catch the sound of Nora’s pencil stopping, and she’d look over without deciding to, and Nora would be chewing the end of the pencil with her eyes somewhere far off, working a lyric loose, and Morgan would feel it—a low warmth that started somewhere in her belly and moved out from there, slow, like heat off an engine that had been running a while.
It was not a feeling she had much practice with, and it had been years since the last time.
It made her lose the thread of what her hands were doing.
Twice she had to stop and remember what came next in a job she could usually do half-asleep.
It annoyed her. She had spent a great many years being a person whose hands did not forget what they were doing, and now there was a musician on a stool four feet away undoing that, apparently just by existing, by humming and having her hair down, and Morgan did not know what to do with a want that arrived uninvited in the middle of a Monday.
She must have gone still longer than she realized, because when she looked up Nora was watching her, and Nora’s mouth had curved.
“What?” Morgan said.
“Nothing.” Nora set the notebook down. “You’ve been holding that same wrench for a while.”
“I’m thinking.”
“About the wrench?”
Morgan didn’t answer, and Nora laughed a warm sound, delighted, like Morgan had handed her something good—and got up off the stool and crossed the shop. She stopped close, in the space Morgan didn’t let most people into, and reached up and kissed her.
Morgan had meant to keep it brief. She had an Outback to finish and grease on her hands and a hoarding going up next door, and there were a hundred good reasons to keep it brief…
but she didn’t keep it brief. Nora’s hand settled light against her jaw and Morgan leaned into it before she’d decided to, the warmth inside spreading out bright and insistent, and for a moment the shop and the sign and the locked drawer all went quiet and there was just this—Nora’s mouth, the smell of coffee and pencil shavings and, faintly, the lavender thing she used, the simple animal fact of wanting to stay exactly here.
It was Morgan who made herself step back, eventually. Nora let her, smiling, entirely too pleased.
“You’re slowing down my work,” Morgan said.
“I know.” Nora didn’t sound remotely sorry. “It’s the best thing I’ve done all day.”
“It’s noon.”
“Still. You should work less.” She went back to the stool, and picked up her pencil, and Morgan stood there for a second with her heart doing something undignified and her work entirely forgotten, and thought: this is going to be a problem, and could not, for the life of her, make herself mind.
The thing she should have said sat in her chest the whole time.
It always did now. The shop is closing. Not slowing down, not relocating because I chose to…
closing. The building’s gone and I’ve got weeks, and that hoarding next door is the same people, and the same thing is coming for this wall too.
The words were right there.
Telling her would mean Nora’s face changing.
It would mean watching worry cross her face, and then—because this was Nora, because Nora’s whole self bent toward fixing the thing in front of her—it would mean Nora helping.
Plans. Listings. Phone calls. And some stubborn, deep-set part of Morgan, the part that had built this shop alone and found Rusty alone and made every hard decision of her adult life with no one’s hands but her own, simply could not stand the thought of it. She handled her own things herself.
And underneath even that—she could admit this only to the inside of her own skull—there was the smaller, more cowardly truth.
She hadn’t said it out loud to a single living person.
Not Ethan, her supposed best friend. Not her mother.
Not anyone. As long as the words stayed inside her, the whole thing kept a kind of distance, the way a problem in a letter you hadn’t opened kept its distance—technically true, certainly true, but off to one side of the actual day she was standing in.
Saying it to Nora would haul it into the middle of the room.
It would make it a fact with a witness. And a fact with a witness was real in a way that a fact alone in your own chest simply was not.
She almost said it once, near one o’clock. Nora peered up from the notebook and said, “Can I ask you something?” and there was something about it that made Morgan think for one cold second that Nora already knew, somehow, that the question was going to be what’s really going on with the shop?
Morgan’s whole body got ready for it.
But Nora only asked whether Morgan wanted half her sandwich, because she’d bought too much again, and Morgan said yes, and the moment—the open door of it—closed quietly while Morgan stood there having failed to walk through it.
Patricia arrived at three, with baked goods and the confidence of a woman who had been letting herself into her daughter’s spaces since said daughter was born. She set a foil-covered plate on the workbench as though workbenches were a normal home for lemon cake.
“Morgan.” She kissed Morgan’s cheek, then turned. “And Eleanor! So good to see you.”
Nora smiled. “Hi, Mrs. Livingston.”
“Oh, please call me Patricia, dear,” Patricia said.
“I won’t stay. I’m on my way to the historical society—we’ve got the dickens of a fight on our hands over this development application.
” She said it lightly, peeling the foil back, the way she said most things.
Then her eye caught the bay door, and the hoarding, and the COMING SOON, and her mouth thinned.
“And there it is. They didn’t waste a moment, did they.
Twelve units, on that little lot.” She shook her head.
“Mom,” Morgan said.
She watched her mother’s eye move from the hoarding back to the cake, already foiling it back over. Patricia had not scrutinized the shop sign, and Morgan had no idea if it was because she didn’t want to see the details, or if it was because she truly didn’t understand the implications.
“I know, I know, I’m preaching.” Patricia set the foil aside and studied her daughter, and something in her face shifted. “You look tired, sweetheart. You’ve looked tired for a while now. You’d tell me if something was sitting on you, wouldn’t you?”
The shop was quiet for a second.
“It’s just a busy stretch,” Morgan said. “I’m figuring it out.”
Which was true, and was what her mother most wanted to hear.
“Well,” Patricia said. “Busy stretches end.” She patted the plate. “Eat the cake, both of you, it doesn’t keep. Eleanor, it’s one of my better recipes, and Morgan loves it.”
“I’ll try it, thank you,” Nora said.
Patricia kissed Morgan’s cheek again, told her to get more sleep in a tone that did not invite discussion, and left.
Nora gave Morgan an amused, sidelong smile. “You love cake?”
“I like keeping my mother semi-happy at times,” Morgan said. “And me eating her cakes makes her happy.”
“That’s kind of you.” Nora grinned. “Also, I’m not sure it’s that much of a hardship to eat cake.”
Morgan gave her a small smile back. “Maybe not.”
But she stood there a moment after, with the foil half off the plate and her mother’s car pulling out of the lot, and felt how near it had come—how Patricia had stood three feet away and as good as asked, is something sitting on you, and how Morgan had said a busy stretch instead of telling the truth.
She hadn’t been able to do it. Not with Ethan in the morning, not with her mother just now.
Twenty years of friendship and thirty of being someone’s daughter, and the words had stayed exactly where they always stayed.
She cut two slices, and handed Nora the bigger one, and let the afternoon close over what she still hadn’t said.