17. Good Bones #2
Not the wobble, not I haven’t decided, not the careful hedging she’d given her father this morning.
She was keeping it. She’d known it the second the third porch step flexed under her foot, maybe; she’d just needed to walk the whole property and read the whole notebook and stand in front of this ridiculous perfect garage to let herself say it.
The numbers were still bad. The roof was still shot.
Her father was still right about every practical thing.
And she was keeping it anyway, because some things you didn’t decide with a spreadsheet, because Gramps had written used, tended, by someone who’ll make something here and she was, apparently, going to be that someone.
She’d call her father tonight. Or tomorrow. She’d tell him. That conversation would be its own weather and she’d face it when it came.
But the deciding was done. That, at least, was solid ground.
The garage was not solid ground… because she could not say a word of it to Morgan.
The dizziness curdled. The high dropped out from under it.
Because to offer the garage—I have this space, come look at it, it could work—she would have to explain why she knew Morgan needed a space.
There was no sentence that started with the garage could be your shop that didn’t begin, somewhere in its logic, with I found the notice and read it.
No gift that didn’t have the secret inside it.
She’d been carrying Morgan’s secret for four days, watching her deflect, and Nora had let the door stay closed because she’d decided—out of love, out of patience, out of everything she understood about what it meant to be handed a private wound instead of choosing to give it—that the kindest thing was to wait.
That Morgan would tell her. That being safe to be told was the most useful thing she could be.
She sat down in the grass. Just sat, knees up, looking at the garage like it had personally done this to her.
The patience had made sense days ago, but it less sense now.
Because the cost of waiting wasn’t just Nora carrying something heavy—the cost was a garage Morgan didn’t know existed as an option, a solution sitting right here on twenty acres while the clock on the lease ran down.
Thirty-four days. She’d done the math. Thirty-four days from today.
Make something here, Gramps had written. That’s all I want for it.
“Okay,” she said, to the garage, to the grasshoppers, to absolutely nobody. “Okay.”
She took a picture of it. She didn’t know why—she just wanted a record that she’d stood here and seen it. Then she got up and stalked back through the long grass to the house, and she got in the car, and she drove back toward town.
She called Adrian from the driveway of the Redwood Inn, before she could change her mind, Gramps’ words echoing through her mind.
I hope she continues to dare to take chances.
Adrian picked up on the first ring.
“I’m in,” she said. “The Fillmore. Yes.”
The silence lasted exactly one second—the silence of a man recalibrating from a fight he’d been expecting into something else. “Okay. Good. I’ll call them today.”
“I want it on my terms, Adrian. My setlist, my pacing. No forcing an opening slot onto something I haven’t agreed to.”
“Understood.”
“And I’m coming back here between shows when I need to. I’m not living in a hotel in San Francisco for four weeks.”
A pause. “That’s… fine. The schedule has enough flex.”
“Good.” She looked at the Redwood Inn’s sign, the small parking lot, the oak at the corner that had been dropping acorns on cars since before she was born. “Then we’re doing this.”
“Yes, we are. And it’s going to be good.”
They talked through the logistics—start date September seventeenth, hotel in the Mission, photographer confirmed, three dates a week leaving Mondays and Tuesdays always open because those days would be difficult to fill anyway.
She wrote nothing down. She’d remember it.
She hung up and sat in the car a moment with the phone in her lap and the September light on the windshield, and what she felt wasn’t triumph exactly, and not relief exactly, and not the flat absence of fear she’d been confusing with readiness.
It was something more complicated. It involved wanting two things that didn’t fully fit together yet and deciding that didn’t mean she couldn’t have them.
She put the car in gear and drove to Morgan’s.
The bay doors were both up, the radio carrying into the lot.
There was a sticky note stuck to the bay door when she walked in—someone’s torn-off corner of paper, a heart and we love you guys!
! in pink pen. Nora barely saw it. She’d had worse and stranger sent to her; it didn’t register as anything but background.
Morgan was at the service desk when Nora came in, working through the handwritten ledger, and Rusty lifted his head from under the desk and thumped his tail twice without getting up.
Morgan looked up and did the small unguarding she did.
“Hey,” Morgan said.
“Hey.” Nora put her guitar down and dropped onto the stool. “I went out to the land today.”
“How was it?”
“Good. Hard.” She picked at the edge of her guitar case.
“Found Gramps’ notebook on the shelf. Mostly lists—things to fix, deer eating his garden.
But he’d written a few lines about my dad.
About the two of them.” She paused. “I always thought I was the reason they stopped talking. The music thing. Gramps pushing it, Dad resenting it.” She studied her hands.
“Reading it… I don’t know. Maybe it had been going on long before me. ”
Morgan set down her pen. She didn’t say I told you so, because that wasn’t a thing she did. She just nodded.
“I took a tour around the property after,” Nora said. “I think I want to fix the house up. Actually use it.”
Morgan nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
Nora gazed at her—the steadiness of her, hands flat on the ledger, completely present—and felt the Fillmore news sitting in her chest like something swallowed wrong.
She should say it. She’d meant to say it the whole drive over.
I called Adrian. I said yes. It’s done and I should have talked to you first and I didn’t and I’m sorry and I’m not leaving, not really, but I am leaving and I should have said something before I decided.
She didn’t say it.
Not because she didn’t have the words, but because she’d made a decision that affected both of them without asking, or even mentioning, and Morgan was sitting right there being steady and warm and entirely unaware of it, and Nora knew that Morgan wouldn’t blow up.
Instead, she’d go quiet and pull the door shut, politely, carefully, and Nora would watch it happen and not be able to stop it, and the evening would curdle into something careful and managed, and she didn’t want that.
She wanted this. The desk and the ledger and the radio and Rusty’s tail scraping the floor.
She wanted more of this before she ruined it.