17. Good Bones #3
“I’m glad I went,” she said, and hated herself a little.
They stayed in the shop for dinner. Morgan made pasta and they ate at the workbench because the table upstairs was covered in parts catalogs. Rusty positioned himself between them, all optimism and wagging tail.
“This is good,” Nora said.
“It’s pasta.”
“It has sauce. Garlic. There’s cheese.”
Morgan snorted. “I know what I put in it.”
“You could accept the compliment.”
Morgan took another bite. “Thank you.”
Rusty sat between them, watching Nora’s fork with high intensity.
“Don’t,” Morgan said.
Nora gave her a most innocent look. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re considering it.”
“He looks hungry.”
“He ate twenty minutes ago.”
Rusty rested his chin on Nora’s knee, the very picture of a dog who hadn’t been allowed food in a very, very long time.
“He says that was twenty minutes ago.”
“He’s a dog,” Morgan said. “He didn’t say anything.”
Nora slipped him a piece of cheese.
Morgan pointed her fork at her. “I saw that.”
“I don’t know how that happened,” Nora said. “I meant to eat that, and then he moved really quickly.”
“He’s like ten years old. He doesn’t do anything quickly.”
“Morgan Livingston, are you claiming Rusty is incapable of something because of his age? Isn’t that ageism?” Nora asked with mock outrage and then a big grin. “He moved quickly for ten.”
Rusty swallowed the evidence and returned his chin to her knee.
Morgan shook her head and kept eating, but Nora didn’t miss the slight upward tug of her lips.
“Do people ever bring you cars that have nothing wrong with them?” Nora asked.
“All the time.”
“What do you tell them?”
“That there’s nothing wrong with their car.”
“Of course you do.”
“A woman came in last winter because she heard a clicking sound whenever she turned left. I drove it three times. Nothing.”
“Did you think she imagined it?”
“No. People usually hear what they say they hear. They’re wrong about where it comes from.”
“What was it?”
“Tin of mints under the passenger seat.”
Nora laughed. “Did you charge her?”
“No.”
“But you found the problem.”
“I put the mints in her cup holder.”
“That’s still labor.”
“It took four minutes.”
“The driving part must’ve taken longer than that,” Nora said. “So that was kind.”
Morgan gave her a flat look. “No.”
“Right. Sorry. Entirely practical.”
Morgan’s mouth moved at one corner again. She ate another forkful, then asked, “What was your first paid show?”
Nora blinked. Morgan didn’t often ask questions without being asked one first.
“The Saturday market. I was sixteen.”
“Here?”
“Over by the library. They put me between a woman selling soap and a man with six kinds of zucchini.”
“How much did they pay you?”
“Fifty dollars. And I got two free zucchinis, because the man liked my singing.”
Morgan nodded. “Were you good?”
Nora paused. “I was sixteen.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Nora smiled down at her bowl. “I was okay. I had eight songs to play, half of them my own, half of them covers. People who stayed longer than forty minutes heard repeats. Gramps sat in a folding chair right in front of me for the entire three hours I was there.”
Morgan chewed and swallowed, then asked, “Your parents?”
“Mom came for the last set. Dad drove her, but he stayed in the car.”
Morgan pushed the bowl of grated cheese toward her.
“What about your first terrible show?” she asked.
“Oh, there are so many.”
“The worst.”
Nora pondered the question. There were different ways to answer that, because one could certainly say that the panic attack one had been the worst. But tonight wasn’t about that. So she picked an entirely different sort of worst. “A bowling alley outside Sacramento.”
Morgan stopped with her fork halfway to her mouth. “Why were you playing in a bowling alley?”
“I needed the money. They put me beside lanes eleven and twelve. Every quiet song had bowling balls going behind it.”
“How many sets?”
“Three.”
“You stayed for all three?”
“Of course. They’d already paid me.”
“Money?”
“Drink tickets.”
“You don’t drink beer.”
“I know that now.”
Morgan laughed. It was brief and surprised, and Nora watched her duck her head over her bowl as if she could hide it.
After dinner, they washed up in the narrow kitchen. Morgan dried while Nora put both bowls in the wrong cabinet and had to be corrected. Neither of them hurried.
Upstairs, in the dark, Morgan’s arm settled across her and Nora fit herself against her and felt, under the warmth and the wanting to stay, the weight of the thing she hadn’t said.
Morgan’s breathing slowed.
Nora lay awake and thought about how she’d sat in the Redwood Inn parking lot and called her manager and said yes and it had felt like she’d chosen something, finally, on purpose—and yet now she lay in the dark next to the person most affected by that choice.
Morgan didn’t know, because Nora had decided she’d find the right moment, as if there was a moment when Morgan wouldn’t retreat because of this.
The oak outside moved in the dry night air.
Tomorrow, she thought, and recognized it for what it was.