22. Twenty-One Days
Twenty-One Days
Morgan
The boxes were the problem.
Not filling them. That work was fine. No, as always, the problem was what the work meant.
Twenty-one days. She’d done the math on Sunday morning, finally, sitting at the bench with the legal pad on her knee—Where does it go, still in her own block printing at the top of the page, and underneath it, in pen this time, the answers she’d started forcing herself to make.
Storage unit on the highway, the lift sold or left behind, the compressor to Patricia’s garage if Patricia would take it.
The apartment upstairs was a separate problem she wasn’t ready to look at. One impossible thing at a time.
Twenty-one days.
The phone was on the bench, face-down.
She’d been looking at it, the way Nora used to look at hers, the same compulsive, half-disgusted thumb-flick. Morgan had pitied that, mildly, in the kind of way you could pity something you were sure you’d never become.
Now she did it three or four times an hour and pretended she wasn’t.
The algorithm had figured her out fast. Nora Carter Fillmore residency opens Thursday.
Nora Carter on the comeback that “almost killed her”: a magazine spread.
A morning show clip, six minutes: Nora on a couch with her guitar, laughing at something the host said.
Throat clear, eyes bright. Nora had sent one message at 6:14 a.m., the first since she’d walked out: I keep starting messages and not knowing how to.
Now she was laughing with a stranger on a couch.
Nora everywhere except the one place.
That had been the worst minutes of her week, and she’d watched them twice.
She put the phone back face-down. The box wasn’t going to label itself.
Ethan came in through the side door at quarter past one.
“Brought lunch,” he said. Two sandwiches in butcher paper from the place at the corner and a paper bag of chips, the chips already half-open in the bag because Ethan was the kind of person who got hungry on the walk over and started in on his half. He set hers on the desk. “Eat.”
“Not hungry.”
“Wasn’t a suggestion.”
She took the sandwich. She unwrapped it and bit it because Ethan was watching and the easiest way to get him to stop watching her was to do what he wanted, which she resented slightly.
He peered at the stack of boxes by the door.
“Started, then.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Started? You knew?”
“Suspected.” He took another bite. He let the silence sit, the way he could, the way she liked him for, and then said—easy, just observing. “So where’s it going?”
“Storage. On the highway. How did you know?”
He gestured loosely at the wall, meaning the whole block, meaning everything on the other side of it that was getting torn down and rebuilt in the brochure renderings she refused to read.
“They’ve been pushing for the whole strip for a year.
Knew you’d be next. Didn’t see how the math worked with you staying. ”
“Since when?”
“Eh.” He waved it off. “June? Maybe May. Whenever they bought the bakery building. After that it was just a matter of when.”
He had known since May, and had come in every week, and had drunk her coffee and made her laugh and never once leaned on it. He had figured out the worst thing happening to her and had—like a person who actually knew her—waited.
“At least you didn’t throw it in my face,” she said, half to herself, under the lip of the sandwich, before she’d quite decided to say it.
He stopped chewing and peered at her.
“Who did?”
She set the sandwich down and wiped her hands on the rag. She had not meant to say that, but was too tired to take it back.
“Nora,” she said. “Found the notice. Week before everything. Didn’t say.”
“...Okay?”
“Then in the fight. She used it.”
“Used it how?”
She rolled it in her head, looking for the cleanest version, the one that took the least out of her. “We were fighting about her not telling me about San Francisco. She said I had no right to be angry, because I hadn’t told her about the shop.”
Ethan absorbed that. He set his sandwich down too. He didn’t say Jeez or that’s not great or any of the things a person with less practice at being her friend would have said. He just sat with it. “Did she have a point?”
Morgan glared at him.
“And then you sent her home?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“Morrie.”
“And nothing, Ethan. She hasn’t been back. She’s in San Francisco. I’m sure you’ve seen the internet.”
He gazed at her for a long beat, eyes soft. She knew he could see what she was leaving out, and there was no point pretending otherwise around Ethan, who had known her since they were young and had developed, against his will, the capacity to read her.
“Was it just the notice thing?” he asked. “Or did you—“ He stopped, picking his words. “Did you give her some of it back?”
She didn’t answer.
“Morrie.”
“I gave her some of it back,” she said, looking at the box. “Yeah.”
“Okay.” He nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“That all you’ve got?”
He sighed. “You both did some damage,” he said, eventually. “People do, in fights. The question is… are you going to leave it?”
“She knows where I am.”
“Sure.”
“She has my number.”
“And you have hers.”
“It’s not on me to—“
“Morrie.” He said it gently. “I didn’t ask whose turn it was. I asked if you were going to leave it.”
She didn’t answer that either.
He let it go and resumed eating his chips, and asked her about the storage unit’s monthly rate, and stayed another twenty minutes talking about nothing useful. On the way out he paused at the door, the way he had last week too, and said, “I’ll come help. With the heavy stuff.”
“I can do it myself.”
“I know you can.”
He left. The door clicked behind him. The shop was quiet again, and Morgan stood there with half a sandwich and a question she hadn’t answered.
Rusty had come out from under the desk while Ethan was there—Ethan was one of his always-approved humans—and had settled in his other spot, the rectangle of weak sun by the side window. Now he lifted his head and looked at Morgan. He waited.
She slid down the side of the bench until she was sitting on the floor with her back to it, which she had not done in years.
Her knees came up. Rusty got up from his rectangle of sun and crossed to her, the gray muzzle, the slight stiffness in the hips she’d been pretending not to notice, and lay down against her thigh with a long sigh.
“Hi,” she said.
He thumped his tail once.
She put her hand on his shoulder, the gray bit, the place where the fur went coarse, and regarded the boxes by the door.
“Ethan figured it out in June,” she told him. “He sat in here every week and didn’t say.”
The dog breathed.
“She found the notice and used it inside a week.”
The dog breathed.
“That’s not—“ She stopped. She started again. “That’s not the same thing. I know that’s not the same thing. Ethan’s known me for years and Nora’s known me for a month, and you don’t get the same trust at the same speed. I know that.”
He pressed harder against her thigh.
“And I was cruel too, Rust.”
It was the first time she’d said it. To anyone, including the dog, including herself, in the four-walls quiet she’d been carrying around since Friday.
I was cruel too. She’d known it the whole time.
She had thrown the locked door at Nora’s face and let it close on her with one of the worst things a person could be told—that’s why I don’t tell people—said calm and final the way you’d say that’s why I don’t open that valve, the way you’d reduce a person to a lesson learned.
She had sent her home. Go home, Nora. Gentle.
The cruelest version of gentle there was.
“She’d just done a thing,” she said. “And I’d just done a thing. And I picked the worst possible word to do it with.”
He tucked his head onto her shin.
“Hannah said I wasn’t as self-sufficient as I thought.” She heard herself laugh, one short hard breath, no humor in it. “I told Nora she had it backwards. I told myself she had it backwards. Eleven years and a shop and a dog. I am self-sufficient.”
The dog made the small noise he made when she was talking and the talking went on too long.
“It’s just.” She bent her head. “I was right, Rust. About all of it. About letting people in. About what it costs.” She swallowed. “And it feels exactly like being completely wrong. It feels exactly the same. I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart in a lineup.”
She put her face in her free hand for a second.
“I miss her,” she said into the hand. Quiet.
To the dog and the empty shop and the boxes by the side door.
“I miss her. Stupidly. I miss the coffee cup on the desk and her sweatshirt on the stool and the way she… God, the way she sang in the morning while she made coffee. I let her in and she walked into a corner of me I didn’t even know existed and now she’s gone and the room she walked into is just sitting there. Empty. With her shape in the air.”
He shifted to put his chin properly on her knee.
“I built all of this,” she said, looking around the shop, the bays, the pegboard with all eleven years of tools in all eleven years of slots, the bench she’d bolted to the floor herself the second year.
“I built it. And it’s ending. And I let her in.
And she’s gone. And I was right. And I am sitting on the floor of my own shop that is closing and talking to my dog. ”
He didn’t move. Old dogs were good at not moving.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she said.
He just looked at her with dark eyes.
She sat with her hand on his shoulder for a long time after that, in the quiet she had made and the quiet she had earned, with twenty-one days on the lease.