23. The Two Stubborn Men #2
He took a breath. “We wanted different things from being alive. He wanted to be left alone with his land and his trees and his projects and to be visited on his own terms when he felt like company. I wanted… I wanted security. For myself. For your mother. For you and your brother. He thought I was a coward for it. He didn’t say that exactly, but he said things that meant that.
And I thought he was reckless and selfish and that he’d given up—when your grandmother died—that he’d given up on the part of being a person where you participate.
I said things that meant that, and I never took them back. ”
She had her free hand pressed flat to the desk now.
“He and I… neither of us was wrong, particularly. We were the two stubborn men we were, too much alike in some ways, and too different in others, and we couldn’t be in a room together for long, because being in a room would have required one of us to bend.
Neither of us was going to. So I told myself we had time.
I told myself I’d call when I was ready.
I told myself the times when he got sick that I’d call when I’d worked out what to say, but then he got better and I figured I still had time.
” His voice did something careful. “And then he was dead, Eleanor. There was no time left to call. There was not going to be any time. There is just the not-having-called, and the years of it before, and the silence that I let calcify because I am, apparently, a man who can do that for thirty years if no one stops me.”
She could not have spoken if she’d tried, her throat so thick and her eyes burning.
“That was never about you,” he said. “I want you to hear that. Whatever you thought, whatever I let you think—that was about him and me. He loved you. He couldn’t manage it with me. I couldn’t manage it with him. It was never you, it was us.”
“Dad.” When she blinked, the tears fell down her cheeks.
“And when I heard you on the radio this morning, I—” He stopped.
Started again. “He doesn’t get to hear it now, but I do.
I am not going to be a stubborn man about a house, Eleanor.
Keep it. Live in it. Sell it in ten years if you want to.
It’s yours. He left it to you because he trusted you to know. ”
Tears poured down her cheeks. She was sitting in a hotel room in San Francisco on the day of her third Fillmore show with a sandwich half-eaten on the desk and she was crying with her hand pressed to the desk like she might fall through it.
“Dad.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have hit you with all of it before a show.”
“I’m… I’m glad you did.” She sniffled. “Just be glad my makeup artist hasn’t done my makeup yet. She’d kill you for making me cry.”
He snorted.
She heard him breathing on the other end, evenly, the way he did when he was waiting out something difficult. He had not always been the man on this call. He was, today, and she was going to remember that he had been.
She didn’t go to the venue right away after she hung up. She sat in the hotel room for a long time with the phone in her lap and the lukewarm tea she’d made and didn’t drink, and she stared at the curtain rod and waited for the thing in her chest to stop doing what it was doing.
We didn’t get there.
Two stubborn people. Both believing they were right. Both letting the silence harden, day by day, into a thing you couldn’t reach across anymore, and then one of them died, and the thing was set, and the other had to live in it.
She knew, with the cold immediate clarity of a fact she’d been refusing to see, that she was eleven days into doing exactly the same thing.
She had been so careful, in Redwood Hollow, not to run.
She had carved out the off-days like a person who meant to come back.
She had been so proud of not running. And the whole time, by every measure that actually mattered, by every measure her father had just described in his own confession of a life—she had been running.
“I am not going to do this.”
She heard herself say it out loud, in the hotel room, to the curtain rod.
The curtain rod was unmoved.
She picked up her phone before she’d decided to, and Daniel picked up on the second ring.
“Sunshine.”
“Hi.” She paused. “Dad just called me.”
In the background, one of his favorite albums was on—the one he listened to when he was having a hard week, which meant he was having a hard week and he’d picked up anyway. That was Danny.
“Okay? And what did he say?”
She told him, in the disorganized version—small detail first, the large one second, the no time left to call arriving last because she’d been saving it like a held breath. Daniel listened without inserting himself, with the occasional okay. When she finished she could hear him breathing.
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
A pause. “Is he okay?”
That stopped her. She’d cried because he told her, but hadn’t stopped to think of him. “He sounded… I don’t know. I didn’t ask, I was just—he never says things like this.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“But I think he was okay,” Nora said softly. “He… I don’t know, it sounded like it was something he needed to say.”
“And you?”
“I’m something. I’m not okay but I’m…”
“Yeah.” He let her sit in it, and then, in his gentle voice, he asked, “So, are we going to talk about Morgan, or are we going to keep pretending this isn’t at least partly about her?”
She closed her eyes. “Danny.”
“I’m just asking.”
“You’re pushing.”
“I’m pushing a little.” He waited. “You rushed out of Redwood so fast Mom and Dad barely had time to say goodbye.”
“We had a fight.”
“Okay.”
“A bad one.”
“Considering where you are now, alone, I figured.”
“I was mean, Danny,” Nora said, running a hand through her hair.
“I said things I shouldn’t have. And she just…
she looked at me and went somewhere I couldn’t reach, and she told me to go home, and I went home, and I left and then I’ve been here.
Doing the residency. Waiting for her to text.
And she’s not going to text. I sent her a text that she hasn’t answered, and it was a bad text anyway, but she’s not going to respond. ”
“How long since the fight?”
“Eleven days.”
“Eleven?”
“Yeah.”
“Nora.” She heard him breathe out. “Are you going to call her? Because texting just isn’t going to cut it, and you know it.”
There it was. The one question.
“I don’t think calling is right. Calling… she’d hear my voice and she’d close. I know her. Calling won’t work.”
“So.”
“So I have to go. I have to see her.” She heard herself say it, and the room rearranged itself around the saying. “I have to go to Redwood Hollow, to the shop. There isn’t a phone-call version of this. I have to be there.”
“Good. When?”
“Eight days. I have tomorrow and Monday off from shows, but Adrian has booked me up with interviews and a night show, so… It’s going to be eight days. I already have the tickets, because I booked them before… They’re in my phone.”
“Eight days.”
“Yes.”
A pause. “That’s a long time for the two of you to sit with it.”
“I know.” Her voice was smaller than it should be. “But I can’t go without breaking contract.”
Shuffling on the other end of the phone. “Just don’t chicken out in that time.”
Nora swallowed hard. “I won’t.”
“And, sunshine?”
“Yeah.”
“When you go, you don’t go to win her back. You go because the alternative is being Dad on the phone today. Yeah?”
Her chest felt tighter. “Yeah.”
He was quiet for a long pause. In the background, she still heard the album going, a new song now.
“I love you, always,” he said.
“I love you.”
After she hung up, she splashed her face with cold water.
She got her notebook out and turned to the back, where the unfinished song was—the foundations one.
She didn’t write it down now either. But she sat with it open on her lap for a minute, and the shape of the last verse began to gather in the air around her.
The notebook went in the bag. The bag went by the door.
The show was in three hours.