24. What She Built the Wall Against
What She Built the Wall Against
Morgan
The pegboard was half empty.
Morgan stood in front of it with a clipboard and a pencil and stared at the holes where things had been—the half-inch socket set, the impact wrench, the carb-cleaner spray she’d never not been able to reach for in her sleep.
She’d done that side of the board on Monday, methodically, drawer by drawer, and had not yet been able to do the other half.
The other half had the tools she actually used.
Taking those down was different. She knew she was going to have to take them down before next Tuesday, and she had not yet.
Thirteen days.
She made a note on the clipboard. A man named Vince was coming next Wednesday with a flatbed to take the lift.
She’d called him on Monday. She’d called him in the parking lot, actually, because she hadn’t been able to make the call sitting at her own desk in her own shop; she’d walked outside into the September sun and stood between two parked cars and asked a man she’d known for nine years and never asked anything of, would he take the lift, would he give her something for it, when could he come.
Vince had been quiet for a beat and had then said Yeah.
I’ll come Wednesday. And he had not asked her why—which was the local kindness she’d been getting all week.
People knew. Had probably known for months, just like Ethan.
Vince had quoted her a price he must have known was too high. She had not argued.
The lift was the first thing she’d let go of out loud, and it had felt—she could not lie to herself about this—like cutting one of the cables holding the elevator and watching the floor count slow but not stop.
The bench was harder.
She’d bolted the bench to the floor herself the second year, six lag bolts into concrete with a hammer drill from a place that no longer existed.
The bench was staying. She’d decided that this morning.
There was no version of moving it that didn’t involve a chisel and a long Saturday.
The bench was going to be destroyed and thrown away when the whole building got demolished.
That was its fate now. She wrote BENCH—STAYS on the clipboard, and underlined it, and put the clipboard down.
The bay doors were down still. They’d been down for eighteen days.
Her phone buzzed on the bench.
Patricia
Honey just made banana bread, come pick some up.
Then, before Morgan could answer:
Or I’ll come to you. You at the shop?
It wasn’t really a question, because Patricia always knew. Where else would she be?
Yes.
Be there in ten.
Morgan put the phone down. She glanced at the half-bare pegboard, then at the bench.
With a distant kind of calm, she thought, she’s about to see it.
For months, she had kept this from her mother, and in the past eighteen days she had declined three dinners, kept the phone calls vague—and she had to decide in the next ten minutes whether to keep keeping it.
The bay door was down; she could lie. She could meet Patricia at the side door and walk her two steps in and walk her back out before Patricia’s eye caught the boxes.
She did not move toward the side door.
Patricia came in eight minutes later with a Tupperware and the smell of cinnamon and the particular brisk fullness that filled any room she entered.
She set the Tupperware on the desk. She kissed Morgan on the cheek.
She turned to take her usual look around the shop—and her hand, which had been moving to pull the lid off the bread, stopped.
She said nothing for a long beat.
She noted the pegboard, then turned and took in the boxes stacked by the side door.
She noted the bench, with no tools on it, and the clipboard, with BENCH—STAYS underlined in Morgan’s block printing.
She rotated once, slowly, with the look of a woman who had walked into a house she thought she lived in and discovered the furniture rearranged.
“Morgan.”
“Mom.”
“How long…”
“How long what?”
“Sweetheart.”
Morgan put her hand on the edge of the bench.
“The building sold,” she said. “Back in May. New ownership wants the lot. I got a sixty-day vacate notice in August. It’s almost up.”
A pause. Patricia’s voice was very level. “When does it expire?”
“October sixth.”
“That’s—”
“Thirteen days.”
Patricia took a breath in and did not let it out for a while.
“Sit down, Mom.”
“I don’t want to sit down.” It was unusually snappish for her mother.
“All right.”
Her mother stood in the middle of the shop and didn’t move for what felt like a long time.
Morgan watched her—watched the small, fine adjustments of a woman doing math, the calculation of how long has she known, how long has she been here alone with this, how long did she choose to be alone with this when I was ten minutes away.
“You were going to let me find out from the for-sale sign,” Patricia said. Not angry. Just a fact, being noted.
“I wasn’t sure how to tell you.”
“Morgan.”
“Mom, I… I was managing it. I had it managed. I didn’t want—“
“You didn’t want me hovering.”
“No.”
“You didn’t want me to worry.”
“No.”
“And—that’s it, right?” Patricia said, voice soft. “That’s all.”
Morgan didn’t answer.
Patricia watched her. Then she did sit, on the stool by the bench—the Nora-stool, the one Morgan had been pretending wasn’t the Nora-stool—and put her hands flat on her thighs and regarded the half-empty pegboard for another long moment. When she spoke again her voice had changed.
“Sweetheart.”
“Mom.”
“You know, you did this for the same reason you used to put yourself to bed at seven years old.”
Morgan stopped breathing for a second.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“Don’t do what.”
“Don’t… go there. I’m thirty-two years old. Don’t… don’t make this about—“
“I’m not making it about anything, Morgan.
I’m naming a pattern I have watched you run since you were old enough to dress yourself.
” She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t lean forward.
In fact, she was being the gentlest version of herself Morgan had ever heard.
“You don’t ask anyone for anything. You haven’t asked anyone for anything since your father walked out the door.
That was when you decided that the way to live in a world where someone could leave you was to never need anything from anyone who could.
And you have been very, very good at it, sweetheart. ”
Morgan was looking at the floor. She could not have looked anywhere else.
“And you have to know, baby—” Patricia’s voice went smaller, the way it went when she was saying the actual thing—“you have to know that I have watched you do this with people for most of your life and I have never once known how to make you stop. I have brought you lasagna. I have brought you boys, and then I brought you girls. I am not stupid. I’ve known.
But you’ve built this wall around you without a single crack in it, and I’m not sure you even know it’s there. ”
“Mom.”
“But she found the crack, didn’t she? Eleanor?”
Morgan didn’t answer.
“And then something happened. And you told yourself the something was proof you’d been right all along to keep the wall, and you put it back up, and you sealed it, and you didn’t tell me, and you didn’t tell Ethan, and you sat in here in the dark with the bay door down for—how long has the bay door been down, Morgan? ”
“Eighteen days.”
“Eighteen days.” Patricia closed her eyes briefly. “Sweetheart. Letting her in wasn’t the mistake. Shutting her out was.”
Morgan put her hand over her face. “I was cruel,” she said into the hand. Quiet.
“You were.”
“Mom.”
“I don’t know what you said, baby. I don’t need to know. But I have known you all your life and I know what you can do when you’re scared enough, and I know how exact you can be, and I have been very lucky in thirty-two years not to have had it pointed at me.”
Morgan, behind the hand, half-laughed. “Yeah.” She swallowed. “I knew what I was doing. I wanted her to… I wanted to make it stop.”
“Mm,” her mother said.
Morgan took her hand off her face. Patricia was looking at her with the steady, awful, seen look of a woman who had been waiting to be allowed to look at her like this for thirty-two years.
“I don’t know what to do,” Morgan said.
“I know you don’t.”
“I don’t know how to—I don’t know how to undo it. I can’t text her. I can’t call her, Mom, she’s in San Francisco, there’s people everywhere—”
“I’m not telling you to call her.”
“Then what?”
“I’m telling you the version of you who’s too proud to know she made a mistake is the version of you who built the wall,” Patricia said. “The wall is still doing its job, Morgan.” She stopped. She breathed. “And before you turn your exactness on me, I’ll stop. The bread is yours.”
She kissed the top of Morgan’s head, which Morgan couldn’t remember her doing in years.
She left.
The shop was very quiet.
Morgan sat down on the floor with her back against the bench—the bench that was staying—and pulled her knees up. Rusty came over and lay down across her ankles with the long sigh of an old dog completing a transaction he’d been working on all day.
The phone was in her hand.
She unlocked it and found the thread. I keep starting messages and not knowing how to. Nora’s text said, still there, still unanswered, sent twelve days ago.
Her thumb hovered over the keyboard.
She typed I’m sorry. Deleted it.
She typed Nora. Deleted it.
She typed Can we talk?
But Nora was in the middle of a press push, and what was she going to do with a can we talk? Morgan had sent her home, and the three words would dump the responsibility on Nora.
She deleted the message and put the phone down.
Rusty’s weight on her ankles was the only thing holding her in the room.
She wanted to fix it but she had no idea how.
She sat on the floor of her own shop, thirteen days from the end of it, cracked open and stuck. The phone was face-down beside her. Rusty’s chin was on her shin. The only thing in the room she knew how to receive was a dog.