25. The Door That Was Always There
The Door That Was Always There
Nora
Nora flew into Portland in the morning and drove down with the windows open because the rental car had nothing she could play on it that she could stand. Her own car was still in Redwood Hollow, left in her parents’ garage.
But Morgan had no idea.
Showing up unannounced was either the right thing or it would make things worse, and she was going to find out in person which.
She drove past the shop first.
She hadn’t meant to. The plan had been inn first, dropping off her bag, giving herself breathing room. But suddenly she found herself at the corner without quite choosing to be, and what she saw at the corner made her foot lift off the gas.
The bay doors were down.
She’d never, in the weeks of knowing this building, seen the bay doors down on a working hour.
They’d been the first thing she’d seen of Livingston Auto, the day Patricia had called her daughter from a curb on Maple Street—wide and open to the air.
The bay doors were the face of the shop.
And they were down at three on a Sunday afternoon, with the COMING SOON hoarding next door taller than she remembered and shinier and meaner-looking.
She pulled into the lot, but went to the side door instead of the bay.
She knocked.
Inside, Rusty barked once, surprised, and then footsteps, slow, and the door opened. Morgan stood there.
For several seconds, neither of them spoke.
Morgan looked thinner. Or maybe just… smaller.
Compacted. Like someone had taken her down a size in some way Nora couldn’t name.
She was in the green jacket Nora had seen her in many times before, and her hair was in a loose braid, and she had a smudge of something on her jaw, and she was looking at Nora’s face with a level look.
“Hi,” Nora said, heart thumping in her chest.
“Hi.”
A beat.
“Can I come in?”
Morgan gazed at her another second. Then she stepped back from the door.
The shop was different.
She’d known it would be different—the lease clock had been ticking the whole time she’d been gone—but knowing and walking into it were different things.
Half the pegboard was bare. The peg holes were a constellation of small empty mouths above a bench that had no tools on it.
There were boxes stacked by the side door, taped and labeled in Morgan’s block printing, and a clipboard on the bench with writing she couldn’t see from where she stood, and the smell of the shop, the oil-and-coffee smell that had been the texture of August, was still there, but thinner, with the dust of disassembly in it.
The sound had changed too—the packed boxes dampening something, the room’s echo flatter than she remembered, like a held note going quiet.
Rusty came over and shoved his head into her hand the way Rusty did, and she crouched and let him, because she could not have looked at Morgan in that moment if she’d tried.
“He missed you,” Morgan said.
“I missed him.” She kept her face down. “How are you?”
A pause. “Packing.”
“Yeah. I… I can see.”
Morgan didn’t help her. She stood by the bench with her hands at her sides and waited.
Nora stood up. Rusty leaned against her shin.
“I rehearsed this,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I rehearsed it on the plane and I rehearsed it on the drive and I had it good. And now I’m looking at you and it’s… gone. I don’t have it. I’m going to have to do it badly.”
Morgan didn’t say anything, but she set the rag in her hand down on the bench, slowly, like it required a decision. Her eyes didn’t leave Nora’s.
Nora’s heart was doing the thing it did before she walked onstage, except worse, because onstage you knew what was going to happen next.
“Okay.” She took a breath. “The notice. About the shop. I found it a week before the fight. I wasn’t snooping; it was on the desk, I just…
I read it. I knew. And I didn’t say anything for six days, Morgan, and I told myself I was being patient.
That I was honoring you. Waiting for you to tell me when you were ready.
And that was a really stupid way to be in love with someone.
I should have said the second I read it: Morgan, I saw this, can we talk?
I didn’t. I sat on it. And in the fight I used it.
I picked it up off the floor and I threw it at you in the worst possible context and I knew what I was doing while I did it. I’m sorry.”
Her hands had started to shake. She pressed them flat against her thighs.
Morgan said, very quietly, “Six days.”
“Six days.”
A beat. Morgan stared at the bench, then back at her. She didn’t say anything else, but she sat down on the stool—the Nora-stool—and that was something. She was staying in the room.
“And the thing you said about your privacy and me liking the attention.” Nora’s throat was tight; she pushed through.
“You were right about part of it. I knew it was costing you, and I let it slide because letting it slide was easier than facing it. The day the man came with the camera—I should have asked. I didn’t. So. Yes.”
Morgan’s hand had gone to Rusty’s head. She wasn’t looking at Nora now; she was looking at the dog. Listening.
“But the part about me wanting it. Morgan, I don’t. Not the way you meant. I want the music because I love the music. The rest just… comes with. I’m trying to figure out how to do the one without the other and I’m not very good at it yet. But I’m trying.”
A nod. Small. From Morgan, that was a lot.
Nora took the breath that wouldn’t quite come.
“And the worst thing I said. The dying-alone thing.” Her voice cracked. She didn’t try to fix it. “I aimed at the softest place I knew about you and I said it on purpose. I’ve heard myself say it every day for three weeks. I’m not asking you to forgive it, but I want you to know that I know.”
Morgan’s eyes came back up to her face. They were wet. Not crying—Morgan didn’t cry the way Nora cried—but wet, and Morgan didn’t blink them clear; she let Nora see them.
“Nora.”
“Yeah.”
“What I said about being self-sufficient. About Hannah having it backwards.”
“Morgan, you don’t have to—”
“I’m telling you.” She wasn’t loud. She was, Nora could see, working very hard at this. “I aimed it. The same way. I picked the word I knew would do it. I wanted you out of the room before you said anything else. I’m not blameless. I… I know that, too.”
Nora’s eyes stung. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
Morgan picked the rag up again. Set it down. Picked it up.
The shop was very quiet. The easy register from August was gone, because the fight sat between them where they could both see it. She let herself feel it.
“There’s one more thing,” she said.
“Okay.”
“And I don’t know how it’s going to land. But I have to tell you. Because I came for you, but there’s also another thing here for me.”
“All right.”
She stepped a little closer to the bench. Not all the way. Just into the same half of the room. She could feel her pulse in her throat.
“Gramps’ land. When I went out there by myself, the second time… I walked it. I read his notebook, I told you that. And I went around the side of the house, and the barn was there.”
A flicker across Morgan’s face. “The barn.”
“Behind the house. Weathered siding. A sliding work door. I’d read the notice four days before, and I—I just saw it, Morgan. The wide door. The long wall. Concrete floor. It’s not a garage. But it could be.”
Morgan went very still.
“And in the notebook,” Nora said, “Gramps wrote that he wanted the land to be used. Not sold. Used. Tended. By someone who’d make something here. He wrote that down. I read it sitting in his chair, and I went outside, and the barn was right there.”
She had to stop. Her eyes were burning. She blinked hard.
“I couldn’t say anything. To offer it I’d have to say I’d read the notice. There was no version of ‘the barn could be your shop’ that didn’t start with ‘I know about your shop’. So I didn’t say anything for two days. And then we had the fight.”
She wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist. She didn’t realize she was doing it until it was done.
“I’m offering it,” she said. “That’s why I came back.
The barn. The land. I want you to have it.
Not buy it. Use it. As long as you want.
Livingston Auto on Gramps’ land. And there’s a house.
The roof’s bad, but I’ll have it fixed. But the barn…
the bones are good and the door is wide and the floor’s already concrete, I checked, it’s a working floor.
And it’s off the road. Private. Nobody’s going to slow down in front of it with a phone.
And Gramps wanted this. He wanted someone to make something there.
And you—” Her voice caught. “You make something. Every day.” She forced herself to stop and take a breath.
“I should have offered it the day I saw it,” she said. “I’m offering it now.”
The shop was so quiet she could hear the second hand of the clock above the desk.
Morgan didn’t speak for a long time.
In fact, she didn’t speak so long that Nora began to think she wasn’t going to speak at all—that maybe this was where it ended, that maybe Nora had said everything and Morgan was going to say thank you, but no, the way Morgan said hard things, level and final, and Nora was going to have to be a person who’d said the thing and lived with it not being enough.
Then Morgan said, “How big is the door?”
Nora raised her gaze. “How—what?”
“The work door. How wide?”
“I… I didn’t measure. It’s wide. Wide enough.”
“Wide enough for what?”
“For a car. To drive through. Definitely.”
“Okay.” Morgan nodded once. Mechanical. Working. “And the floor. You said concrete. Level? Cracked?”
“Level. There are cracks. I don’t have a mechanic’s eye, Morgan, I just… I looked at it and thought of you.”
A flicker, maybe, of something at the edge of Morgan’s mouth. Gone before Nora could be sure.
“Access road?”
“Gravel. From the county road. It goes right past the house and around. A truck could get in. A flatbed could get in.”
“Okay.”
Morgan glanced at the half-empty pegboard, at the bench, and then back at Nora, and her face had not softened, exactly, but something behind it had.
“I’d need to see it,” she said.
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Tomorrow.”
“I’m here through Tuesday. Tomorrow’s good. Whenever you want.”
“Ten.” Morgan grabbed the rag again.
“Ten.”
A pause.
“Nora?”
“Yeah.”
“I haven’t said yes.”
A soft whoosh of air escaped Nora, which might have been part of a smile if the situation hadn’t been… this. “I know.”
“There’s a lot of practical. A lot I’d need to—”
“I know.”
“And I’m not—” Morgan stopped. Picked her words. “I’m not back, yet. To how we were.”
“I know that too,” Nora said. “I’m not either.
I don’t know if we can get back to how we were.
I think we have to build something different than the thing we had, if we’re going to—” She turned her hands palm-up, empty.
“I’m not asking for everything. Just a chance to look at a barn together tomorrow morning at ten. ”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Morgan’s hand had gone, without her seeming to know it, to Rusty’s head. Rusty had moved at some point in the last minute and was now leaning against her leg. The way he’d been leaning against Nora’s. He had, apparently, decided to keep them both in the same room with him.
“I’ll see you at ten,” she said.
“At ten.”
She stepped back toward the side door. Put her hand on the handle. Turned, because she had to.
“Morgan.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you for letting me in.”
Morgan’s fingers ran through Rusty’s fur. “Thank you for coming.”
Nora went out. She closed the side door behind her. She got into the rental car and sat with her hands on the wheel for a minute before she turned the key, because the door behind her had not closed.
Tomorrow at ten she was going to take Morgan out to look at a barn on twenty acres her grandfather had left her.
She turned the key. The shop was behind her with its bay doors down. Tomorrow it would be down to eight days.