27. Foundations #2
“Yeah.” Nora wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “It’s done.
” She paused, shook her head, and said it again.
“It’s done. I’m going to cut it next week.
The week after, maybe. I want to do it at home.
” She paused, hearing the word. “Here, at the house. I have a portable kit I can set up wherever. It doesn’t need a studio. ”
“Okay.”
“Was it—Morgan, was it—”
“It was good.” Morgan nodded as if confirming it to herself. “It was the best one I’ve heard you play.”
“It’s about you. Us.”
“I know.”
Nora put the guitar down and went and sat next to Morgan at the table and put her face in Morgan’s shoulder, and Morgan let her, and they sat at the kitchen table for a minute or three with the magazine half-folded under Morgan’s elbow and Rusty pressing his weight into both their shins, and a few tears escaped Nora because the song was done, and she was the one who’d finished it.
At some point Nora’s hands had gone still. Not fidgeting, not reaching for something, not moving through the small anxious orbit they usually traveled—just still, flat on the table, the way they went when she had the guitar. If Morgan noticed it, she didn’t say.
She had a flight at 8:40. Morgan drove her to PDX in the truck. She would return the rental for her—the kind of small unprompted competence Nora had only the dimmest idea how to receive and was going to have to learn.
At security she kissed Morgan on the cheek because she didn’t want there to be pictures plastered all over social media again against Morgan’s wishes, but Morgan pulled her close and kissed her for real, which Nora had to respect as Morgan’s decision.
“I’ll be back on Sunday,” Nora said.
“I’ll pick you up.”
“You don’t have to.”
Morgan gave her a look. “I’m picking you up.”
“Okay.”
Nora went through security and didn’t turn around, and she walked all the way to the gate before she let herself look at the picture Morgan had texted her—Rusty in the passenger seat, no message—and she sat at the gate and laughed and cried a little and put her face in her hands, and despite it all, things felt pretty good.
The Fillmore in the last week was a different room than the Fillmore in the first week. She walked into the green room on Thursday night and looked at the dressing-room mirror and saw a person she could recognize, which was not a feeling she’d had for a very long time before this month.
Adrian came in halfway through her warm-up with a coat over his arm and two coffees in cardboard cups from the place across the street—the spot they’d been using all month, because Adrian had become, over the last three weeks, the sort of manager who brought her coffee at warm-up without being asked.
She cocked her head to the side. “You’re early.”
“I want to talk about next year before the show,” he said. “Five minutes.”
“All right.”
He gave her the version they’d been building between calls for the last ten days.
The new shape of it. Rooted in Redwood Hollow, base of operations, ten or twelve days a month on the road, no LA apartment, no NYC apartment, recording done remotely where possible, mixing done where she said.
Two records over the next eighteen months—one with the songs she’d written this month, and one with the songs she’d write next.
No more compulsory touring of the kind that had broken her earlier in the summer.
“This is what you asked for in August,” he said. “I’m putting it on paper this week.”
“I know.”
“You sure you want to be the kind of artist whose base of operations is twenty acres in rural Oregon?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay.” He sipped his coffee. “For the record, the internet has figured out you were in Redwood Hollow again.”
“I know. My mother told me.”
“They have a theory.”
“I’m sure they do.”
“You want to give a statement?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Adrian, I’m sure. Whatever they think is between two people, I’m not feeding them on it.”
He looked at her another second, the careful man-of-the-business look. Then he nodded. “All right.”
“All right.”
Years she’d spent handling Adrian, absorbing Adrian, deflecting Adrian. This felt like something else.
She strode out on the Fillmore stage Thursday and Friday and Saturday and finished the run, and on Saturday she closed with Steady Hands, and they sang it back at her, and she let them, and the place where she had been hollow in week one was not hollow anymore.
It was full of a specific person, in a specific town, twenty-three minutes from a specific barn—someone who had loved her off-stage, in a shop that smelled of oil and old coffee, without an audience, without a byline.
That made all the difference.
The noon flight Sunday, October fourth, landed at PDX at twelve-twelve, and Morgan sat waiting for her in the truck. The coffee cup she handed Nora when Nora got in the cab was hot.
“You got me coffee.”
“Mm.”
“Morgan.”
“Get in.”
She got in. Rusty was in the back seat with his chin on the headrest. The truck smelled like dog and metal and the small interior scent of Morgan that Nora hadn’t realized she’d been missing until she sat down in the cab.
They drove south on I-5 with the afternoon light in the rear-view, and Nora drank her coffee, and Morgan kept her hand on the gear shift between the seats and Nora put her hand on top of Morgan’s.
They didn’t talk much, but Morgan told her the lift had been delivered Wednesday and was sitting bolted to the new floor under a tarp.
The bench Morgan had built Saturday was already in place.
There was, in fact, a great deal to do.
“How was it?” Morgan said, after a while.
“It was good. I finished the run. Adrian’s writing up the new deal.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re back.”
“I am.”
She watched the highway markers pass for a minute.
The October light had turned the long valley grass to a kind of gold that wouldn’t last another week.
The maple at her grandfather’s property had probably begun, this past weekend, to turn—she would see it when they got there.
It was hers. It was Morgan’s, by the lease. It was theirs.
She kept her hand on Morgan’s hand on the gear shift, and they drove south.