Chapter 16
The voice in the garden came at one o’clock, four hours before supper and three hours before anyone with a functioning relationship to time would have arrived. Nora knew, with the deep bodily certainty of a woman who had been braced since breakfast, exactly who it was and exactly where they were.
They were next door. Her mother had not been early for anything in twenty-nine years. She was four hours early for this.
“—the smell of it, that’s what I always say. You can’t fake tape and liniment, it goes straight to the back of your throat and stays there. My second husband played rugby, briefly, badly—”
Nora came around her hedge at speed and found her mother on Rognar’s porch.
Summer had an enormous plush object clutched to her chest—a giraffe taller than the baby it was intended for, with a neck like a rolled-up rug and eyes the size of saucers.
And she was already deep in conversation with the six-and-a-half-foot orc leaning in his doorway, a baby on his hip, both of them laughing at something Nora had missed and would never now recover.
“Mom.”
“There she is!” Her mother turned, her smile radiant, silver-streaked hair coming loose from a scarf that had given up entirely. “Darling, this is your neighbor, he’s marvelous. I went to the wrong house—”
Of course she did.
“—and he’s got the baby. Look at the baby, look at her little face! Oh, I brought her a giraffe, is it too big? It’s too big. She’ll grow into it. Whom am I hugging first, that’s the question.”
She hugged Rognar first. He was closer, and he had a baby, and he went down into it with the easy warmth of a male who had never once in his life been suspicious of a hug. Over her mother’s shoulder he looked at Nora. He grinned at her, and she realized that the entire day was already lost.
By three they had agreed about a dozen things and had been wrong, in her opinion, about all of them.
They took to each other the way two of the same animal take to each other across a field.
Her mother perched on the arm of Rognar’s couch with Charlie on her knee, and the giraffe looming behind them both like a benevolent hostage-taker.
Rognar sat on the floor, because he sat on the floor now.
They built between them, brick by cheerful brick, a shared and unshakeable theory of Nora.
“Your daughter alphabetizes her spices,” Rognar said.
“I know.”
“By cuisine.”
“Rognar.” Her mother bounced Charlie, who was gazing up at her with the frank astonishment she usually reserved for Brogan.
“I have known that woman since she was born, and I’m telling you, she came out like that.
The nurse handed her to me and she gave the room a look. Two hours old. Assessing us.”
“I can see it.”
“Filing us.”
“Both of you,” she said, from the doorway, “can leave. Well, this his house. He can’t leave it, but he can be quiet in it.”
They ignored her. This was how the two of them were, and it should have been unbearable, and it wasn’t, because it was so obviously fond.
She refused the lovelier word for it. They were laughing at her, and she’d have walked into traffic for the pair of them.
She stood in the doorway with her arms folded and a smile she was fighting with everything she had.
Rognar caught the fight, because he caught everything, and had the decency not to name it.
“She had a labeled shoe rack at twelve,” her mother confided.
“Twelve?”
“By season.”
“Enough,” said Nora, and went to make tea, mostly so that neither of them could see her face.
It was in the small acts that she caught herself.
She reached for the diaper bag when her mother suggested a walk—reached automatically, unzipped it, and found it packed.
Two bottles, the good balm, three diapers, the muslin cloths, the spare outfit rolled the way she’d shown him, and the little wooly hat.
Everything. She stood with her hand in the bag and nothing to add.
“You checking my work?” he asked mildly, doing up his boot.
“No.”
“You’re checking my work.”
“I’m confirming inventory,” she said, with dignity, and zipped it back up.
Later, at the kitchen table, her mother asked something about the baby’s ears—wasn’t there always a check at this age? Nora had the pencil in her hand and the notebook open before the sentence finished. Pediatric follow-up. She’d write it down, she’d chase it, someone had to—
“Fifteenth,” Rognar said, not looking up from Charlie. “Nine thirty. It’s in the phone. Deb’s got it too. Reminder’s set.” He glanced over. “You can write it down if you want. I know it helps you.”
She put the pencil down. It didn’t help her.
Summer found the dish towel at half past nine, after Charlie had gone next door in her father’s arms to be put down.
After Rognar had come back, monitor in hand, and been shooed off to his house with a kiss at the fence.
A kiss Nora had thought she’d hidden, and had not hidden from her mother at all.
Now it was just the two of them and the last of the dishes. Her mother was drying, or pretending to, which meant she held a plate and a towel in loose proximity while she talked.
“You keep waiting for the other shoe,” she said.
Nora rinsed a glass. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Baby.” Her mother set the plate down. She wasn’t looking at Nora. She was looking, vaguely, for somewhere to hang the towel. “I’m the other shoe.”
The water ran.
“I know what I was,” Summer went on, comfortably, as though she were still on the subject of Marco.
“You don’t have to be delicate about it, I’ve had years to make my peace with it.
But I know. You’ve been checking behind people your whole life because you had to check behind me.
The power. The rent. The Thursday you were supposed to have been picked up.
” She found a hook, finally, and hung the towel on it, crookedly.
“You did that at nine years old and you never once made me feel it, and I have thought about that more than you’d guess. ”
“Mom—”
“You’ve been checking behind that boy all day.
I’m guessing you’ve been doing it for weeks.
” She turned around now, and there wasn’t anything sharp in her face, just fondness.
Nora would have taken sharp. “And he hasn’t dropped one single thing.
Not one. I watched. I’m good at watching, it’s the only organized thing I do.
” A small shrug. “So at what point do you stop checking?”
“When people give me a reason to,” she said. It came out hard and flat, and she knew the instant it left her mouth that it had been aimed at the wrong person, or at exactly the right person and thirty years too late. Either way it went somewhere it shouldn’t.
Her mother took it the way she took everything. Which was to say she didn’t take it at all. It drifted past her like a cloud she’d decided not to be rained on by.
“There’s my girl,” she said warmly, and kissed Nora’s temple, and went off to the couch she had not, in the end, been made to sleep on. She left the towel crooked on its hook and the enormous impossible giraffe standing guard in the corner of the living room with its saucer eyes.
Nora stayed at the sink.
She picked up a plate. She dried it. She kept drying it. The water had long since gone cold in the basin. The house was quiet in the way it only was when someone else was asleep in it. She stood there turning the cloth over the same plate, around and around, for some time.