against him. It all felt so practical, so responsible. So safe.
He recognized her energy from many days and nights he’d spent checking in on families—tired but teed-up, relieved but worried. With her head on his thigh and her legs draped over the arm of the tiny love seat, she told him all kinds of things he didn’t know, origin stories for how everyone had ended up in the building. Jonah had grown up nearby, the only child of parents who’d run a small grocery store less than five blocks away; he’d moved in after he married a woman who’d eventually left him (and the apartment) after only three months to move to Maine with a man Jonah worked with. Mr. and Mrs. Salas had moved in after they’d sold their place in Bucktown, only ever intending to stay for a few years but eventually making peace with the fact that their son would be staying for good in Singapore, the place where he’d gotten a job in finance after college. Benny’s aunt Alma had lived in the building, and because he’d been her favorite, because he’d stayed with her for long periods when his own mother was ill, he’d taken over the lease way back when Alma had moved into a rest home. Marian and Emily—both from small, somewhat challenging families—had come to the building only two years after they’d graduated from college, the place where they’d met and fallen in love.
Nora’s grandmother, for her part, had moved in as a widow, surprising Nora’s mother—her only child—by selling her paid-off house in the suburbs and moving into an apartment that she’d always said had something special about it.
“Those little angels in the hallway,” Nora said, her feet swinging gently back and forth, “I think that’s what sold her. She loved things like that.”
Nora thought Nonna had needed a new start, had needed to make a home only for herself after so many years of focusing on making her husband comfortable. “And with my mom so far away, she needed a new family, too, I think,” Nora had said.
Will didn’t miss that she’d skipped over whatever she might’ve known about Donny and his history with the building, a kindness that made him love her all the more. Instead, she went right on ahead to the year her grandmother had led the effort to take the building condo, to all the moments where various building traditions were born. Will listened and stroked his fingers idly through her hair, recognizing this for what it was: not only Nora winding herself down but also Nora giving him her full trust, giving him the history of the building that had been the source of their feud. As she spoke, her voice got lower and slower, her eyes closing longer and longer on each blink.
Orphans, kind of, he thought, thinking through the stories she’d told him—grown-ups upended for one reason or another, making their own family unit even amid weird wallpaper and awful wall sconces. For the first time since he got the call from Donny’s lawyer, he let himself imagine that his uncle had left him the apartment not as some kind of cross-generational slap in the face but instead as some kind of offering. Some kind of apology, or gesture of understanding. From one orphan to another, maybe. A belated gift Donny—for whatever angry, grudging reason—hadn’t been able to give Will sixteen years ago.
He felt strangely, surprisingly grateful to his uncle.
Against his leg, Nora’s head felt heavier, her body earnestly sinking into sleep now. “Not gonna drool this time,” she murmured. “Because I’m not sick.”
“You can if you want,” he told her, which he wasn’t sure made sense, but it’d been a long day for him, too. He leaned his head back against the wall behind him, grateful that the lights above had dimmed automatically, grateful that he’d slept in far more uncomfortable places, grateful that Nora was home and that he was with her, that he’d gotten to help her. He thought sleepily of that scroll of poetry at home, the one he’d left on his nightstand. Little fragments of it caught at the edges of his brain: lily’s white, deep vermilion in the rose. Figures of delight.
You, pattern of all those.
He’d have to remember to tell Nora about it, this sentimental start he’d made while she was away. But for now—Jonah’s accident aside—this all seemed just as well: the best of who he was, all in service to her.