“Used to be.” Used to play, he thought, for the first time in ages. He hadn’t thought about baseball all that much since . . . well. Probably since the last time he stood for any length of time in this backyard.
It was really time to go inside.
“What’s that mean, ‘used to be’?”
“Don’t have much time to watch these days.”
“We put games on out here sometimes. Nora hangs a sheet over there between Donny’s balcony and Marian and Emily’s. She gets her computer and some projector thing out.”
There’s other things we do here and there, he remembered her saying. Probably projector-supported viewing of ball games counted. That sounded nice, sure, but he’d have to talk to her about continuing to use his balcony. He couldn’t imagine renters would like that. Maybe he’d find her now, before he went in for the night. Maybe—
“Next up is number nine!” called Marian, interrupting his thoughts, and he figured he ought to take his chance to go now, before the next reader got started. He’d catch Nora some other time, could even try waiting for her out on his balcony early tomorrow morning, once he’d gotten some work done.
But then he saw her rise from her seat, waving her scroll sheepishly. Number nine, then.
“Darling Nora,” Marian said, welcoming her to the mic with an arm around her shoulders. “Nora read her first poem here when she was ten years old!”
Everyone snapped for that, and even though he was far away, Will had the feeling that Nora was blushing. She lowered her head, pulling her braid over her shoulder, and smiled at Marian. When the older woman took her seat, Nora stepped up to the mic, using one hand to straighten the neckline of that pretty, bare-shouldered dress.
She looks like summer, he thought, which meant he was probably full up on poetry shit for the night.
Jonah made another one of those snorting noises. Either he had a mild upper-respiratory problem or he could read Will’s mind.
“First one she’s done by herself in a while,” Jonah said.
“What?”
Jonah tipped his chin toward the mic. “Last few years she visited, she always read with Lidia. Her grandmother.”
“Ah,” Will said, but now he watched Nora more closely—the way she fumbled a little with the ribbon on her scroll, the way the bottom edge of her dress fluttered erratically along the ground, as though her feet shuffled beneath it.
She was nervous.
He reached up, rubbed a hand across his chest. Shot a glance at Jonah when the man snorted again.
“Let’s see,” Nora said into the microphone as she unrolled her page, her voice soft. “Oh.”
There was a long pause, and Will looked over at Jonah, then at the back of Marian Goodnight’s head, way up in the front row. Did she usually take this long to get started?
Nora cleared her throat, the sound too loud over the mic. “Whoops,” she said, and a few people snapped in encouragement.
“Say pass,” Will muttered under his breath, then looked over at Jonah to make sure the old man hadn’t heard him.
Nora looked up, and because he’d been watching her smile all night in this petty little game they’d been playing, he could tell something different about this one. He could tell it was brittle, a little wobbly at the edges. Say pass, he thought again, almost desperately, because he hated that smile on her face.
“My poem is by Mary Oliver,” she said finally. “It’s called ‘The Summer Day.’”
She started reading after taking a deep breath, and Will felt like he was holding his own. He may not have made a lick of sense of his own poem while he was up there, but when Nora read, he paid attention to every word; he listened to her read about watching a grasshopper, about kneeling in the grass and being idle, about everything dying at last, and too soon.
When she finished, she gave that brittle smile again, did a funny little curtsy that made a few people laugh amid their snapping, and Will blew out a breath. She seemed fine, ushering Marian back to the mic, patting Emily’s shoulder, taking something from a tray Mrs. Salas handed to her.
But she also didn’t go back to her seat.
She stood off to the side for a few seconds, but she kept that same tense, fragile smile on her face. She seemed to be waiting for something, and when Marian started speaking again, announcing the changeover to the evening’s original compositions, he could tell what it was.