wasn’t that she didn’t want him there, at least not for now. He still should go; he still should get back to work.
But he didn’t go. He leaned a shoulder against the wall, right at one end of the line of mailboxes, and tucked his hands in his pockets. He thought about that tear he suspected she’d been wiping away, and he could not for the life of him bring himself to turn around and go back to Donny’s place.
“I don’t really think grief cares so much about titles. It sounds like you were close.”
She tipped her chin down in a nod. “She was ninety-two years old. It’s really . . . I’m fine, you know? She had a good, long life, and she wasn’t well, right there at the end. So it’s . . .”
She trailed off again, and then she gave a shrug that was so, so familiar to him. He’d given that shrug to people for what had felt like his whole entire seventeenth year of life. He’d been sick for a while, he remembered saying to people. It’s good he doesn’t have to suffer anymore, he remembered people saying to him.
“It’s still awful,” he said. “No matter what way it happens. No matter when.” He thought of the poem she’d read. Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Now that, he thought, was a sad poem.
She nodded, and then she moved to the side, mimicking his posture—leaning a shoulder against the wall, right at the other end of the line of mailboxes. She didn’t smile, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Probably I shouldn’t have said ‘orphan,’ before,” he said, honoring this unsmiling honesty with an offering of his own. “My dad passed when I was seventeen, my mom about a year later. I was an adult by then.”
She looked at him for a long time. “That’s not . . . really an adult.”
What was there to do, except offer that trusty, shared shrug? “Adult enough,” he added, and then he promptly changed the subject. “Jonah said you and your grandmother used to read together at these things.”
She hesitated before answering, her eyes on him soft and seeking, and for a second, he thought she might press him, might ask him what “adult enough” meant.
But she must’ve seen something forbidding in his expression, because she eventually relented, rolling so that both her shoulders rested against the wall, her legs stretched out in front of her, one foot crossed over the other. The soft fabric of the loose, flowing part of her dress draped close over her front—her stomach, her thighs, the sharp line of her top shin—and everything in his body heated. Once he realized he’d been staring, he jerked his eyes back to her face, but she didn’t seem to be watching him, anyway. She was looking up toward the chandelier and all its dangling crystals.
“It was strange tonight,” she said. “I kept feeling like—I don’t know. I guess I kept feeling like she was around. Not in a creepy way, but sort of a nice way. A watching-over way.”
He thought of the moment he’d first arrived, Nora’s sharp interruption of Mrs. Salas. He reached up, touched the edge of his laurel wreath. “A discount-on-flower-crowns way?”
She laughed—a quiet, breathy sound that for once didn’t go right to his heart. Somewhere else, sure—to all those heated-up places in his body—but with a little concentration he could deal with that. He inhaled through his nose, curled his fingers into his palms. Cooled himself.
“Yeah, maybe. But also the weather, and everyone we called—” She stopped herself, looked at him from the side of her eyes, her expression stricken.
Now it was his turn to laugh. “I figured it was a bigger-than-usual crowd,” he said. “For my benefit.” At the moment, alone with her in this weird, wallpapered vestibule, he couldn’t work up much anger about this whole charade, not if it gave her some comfort. He’d be up all night, making up for lost time, but he’d manage. “Maybe she got me called up to the mic first, too.”
Nora smiled—a real one, this time. “I admit, I wondered.”
She was quiet for a few seconds, lifting her crown, making small adjustments to cover some bare spots.
“That Mary Oliver poem I read,” she said, when she finally spoke again. “That was one of her favorites.” He noticed that her expression had changed—her brow furrowed, her mouth set more firmly. “I guess it made me a little emotional, to read it.”