be like, she wondered, to close it? To scoot her body across that space and lie right next to him, and to mean to, this time? To not fall asleep on accident, but to say with her body that she could tell he’d said something painful, something honest?
“It was isolating,” he said, and then shrugged. “I had buddies from school, but then I—well, I had a lot of responsibilities at home that kept me pretty busy. I’m not even sure I ever learned how to be a good friend. And obviously, I didn’t have any . . .”
He trailed off and made a gesture toward the air around them, to the structure around them, and Nora had to swallow around the shock of sadness she felt, seeing him do that. Exactly what she’d been trying to get him to see about this place, and it was the hollowest sort of victory.
“Family,” she whispered, not even really meaning to. Once she realized she had uttered the word, she thought that would be the end of it, frankly. Mentioning his parents, that had been huge, she figured. There was no way he’d bring up—
“Donny and my mom,” he said, and Nora held her breath. Easy enough, what with the sinuses. “They’d stopped speaking, a long time before. Back when my parents first got together and then when my mom left home for good. I never met him until we came here, the once.”
She wanted to ask a hundred questions. She’d start with: What year, what month, what day?
But all she said was, “Why did you come?”
“My mom had found out my dad was sick. She was pretty desperate for help.”
Nora thought about Donny—how he’d been good at hanging pictures and at fixing the dryer hoses in the basement when they got clogged. How he’d always been the one to put in everyone’s window AC units, back before they’d gotten central air, a huge, expensive project that Nonna had said he’d done all the legwork for. How he always hosed off all the outdoor furniture when it got dirty in the spring and summer, even though he himself never really used it. How he’d fed all those cats, for God’s sake. They weren’t even his.
“And Donny . . . ?”
“Didn’t help,” Will said grimly.
Nora could only really blame her loyalty for what she said next—her desperate instinct to bridge the gap between the Donny she’d known and the Donny this man in her bed was describing.
“Donny never really seemed to have much money,” she said quickly. “Maybe he—”
Will made a noise, something too flat to be called a laugh. “She didn’t ask him for money.”
“Oh.” It was barely a sound, barely a breath. She felt cold again, almost like the fever was back, but she knew that wasn’t it. She knew that wasn’t it at all.
“She asked him to take me.”
Part of her wanted to turn on a light.
The one on her nightstand would do—it was small and shaded; it gave off the kind of soft glow that was perfect for the in-betweens of her day: when she was waking up, when she was winding down. This moment, with Will—it felt like both, somehow. It felt like the beginning and the end of something, all at once, and so maybe that’s why the other part of her didn’t want to turn on any light at all.
“For the summer?” she whispered.
“No,” he said, in that same flat, matter-of-fact tone. “For good.”
She swallowed, scratchiness in her throat reasserting itself. It was probably time for more medicine, or maybe for another shift over that hot bowl Will had made her use yesterday, but she wouldn’t have moved for all the decongestants and hot bowls in the whole entire world.
“Could be that she didn’t mean it,” Will said, and Nora felt such terrible certainty about where he’d learned his I’ve seen worse bedside manner. Maybe he’d been I’ve seen worse–ing himself his whole life, only to feel better about this one awful moment.
“Or that she would’ve changed her mind, eventually. I don’t really know. But Donny, he didn’t want to have anything to do with me.”
“Why would she . . . why would she take you to someone you didn’t even know?” Nora had always known Nonna, even before the summer stays started. There wasn’t a week of Nora’s life that hadn’t included some interaction with her—a phone call, a card in the mail, the occasional visit.