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 evenhis.
“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 hisI’ve seen worsebedside manner. Maybe he’d beenI’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 evenknow?” 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.
“She wanted to be with my dad, for the time he had. The two of them.”
If he’d said it in any other way, in any other tone of voice, Nora might’ve figured something else—that Will’s mom wanted to shield him from his dad’s sickness, whatever it had been. But she could tell that’s not what it had been, or at least that’s not what it had been to Will.
“Did she ask you first? I mean . . . if you wanted to go?”
Everything about him was a silhouette, but she could still see him shake his head.
“She didn’t tell me where we were going. A couple days after we got home, I kept not being able to find some of my stuff—my favorite T-shirt, a ball cap I wore a lot. Eventually I realized they were out in the car, in a suitcase she’d packed. She’d forgotten to bring it back in.”
Nora had really never been much one for name-calling. Nonna had always told her that calling someone a bad name was a symptom of a small mind and an even smaller imagination. When someone was rude to Nonna she would say things like,Well, he seemed to be having a bad day!orShe must have misplaced her manners this morning!
But right at this moment, Nora felt like she had the smallest mind, the most minuscule imagination. The only available capability of both was to come up with names for Will Sterling’s mother.
“What a—” she began, but at the last, loyal second her long years of Nonna training took over, and she recalibrated. “What about your dad?”
“I don’t know if my dad knew. We never talked about it.”
My parents,they were kind of like yours, he’d said, but for all her desperation to believe it, to bond over it, now she thought that wasn’t so true. Nora’s parents, they’d talkedconstantly. Months before her first summer here, they’d talked to her about independence and resilience and trying new things; they’d talked to her about how she was “practically” a teenager, about how her dad had gone to summer camps far from home, about how Nora needed to learn to let go of the rigid routines she seemed to cling to. Sometimes Nora thought that all her parents knew how to do was talk.
She’d probably been pretty wrong, to get annoyed with them for that. All families were messy, but Will’s . . . Will’s reallydidsound like a Dickens novel, or worse.
“When my mother died,” Will said, his voice rough, cautious, and she knew he was about to confess another painful part of this story. “I sent a copy of her obituary here. But he didn’t . . . I never heard from him. I don’t really know why I did it.”
