He tucked his hands into his pockets, his brow furrowing. They stared at each other across the stretch of sand and she knew he could tell she wasn’t telling him the full story. But the full story—the story of how she’d spent the last two weeks—felt too complicated, too tentative. Nora wasn’t even sure she understood it herself, really. All she knew was that after Will had gone, she’d waited, caught between some strange feeling of anxiety and anticipation, for someone new to show up downstairs. And when it’d been clear that no one was coming yet—that Will’s quiet efforts at caretaking via her neighbors had extended to his delay with listing Donny’s apartment—she’d almost felt . . . well.
She’d almost felt disappointed.
It wasn’t really that she’d come around to the idea; in fact, breaking the news to her neighbors—in a lousy, impromptu backyard building meeting during which she was still battling her sinuses—had been stressful enough to make her consider bricking over all of Donny’s doors and windows in the hopes that by some miracle everyone would forget it had ever existed. But beneath all that knee-jerk resistance had been something else, too. Sheunderstoodsomething about Will now, about how he related to Donny’s apartment, to the building. And losing the battle over the rental—or maybe accepting that she’d lost it to a worthy enemy, for good reasons—had made her think differently about herself and how she related to Nonna’s apartment. If the rental was going forward, she needed to find some way to stay true to Nonna and to her neighbors that didn’t involve keeping every single thing exactly the same. She needed to take control of this new normal.
And maybe,maybe, the right place to start was in the apartment.
Minor changes. Adding a towel rod, and . . . that sort of thing.
“I could help,” he said.
At some point, she must’ve dropped her eyes from his, because now she had to raise her head to look back at him. His posture was exactly the same, but the expression on his face had eased into something more practiced, more casual, and for some reason, it soothed her. That’s how she wanted this to be. A towel rod! Very casual. No real disruptions there.
“You’re probably too busy.” Even as she said it, she hoped he’d put up a fight. Sure, she could make measurements and operate a drill—uh, once she bought one—but for some reason, no matter how nondisruptive a towel rod was, she didn’t quite feel up to doing it alone.
“Won’t take but a minute. I’ve done it once recently.” He added a small, crooked smile. Probably that would’ve looked like a smirk to her, only a few weeks ago. But now it looked like the most gentle, welcome encouragement. “I’ll have to be coming by anyway. I need to put a lockbox on the uni—um. Apartment.”
“Right.” She shifted on her feet, newly uneasy. Would her neighbors think of it as a betrayal, Will coming in and out of her apartment? Their reaction to the news of the rental going forward hadn’t been as extreme as she’d anticipated, but still—their memory of Donny was unchanged, this plan of Will’s seemingly as disrespectful as it was disruptive. To them, she and Will were still on different sides of this thing.
But like always, he seemed to see right through her.
“We can keep it between us,” he said. “It’s not as if we both don’t keep weird hours.”
She couldn’t help her smile, the flutter of excitement in her stomach. “That’s true.”
“One condition,” he said, and the flutter faded. If he asked her for some favor about his rental, she—
“You gotta let me have more of that sauce.”
She narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips in feigned, joking contemplation.He’s coming back, she thought, inwardly thrilled, and eventually—right when she thought he might be starting to sweat it—she let her smile break free once again.
She held out her hand. An agreement, not a farewell. Her palm tingled in anticipation.
“Okay, Will,” she said. “You’ve got a deal.”
Nora had always thought of herself as a patient person.
The art of waiting had been instilled in her early, and unlike most of the qualities she considered to be her best, she could mostly credit this one to her parents. In practical terms, honing this skill had been an essential part of her childhood days: waiting quietly outside her mom’s or dad’s office on campus after school, eavesdropping on the excited or concerned conversations they’d have with their research students. Waiting at the kitchen table, where she did her homework each night, for one of her parents to put together or bring home dinner, at least until she got old enough to handle the occasional dinner for herself. Waiting for her mom to have a few free afternoons to teach Nora how to drive when she got her learner’s permit; waiting for her dad to read over her college application essays.
But in philosophical terms, too, waiting had been an important part of her parents’ ethic. Their projects took a long time; they sometimes took years to get access to important dig sites, or to make a breakthrough on even the smallest, most banal part of a research argument. As a result, they seemed almost preternaturally calm about delays of any kind. They treated waiting like it was opportunity, like it wasn’t really waiting at all. When Nora was eight, she’d gone with her dad to a meeting he had with a colleague at UC Riverside, and on the way back they’d gotten caught in a twelve-mile-long traffic backup. Outside her window, Nora could see drivers on every side getting frustrated—slapping at their steering wheels, rolling their eyes, craning their necks to try to see what was up ahead. But Nora’s dad had barely been bothered. He’d put the old Volvo in park and said, “Well, we’ll get there eventually.” For two hours he’d helped Nora practice her spelling, picking out words he chose at random from the sonorous sentences of whatever NPR program was on.
To this day, Nora was a really good speller.
But her patience?
It was starting to wear thin.
It’d been three days since she’d shaken on their deal and set tonight as the date for Will to come by, and while she’d done fine for the first two—working and reworking the eco-influencer site into something she thought was finally bulletproof, having her regular lunch with Emily, driving Mrs. Salas to an appointment with the eye doctor—today had feltinterminable.
Of course part of the problem had been that it started early—golden-hour early, because her body was trained for it. Out on her balcony, she’d watched the sky go from dark to light, already fairly twitching with awareness that the sun had a long way to go before it would set again. In her office, she’d readied herself for the remote presentation she’d be making later that afternoon, frustrated each time she bumped an elbow against something on her desk or accidentally backed her chair into the side of Nonna’s old dresser. When her stomach had growled for lunch, she’d stood and stretched before she realized it was only 9:30 a.m. Second breakfast, then,fine, but she sure would’ve liked things to move faster.
By the time her presentation came around, she’d somewhat recovered her sense of being in the moment: she’d done good work, and she was looking forward to showing it off. But the meeting, too, had been filled with tedious, aimless questions from the client—questions that barely related to the site at all, and in the end, she hadn’t even given her final approval for launch. Deepa had practically slammed her notebook shut; Austin had gone coolly silent, and Nora half considered bringing up the sustainable dildos, if only to get a conversation going.
If there’d been a bright spot, it’d been her post-meeting debrief with Dee, who had to retouch her brows after a rare moment of rubbing them in frustration when the client had brought up the bitmoji again. Dee fully expected to leave that conference room and get treated to Austin’s bad mood for the rest of the afternoon, so Nora—with no small amount of remote-work survivor’s guilt—did her best to fill her friend’s time, even if it did mean she had to answer fourteen questions about what Will Sterling looked like.
When the workday was over, that’s when the real waiting set in. She and Will had decided that he’d come by around 10:00 p.m., when her neighbors would almost certainly have turned in for the night, especially since the Cubs weren’t playing, and that had seemed like an exciting, clandestine idea during their lakeside rendezvous. But getting up before dawn made 10:00 p.m. a dim prospect on normal days, and so Nora had to fill her remaining waiting hours with keeping herself awake: a strong coffee; a shower; at one particularly low point, a few light slaps on her cheeks as she stood in front of the bathroom mirror.
Come on, she told herself, or told the setting sun, or possibly told the yet-to-arrive Will. Dimly she was aware that nothing about her impatience suggested a casual engagement with their planned project. But as the sky turned dark again, as the building quieted and the clock ticked down the minutes, she accepted the excitement that coursed through her body as her due.
