“But she was awfully stubborn. Like a mule, about things big and small.”
“She wasn’t.” Even as she said it, though, Nora felt a knot of uncertainty take up residence in her stomach. She’d always thought of stubborn people as people who couldn’t admit when they were wrong. But Nora had never really been in a situation where she’d thought Nonna had been wrong about anything.
“Now I think I knew her pretty well,” said Marian. “I knew her differently than you did, sure. So believe me when I tell you, she was stubborn. Couldn’t get her to budge on that wallpaper, for example. And do you know, thirty years ago there was a man who wanted to take her out, a very nice man whose company I happen to know she enjoyed? But did she go?”
This was a rhetorical question, but also it was Marian, so Nora had to answer.
“No?”
“No! And do you know why?”
Nora shook her head.
“Because she said it wouldn’t be the right thing to do to yourgrandfather.”
“But . . . ,” Nora said tentatively. “He was . . . dead?”
Marian widened her eyes, pursed her lips, and swept her hands out, palms up, in a gesture that began by encompassing the sofa, and then expanded to what was, Nora assumed, the whole entire apartment. This expression said,I hope I don’t have to waste any more of my time on this.
“I’m going to change the apartment,” she asserted, though she was in fact very surprised to hear Marian’s feelings about that wallpaper. “I am. Already I started working on the bathroom.”
“Great,” Marian said, though she didn’t really seem that impressed. “Of course you hadhelp. From a veryhelpfulperson, who also did not want you living in atombfor the rest of your life.”
Nora winced. Not so much at the tomb imagery (although that was very unpleasant!), but more at the thought of Will at the hospital—all day yesterday, when she wasn’t there. All last night, when she was.God, she had been such ajerkthis morning.
She rubbed her hands over her face. The kettle started to rumble, and Marian stood, returning to the kitchen and making tea while Nora stared down at her lap and thought about calling Will.
When Marian returned, she looked over the lip of the mug and stared at Nora while she sipped. When she pulled it away from her mouth she said, “I didn’t say I was making it for you.”
Nora shook her head and laughed softly. “I love you, Marian,” she said, because she really, really did.
“I love you too, doll. But you were definitely wrong to send that man away.” She sipped her tea again. “I can’t really believe I said that, but here we are.”
She could have let it go there; she could have sat in the silence with Marian and contemplated her stubbornness until she got up the courage to call up Will and apologize for the way she’d acted. Marian was probably going to sit here until she did it, actually.
But telling Marian she loved her, and knowing Marian would say it right back—it reminded her of the bigger problem she didn’t quite know how to solve. She could get rid of this couch; she could clear out Nonna’s bedroom; she could leave her job. She could maybe even deal with Jonah having to go somewhere else. But could she deal with it if . . .
“He’s not really a sure thing,” she blurted. “Will, I mean.”
Marian raised her eyebrows. “What’s he been doing over here all night, then?”
Nora clapped her hands over her face, groaning. “I don’t meanthat! Mygoodness, Marian!”
“Exactly like her,” Marian said, rolling her eyes. “Like what, then?”
Nora dropped her hands, sobering. “I’m in love with him. And he’s—I don’t know. He’s not sure about being serious with someone. That’s what he said, before.”
Marian clicked her tongue. “A person doesn’t do the things Will did over the last couple of days unless they’re serious, Nora.”
Nora nodded again, because of course part of her believed that, too. It’s what she’d clung to last night in the hospital, her desperation to believe that they’d settled things, even without words between them. But thinking of it now, thinking of Will’s determined, practical helpfulness, a little clumsier than usual, this morning—she wondered if they had both, in a way, still been hiding. Jonah’s accident like a towel rod or a sink faucet or a new can of paint. Some way for them to keep from having to risk themselves.
She thought about Will that day in Donny’s apartment—that photograph, that look in his eyes when he told her it was too much between them. She wouldn’t break her promise to him, wouldn’t tell Marian what she knew about his parents and what their relationship had done to him. But she couldn’t set it aside in her own mind, either.
She knew Will would forgive her for this morning if she said she was sorry for sending him away, for not talking to him the way she should have.
But would he forgive her for telling him how she really felt about him?
Or was it still too much?
