The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(85)

“This is it,” I said, dropping my duffel bag on the wood floor.

“I wish I’d been able to come down for the funeral.” She hung her jacket in the coat closet. “I just couldn’t get away.”

“No, I understand.” I put my keys in the bowl on the console and slipped off my shoes. Margo was studying my face, as if trying to decide whether to tell me something, and an uncomfortable silence fell between us. “All right,” I said. “I’m going to turn in for the night.”

Without switching on the light in my room, I took off my clothes and got into bed, covering myself with the blanket I had bought after Max complained that my apartment was too humid. The neon sign from the movie theater down the street lit the ceiling an intermittent red, and I turned to the wall, falling quickly into a heavy and dreamless sleep. I didn’t stir until almost noon, when the sun was bright against the window shades. I had spent only a couple of months in the desert, but I had already grown accustomed to its open space and uninterrupted silence: the moment I opened my eyes, my room seemed cluttered, my bed too narrow, the street too loud.

When I walked out of my bedroom, I found Margo at the dining table with her laptop. She worked as a math tutor for a test-preparation company, and often her mornings were spent answering rescheduling requests from difficult parents. These requests she met with a midwesterner’s patience, coupled with a freelancer’s anxiety to get paid. Dvo?ák was on the stereo, a piano and violin piece that mercifully drowned out the hum of the street. After pouring myself a cup of coffee, I came to sit across from her at the table.

“How was it?” she asked. “Tell me everything.”

In the texts and calls we’d exchanged since I’d left, I’d only shared with her the broadest outline of what had happened, but now I began filling in the picture, telling her about my mother’s refusal to keep the restaurant, my attempt to run it even while the Bakers stayed next door, what had started with Jeremy and how it had ended. As I spoke, I felt something shifting, as if a spell I had been under for several weeks was finally broken. I had tried to fill the hole my father had left in my life by holding on to his things—his cabin, his diner, his secrets—and I saw clearly now that none of these could be a bulwark against death. Grief demanded surrender. I had to let go. I had to learn how to live with just the memories, nothing else.

But either I’d chattered for too long or Margo’s capacity to console hadn’t been deepened by the experience of death, because her eyes kept shifting. “I’m sorry,” she said. After a suitable pause, she asked, “So you’re back here for good?”

“That’s the plan.” The pile of mail she had saved was waiting for me, and I started idly sifting through it. A lot had accumulated in just nine weeks: bills, credit-card offers, magazines, mailers from art or music organizations.

“Because there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

I looked up from the junk mail. “What is it?”

“I’m moving out.”

“What? Where to?”

“Fremont. Claire put a deposit on a place.”

“You’re moving in together?”

“Yeah,” she said with a grin.

“Congrats.” Margo and Claire had been together for nearly three years, and I really should’ve been happy for them, but sitting at the table that Sunday morning, all I could find when I searched my heart was the feeling of being unmoored. Lost. I had come back to Oakland thinking that I could live as I had before, but that was no longer possible. “When are you moving out?” I asked, unable to keep the note of desperation out of my voice.

“In ten days.”

“That soon? You’re not giving me much notice.”

“But you’ve been gone so long, Nora. Claire and I expected to look for a while, but we just got lucky with this apartment. You should see it. Built-in bookshelves, crown molding, a backyard view. We knew lightning wasn’t going to strike twice.”

“That’s great,” I said. Quickly and savagely, I tore up credit-card offers, realtor mailers, a reminder for a doctor’s appointment I’d already missed, a subscription renewal for the New Yorker, a sympathy card from the headmaster at Bay Prep, an invitation to my friend Anissa’s housewarming party. And then, beneath the detritus of the life I wished I could have again, I found an envelope from Silverwood Music Center, with a note informing me that I’d been accepted for their summer festival. The curators wanted to include one of my pieces in an evening program featuring younger composers. “I just got into Silverwood,” I said, my voice rising with excitement.

“Mazel tov!” Margo said. “Congratulations to us both, then. We’re moving on to bigger and better things.”

It was the kind of break I would read about in the trades every fall, a gushing article celebrating the arrival of a fresh new talent in American music, but that’s all it ever was to me—a story, not something that actually happened, least of all to people like me. I wished I could’ve called my father to tell him the news—Can you believe it? I would’ve said. And I almost didn’t apply!—and now I was seized with pain at the thought that he hadn’t lived long enough to hear about this. I could have called my mother instead, but I knew that she was still upset with me. For years, we had been operating under a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy about my sex life, and our mutual violation of that agreement while I was home—she asked, I told—had given her yet another reason to be disappointed in me. Why couldn’t I be more like Salma, she moaned, find myself a nice Muslim doctor or engineer and marry him? Two days before, when I told her I was leaving town, she’d seemed relieved.