And never mind all that, she stays not just for us, but for all of us. For Nora’s fourth job—for which she also does not get paid, for which, in fact, she herself pays handsomely—is truth-prover, justice-seeker, retribution-guarantor, and wreck-herder. Every hour she is not working or baking or mothering, she is holding Bourne’s class action lawsuit together with both hands. She has a fancy, big-city lawyer, Russell Russo, and a crowd of plaintiffs—nearly everyone left has signed on at some point or another. She has piles of research, interviews and testimony, documents, affidavits, and absurdly high hopes. What she does not have, however, in sixteen years of trying, is sufficient admissible evidence to prove what she absolutely knows to be the case. Not yet, anyway.
When the old oak door opens and a little light spills into our dankness and with it Bourne’s mayor, Omar Radison, everyone holds their breath, but I am the only one who sets off an alarm. My apnea monitor starts shrieking like a banshee on the moors, and this is a good thing actually because it reminds everyone to breathe again and gives Nora something to do.
Omar comes running over to help me, but Nora beats him there. Still, it was sweet of him to try.
“Christ, is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” Nora snaps.
“Are you sure?” Omar’s hands are out to help, but he doesn’t know where to put them. Nora’s propped my head and checked my airway and is fiddling with the monitor, trying to get it to stop shrieking. I am telling her with my eyes I’m fine.
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Some days Nora is too tired for sarcasm. Today is not one of those days.
“Okay, jeez, just…” Omar trails off. Making sure? Trying to help? Unable to muster the will to live with that alarm pummeling my eardrums? Who knows how he meant to finish that sentence. But the pealing finally ceases.
“She’s fine,” Nora says again.
Omar’s outstretched hands rise up like he’s under arrest. “Sorry, sorry. A beer when you get a chance.”
He chooses the farthest stool at the end. Her eyeballs look mere degrees away from being able to set it aflame. She returns behind the bar and pours unrequested refills for Zach, Tom, and Hobart. “On the house,” she says. Then she starts polishing glasses.
Frank sighs and pulls Omar a beer, takes it over to him.
“Sorry, Frank,” says Omar.
Frank nods. “Not your fault, man.”
Everyone in the bar closes their eyes and takes this in. Everyone winces. Everyone thinks the exact same thing. There is an unspeakable amount for which Omar is at fault.
“So, um … I have some news.” Omar doesn’t look up from the beer Frank has just handed him. He sounds sorry—for opening his mouth at all—but also a little bit excited, proud even, to have something to report. There’s not much he can give us—his wards, his citizens—but this is one thing. Some news. An offering. “Donna Anvers saw a moving truck.”
“I heard it was a delivery truck,” Nora says, also without looking up. “Kitchen supplies or something.”
“That too,” Omar says. “But that’s not what Donna says she saw. A moving truck, she said, for sure.”
Nora’s incredulity is such that it overwhelms her abhorrence for Bourne’s mayor. She looks to see if he’s kidding or lying, teasing her, mocking her, tormenting her, manipulating her. He is not. Finally she asks, “Where?”
“She saw it go by the nursery.”
The plants never really came back here, so neither did Donna’s Nursery. It’s still open, but mostly she sits in the front window all day and watches Bourne go by.
“Must have been on the way somewhere else,” Nora says, sure.
“Where?” Omar asks.
It’s a good point. Bourne is on the way to nowhere. No one, nothing, goes through Bourne.
“No shit.” Frank gets away with penetrating commentary like that because he owns a bar.
“Can’t be,” Nora says but adds, despite herself, “Can it?”
Omar smiles at her. Omar shrugs. Omar looks like hope. So does Nora. It makes them both unrecognizable. His shoulders rise up toward his ears. “Maybe?”
Nora considers this a moment. “I doubt it’s true.” Then her face shuts down. “And even if it is, we don’t want them here.”
“You don’t even know who they are.”
She goes to anger faster than an exhale. “Who would move here, Omar? I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. We’re broken.”