Chapter 2: Dot Bellweather Has Opinions

Dot Bellweather's porch light had been broken since roughly the Clinton administration, so Nora saw the shape of her grandmother before she saw her face — small, straight-backed, arms crossed in the doorway of the house on Larkspur Street, backlit by a kitchen lamp and radiating the specific energy of a woman who had heard the truck coming from four streets away and had opinions ready. "Well," Dot said, as Eli's truck rolled to a stop at the curb. "Look what the cat dragged in, riding shotgun with the last man in town I told you not to marry." "Gran." "I'm not wrong. I said it at the time. I said, Nora, don't you run off from that boy without giving him a straight answer, and did you listen?" She was already moving down the porch steps, already reaching for Nora before the sentence finished, and the hug that followed knocked all the air and most of the composure straight out of Nora's chest. Dot smelled like rosewater and woodsmoke, exactly like always, and she was thinner than she'd been the last time, and she held on a beat longer than a hello required. "I missed you," Nora said into her shoulder. "I know you did. You missed me so much you called twice a month and visited twice a decade." Dot pulled back and held her at arm's length, cataloging. "You look terrible. Beautiful, but terrible. City did a number on you." "Thanks, Gran." "Eli Hargrove." Dot turned the full beam of her attention on him, and to his credit, he didn't flinch. "You fix her truck or did you just want an excuse to carry her bags." "Belt's shot. I'll have it running by ten tomorrow." "Mm." Dot looked between the two of them with the frank, assessing patience of a woman who had outlived two husbands and had no more patience left to waste on subtlety. "You'll stay for pie." "I should get back and close up." "You'll stay for pie," Dot said again, in a tone that had settled zoning disputes and one memorable custody battle over a dog, and Eli, wisely, stayed for pie. --- The kitchen hadn't changed. That was the thing that undid Nora more than the hug had — not the big things, the marriage that hadn't happened, the decade gone, but the small stubborn sameness of her grandmother's kitchen, the same chipped rooster cookie jar, the same water stain on the ceiling shaped like Florida, the same table where she'd rolled her first pie crust at age seven with flour to her elbows and Dot's hand steady over hers. "The building's a disaster," Dot said, cutting three slices of apple pie with the brisk efficiency of a surgeon. "I won't lie to you. Roof's bad, the walk-in's from 1985, and I think there might be something living in the basement that isn't technically a raccoon but I haven't ruled it out." "Encouraging." "I'm not going to sugarcoat it and have you find out from the contractor and feel ambushed. Your mother always said I ambushed people. I prefer *informed swiftly*." Eli, at the end of the table, made a small sound that might have been a laugh disguised as a cough. "You've got opinions," Dot said to him. "No opinions. I just know that basement. There's definitely something living in it." "See." Dot set a plate in front of Nora like the matter was closed. "Eat. You're too thin, which I recognize as a professional hazard in your line of work, but humor an old woman." Nora ate. It was, unfairly, the best pie she'd had in ten years, and she said so, and Dot looked pleased in the tight, unshowy way she'd always looked pleased, like praise was something to be handled carefully so it didn't spoil. "Why now," Dot said, when the plates were nearly empty and the kitchen had gone quiet enough for real questions. "You've had that building sitting empty for three years. Why now." Nora looked at her fork. She'd rehearsed an answer for this on the drive — something about timing, about the market, about wanting to be near family — all of it true and none of it the actual truth, which was that eight weeks ago she had stood in the gutted dining room of Verre, the restaurant she had built with a man named Colin Ashford who had also, unbeknownst to her, built an entire second set of investors' expectations on lies she hadn't caught until the fraud case broke and her name went down with his in three separate news articles she still couldn't make herself finish reading. "It didn't work out," she said finally. "The restaurant. My partner. It's — it's complicated, and it's not something I can talk about without a lawyer clearing his throat somewhere, but the short version is I lost it. All of it. And I had nowhere else that felt like it would have me." The kitchen was very quiet. "This will have you," Dot said, and reached over and put her hand, flour-dry and warm, over Nora's. "This has always had you. You're the one who left it." It wasn't unkind, the way she said it. It was worse than unkind — it was true, delivered with love, which was the only kind of true that ever actually landed. Eli was watching his plate very hard, the way a man does when he's trying not to have an opinion about a conversation that isn't his, and failing. "I should go," he said finally, standing, gathering himself the way Nora remembered — an economy of motion, nothing wasted. "Ten o'clock, Nora. Belt'll be in." "Thank you. For today. All of it." He paused at the door, hand on the frame, and for a second she thought he'd say something that would crack the evening wide open — something about the ring, the eight months of unanswered letters, the reason she still couldn't look at him for more than four seconds at a time. Instead he just said, "Welcome home," quiet, almost private, and let himself out into the dark. Dot watched the door close, then watched her granddaughter watching it, and said nothing at all, which from Dot Bellweather was its own kind of very loud statement. Nora didn't sleep much that night. Somewhere past midnight she got up, padded to the window of her old childhood room, and looked out at Main Street — at the dark shape of the garage, one light still burning in the back office, and beside it, hers now, the black windows of the building that used to be Bellweather's and was about to become something else entirely, if she could just survive being home long enough to build it.

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