None of Your Business

Nora was working on the switch from G to C for the twentieth time, his grandfather's guitar on her knee, when Alex's phone buzzed on the step. He read the message, and his face went very calm, as calm as it only got when something was wrong. “I have to go,” he said, standing up, car keys already in his hand. “What happened?” “Later.” Then he drove off, and Nora sat alone with the guitar on the Kellers' front steps.

That night she texted, “You okay?” The answer came an hour later: “Yeah.” One word, nothing else. Around eleven she saw from her window that his light was still on across the street. He was standing at the fish tank, sleeves pushed up, cleaning it. He did that when he was angry, or when something was bothering him so much his hands needed something to do. Nora had known that for years.

At lunch the next day she caught him outside the physics room. “You look like you didn't sleep.” “I didn't.” “Want to talk?” “Not now, Nora.” He said it kindly. He also said it in a way that told her the conversation was over. She went back to Chiara, who asked what was going on with him, and Nora said, “No idea,” and that was the worst part.

That afternoon she went over anyway. The garage door was open. Alex was sitting on a stool in front of a bike she recognized: his grandfather's old, heavy bike, the one Grandpa Emil rode along the railroad tracks almost every day. The front wheel was bent, the handlebars crooked. Alex had taken off the front brake and laid the parts out side by side on a rag, like silverware. “Is that your grandpa's bike?” Nora asked. “What happened? Is he hurt? Alex, say something.”

He didn't look up. “Nora. That's none of your business.” He didn't say it loudly. Alex never got loud. But he had never spoken to her that plainly, not in eleven years of her running across the street whenever she felt like it. Nora stood in the garage doorway, and her hands went cold, the way they always did when something hit her. “Okay,” she said. Nothing more. Then she turned around.

Suza was sitting on the front steps, drawing something in a notebook. She looked at Nora with the look she'd had for her for a few months now, a little cool, a little satisfied. “He's not talking to anybody,” she said. “Not to you either. See?” Nora would have loved to have a comeback. Nothing came to her, and that almost never happened.

That evening she went running. Five kilometers instead of three, until her head got quieter. At home she lay in the dark and said out loud the three things that could wait until tomorrow. One: maybe this isn't about me at all. Two: if it's about Grandpa Emil, that's worse than if it were about me. Three: I don't have to know everything right away. She stumbled over the third one, because it didn't feel like hers. She said it again anyway. Then she put her phone face down on the floor.

She didn't text him on Friday, or on Saturday either. It was harder than any test. On Sunday evening someone knocked on the Sommers' kitchen door, and Alex was standing outside, hands in his jacket pockets. “Can you come out for a minute?” They sat on the bench next to the farm stand. It smelled like potato dirt and wet leaves.

“Grandpa fell off his bike on Thursday,” Alex said. “By the tracks. Broke his wrist, he's in a cast now. Otherwise he's fine, the doctor says.” He was quiet for a while. “Two weeks ago he told me the front brake was rubbing. I said, ‘Let me take a look.’ And then I didn't. I had the shop and the fire department and you and… I just didn't do it.”

Nora didn't say anything. Suddenly she understood the parts on the rag. “I had to know if it was my fault,” Alex said. “Until I knew that, I couldn't talk about it. Not with my mom, not with you. I wouldn't have known what to say.” “And?” “The brake was worn, but it worked. He slipped on wet leaves. He told us that himself at the hospital, I just didn't believe him until I saw it for myself.”

“And if it had been the brake?” Nora asked. “Then I would've told you anyway,” Alex said. “Just later.” For the first time that evening, he really looked at her. “What I said in the garage wasn't fair. It is your business. Just not right away.” Nora pulled her sleeves down over her hands. “I asked three times because I was scared it was about us,” she said. “That wasn't totally fair either.”

Across the street, a light came on in the Kellers' first-floor apartment. They could see Grandpa Emil at the window, his arm in a cast, trying to get a pot onto the stove with his other hand, and Carmen taking the pot out of his hand. Tomorrow, Nora thought, I'll bring him potatoes from the farm stand. She didn't ask anything else. They sat on the bench until it got too cold, and Alex didn't fill the silence. This time, neither did Nora.