At ten o’clock on Saturday morning, October 11th, I knocked on Norine’s door again. I handed her a single sheet of paper.
At the top was the name and phone number of Lassen Piano Movers. It’s a company in Chico that moves grand pianos for churches and the university.
I had booked them for 4:45 on Sunday afternoon. I’d already paid them six hundred and forty dollars, to take her piano anywhere within sixty miles.
Below that, I’d written down three furnished rooms in Chico that rent by the week. With phone numbers.
“You can leave with dignity, Norine,” I said. “Tomorrow, before your recital, or right after. It’s your choice. The truck is already paid for.”
For a moment, she looked at that paper the way she’d looked at the hymn that night. Like she was tired. Like she wanted, more than anything, to put something heavy down.
Then her phone rang.
It was Darcy.
Norine listened for a long time. She said “yes” three times. Then she hung up.
“Darcy says I shouldn’t sign anything else.”
“It isn’t a contract,” I said. “It’s a phone number.”
She set the paper on top of the piano, next to the metronome. Then she went into her room and closed the door.
That night, I sat at my dark kitchen table and listened.
Norine had left the metronome running in the empty living room. She’d set it back down to sixty. One tick a second.
For the first time since I came home, I counted along with it.
Sixty ticks to a minute, while the green numbers on my microwave clock crept toward midnight.
11:57.
11:58.
11:59.
12:00.
At midnight, Norine Tackett was no longer my lodger.
She was something the Penal Code had a number for.
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