Love at First

by Kate Clayborn

  Still, that lapel-smoothing. It got right in there, up against that cracked glass in Will’s chest. He took a breath and thought about Quincy and Francis, who were in fact enjoyable to look at on a phone screen but a lot of work outside of that.

  “Two is enough,” he said, and Abraham nodded gravely, looking toward the doors Will was about to go out.

  “You could maybe get her something from a pet store,” he added. “Supplies. A gift card.”

  “I often bought her gift cards. During our marriage.”

  Will winced. “Don’t do that, then.”

  A memory of two weeks, two days ago came back to him, something he’d said to Nora in the dark, confessional solace of her bedroom: I’m not even sure I ever learned how to be a good friend. Definitely he and Gerald Abraham weren’t friends, and definitely Will would never be finding himself in this particular situation—broken up, lonely enough to be coming up with cat-purchasing schemes, looking for advice from the nearest person you knew the name of.

  But that didn’t mean he couldn’t offer something.

  “You ought to go see her,” he said, putting his hand on the door handle. He’d help, but then he had to get the hell out of here. This was uncomfortable enough that he thought he might be blushing. “If you—if pets weren’t your thing, I mean. Going to see hers, that would be a nice gesture.”

  Abraham tucked his hands in the pockets of his white coat, and Will wondered if he was going to get out his notebook and write this down. Maybe he would, once Will left, but for now he simply looked at Will, gave him a curt nod, and said, “Very good,” as though Will had offered up a satisfactory diagnosis and treatment plan. He added a brief, “Enjoy your evening,” and then turned and walked away.

  Will shook his head, pushing out the door. In spite of himself, he felt a smile tug at his lips, thinking about Gerald Abraham getting climbed all over by Quincy and Francis. A rogue urination and follow-up face scream wouldn’t be the worst thing. But as he stepped into the evening air, the smile faded. You ought to go see her, his rash, reckless, cracked-glass heart told him, and he was so tired of it. Tired of wanting what he shouldn’t want. Tired of missing what he shouldn’t miss.

  Tired enough that when he looked up, he thought he might be dreaming.

  Because that was Nora Clarke, standing there waiting for him.

  “I was pretty sure I missed you.”

  It was the first thing she said to him once he’d crossed the parking lot to get to where she stood, her cheeks flushed pink and her hair in that loose braid he liked, the one that made his forearm prickle in remembered awareness. She said it with the kind of frazzled, slightly out-of-breath frustration of a person who’d been dealing with traffic for a while, but he heard it all wrong, of course, and for long seconds all he could think was, I’m sure I missed you.

  “I remembered you said you sometimes worked six to six,” she rushed out, obviously discomfited by the long silence, “And so I took a chance on showing up a little after that, but then . . . the truth is, I got lost! I’ve never come down to this side of the city, and”—she broke off, shook her head—“it doesn’t matter. I figured I’d missed you, being so late getting here and all, but then I called and got transferred to a nurse who said you’d left a few minutes ago, and anyway that’s why I’m here! I wasn’t, uh. It’s not like I’ve been standing out here for a long time or anything.”

  For the first time, he noticed she was holding something—a thin, square package that seemed to be wrapped in quilting material. She thrust it forward, holding it out to him, her face turning even pinker. “This is still warm, see?”

  He looked down at it, shifting to tuck his bike helmet under his arm so he could take it from her. But as soon as he moved, she pulled it back toward her stomach. “Oh! I can hold it! I didn’t . . . if you ride a bike, you won’t be able to—”

  “Nora,” he said, because he knew this about her now. That if he said her name this way, she would slow down. She would look up at him.

  When she finally did—her lips pressing together, her flush deepening—he could not help his smile.

  “You look like you feel better,” he said, which was an understatement. She looked like the best thing he’d ever seen. Fresh and pretty and painted with the pink-orange light of the setting sun. How had he not gone to see her? That was the real question.

  “You left me all the food that was in your freezer,” she blurted, and that quick, everything between them shifted. Now it was his turn to flush, her turn to smile teasingly—knowingly—at him.

  “You told Benny to send me text message reminders for when to take my medicine.”

  Benny, Will thought, dropping his eyes to the concrete. A traitor, through and through. Still, Will wondered if he’d been able to get that starter wort going.

  “You told Marian I shouldn’t go out for three days, and she basically set up a security checkpoint.”

  Marian! Dammit. Though the security checkpoint, that was a good idea. He knew he could count on her. He hoped at least Mrs. Salas had been more dis—

  “Mrs. Salas made me mantecaditos.”

  Will suppressed a sigh. He hadn’t told Mrs. Salas to make the cookies. He’d maybe mentioned, when he was bringing up the food he hadn’t eaten from his freezer, that he didn’t have any of them left. Mrs. Salas was the one who’d insisted.

  “And I can only assume you asked Jonah to put his air purifier in the hallway for a few days.”

  He cleared his throat. “I . . . no.”

  That had been the worst, asking for a favor from Jonah. Even after the ball game they’d watched together, Jonah still looked at Will through narrowed eyes. He still called Will “Beanpole,” even when Will was giving him doctor’s orders.

  “No?” Nora said.

  He scraped the toe of his shoe against the concrete.

  “Fine, yes.”

  He didn’t need to look up to know she was smiling even bigger now.

  “Neighborly of you,” she said, and he couldn’t just hear the grin in her voice. It was like he could feel it, like she had her mouth pressed right against his chest.

  It wasn’t neighborly of me, he wanted to say. It was something else of me. Not rash, not reckless, not selfish. But not neighborly, either.

  “It was nothing,” he said, finally working up the courage to look at her again.

  She rolled her eyes, flicked her braid over her shoulder. “I brought a thank-you gift. It’s only one serving, because I didn’t want it to seem like a threat.”

  He breathed out a laugh. “Is it more of those cheesy bacon potatoes?”

  Her face fell. “Oh. No. This is something I made.”

  His eyes dropped to the package again. He had no guesses as to what could be in there, didn’t even really know if Nora was any kind of cook, but suddenly he felt hungrier than he had all day.

  Than he had in two weeks, two days.

  “I didn’t really like those potatoes,” which was half a lie. He liked them fine, when there weren’t ten pounds of them. He just wanted to know what Nora had made him.

  “It’s manicotti. Homemade sauce. My nonna—”

  He held out his hand, beckoned for the dish. “Lemme try it,” he said impatiently.

  She clutched it tighter. “You can’t eat in a parking lot.”

  He furrowed his brow. He’d eaten a lot of food in this parking lot. Last night when he’d gotten off his shift he’d shoved an entire hunk of stale corn bread from the cafeteria into his mouth before unlocking his bike. He was still chewing when he’d pedaled away. He hadn’t even tasted it.

  “This is my best dish. You can’t disrespect it like that! This is a tablecloth kind of meal.”

  She had this look in her eyes, one he recognized—the what a nice houseplant, here’s a laurel wreath, I found you some kittens look. Part mischief, part triumph. He’d missed that look. If he had a lapel, he’d probably be smoothing it.

  “Is that right?” he said, then shrugged.
“I don’t have a tablecloth.”

  She traced the tip of her finger over the loopy, colorful fabric of the package, and that—that was even more dangerous than the grin. He felt that finger’s path in the kind of way that was going to make for a very uncomfortable bike ride home, unless he got control over himself.

  She blew out a gusty, exaggerated sigh. “Well I don’t know what to tell you then,” she said. “It’s a shame you won’t be able to en—”

  “I’ve got an idea,” he interrupted, and she practically beamed at him.

  Rash, reckless, selfish, that stubborn voice said to him, but he was so hungry—for her food, for that smile, for her—that at the moment, he couldn’t make himself care. And anyway, it’s not like his idea was to take her back to the building. This was different; this was separate.

  This was safe.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  In a pinch, the jacket he had stuffed in his backpack made for a fine tablecloth.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d had an impromptu sort of picnic in this spot, one of his favorites in the city—a stretch of beach that only took him about twenty-five minutes to get to on his bike, a route along Lakefront Trail that made for a good workout. Every once in a while, he’d stop here, sweaty and pleasantly out of breath from his ride, lock up his bike, and walk to one of the expanses of smooth, tiered concrete. He’d sit and unwrap some half-smashed sandwich he’d forgotten to eat during the day, staring out at a spot on the horizon and letting his mind empty and his belly fill before riding the rest of the way home.

  But with Nora here, everything felt different.

  In the first place, there was no need to lock up his bike—it was stowed away in the back of Nora’s car, the front wheel off to make it fit. In the second, Nora had no use for tiered concrete, not when she saw the open stretches of pale sand, warm from a day beneath the bright sun. And in the third, Nora—the maker of the best meal Will had ever tasted, sauce like a religious experience—liked to look at everything. The whole expanse of water, the city skyline, the boat slips, the sparse pockets of people gathered in different spots along the beach.

  And because Will liked to look at Nora, he saw it all anew.

  In between bites of food, that is.

  “You really only brought one serving?” he said morosely, once he’d finished his last bite. The glass dish in his lap still had sauce in the bottom, and he was waging a desperate battle with himself not to stick his face into it like a dog.

  She shrugged, smiling over at him. “It’s like I said. I didn’t want it to seem like a threat.”

  He pointed at the dish. “You can threaten me all you want, if you bring me more of this.”

  This teasing about their shared history—the little sabotages of the last several weeks—it was the closest they’d gotten to the subject of the building since they’d arrived, like a bruise they were both avoiding, save this occasional, soft-touch reminder that it was still there. He knew it couldn’t last; he knew there was some reason beyond a single dish of food that she’d come all the way here.

  He even had a good guess what it was.

  But right now, his stubborn, sated brain wouldn’t give over to thinking about it. Instead, he watched her wave her hand, saw her make a small noise of self-deprecating dismissal while the flush in her cheeks deepened. His mind prodded him with one compliment after another. You look pretty in this light. I could listen to you talk about making sauce all night. Your voice carries like a song out here.

  He picked up the lid for the container, pressed it back on with more vigor than was necessary. Quiet, he thought, as if he was lidding his own brain. Once he had it on, he set it down and shifted to mimic her posture—facing the water, knees up, elbows resting on top of them. Between them, the jacket-tablecloth had wrinkled up, a dozing chaperone.

  He was trying to concentrate on being responsible, practical, when Nora’s laugh broke the silence—a bright, lilting thing, the grown-up version of the laugh he’d heard all those years ago. It was hard to feel responsible in the face of that.

  He looked over, glad he wasn’t two floors beneath her. “What?”

  She was still looking toward the water, big smile broadcast in its direction. “It’s . . . this is so neat, that there’s this whole beach here!”

  He smiled, shaking his head. Sometimes, when he was around Nora, he could sense—even though he’d never met her—the way her grandmother must have shaped her. She said words like neat with total sincerity. When someone cut her off in traffic on the way here, her only exclamation had been a quiet, surprised “Well!” The night he stayed with her, he noticed all kinds of funny contradictions about her space—the sleek, top-of-the-line laptop set beside an old corded phone on the heavy, ornate console table in her living room. The complicated chrome coffee machine sitting in crowded formation on the countertop next to an almond-colored toaster oven that looked like it’d seen better days. Her fluffy, bright white comforter and pillows, and the flat, frayed quilt that she had folded over an old rocking chair in the corner of her bedroom.

  “Wait,” he said, a thought striking him. “Have you . . . never been to the beach here? In Chicago?”

  She looked down at her knees, gently digging her heels into the sand, her bare toes wriggling with the effort. “I haven’t. I’m sure that sounds silly.”

  “It doesn’t,” he said, but also, it sort of did. He didn’t get here as often as he should, but to his mind, the whole world slept on Chicago beaches. They thought of the city and pictured that shiny silver bean or the Sears Tower or the sign outside of Wrigley Field, maybe the fussy, lit-up Ferris wheel on Navy Pier. But Chicago beaches, they were something else. All through the winter they’d punish you with possibility—gray-beige and iced-over and unwelcoming, and then a sunny day would come and the water would look unreal, blue like you were in the tropics even as the wind was cold enough to make your eyes water, your tears freeze. You felt like the whole world opened up when it turned warm again and you could see it up close.

  “Nonna didn’t drive much, not even when I was younger. She stuck close to what she knew, and I stuck close to her.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “It would’ve been fun to come, as a kid.”

  He’d grown up landlocked, had learned to swim in the rectangular chlorinated pools of the Indiana suburbs. If he’d been a kid in this city, he would’ve wanted to go to the beach all the time, and it’s not like his parents would’ve stopped him. He had a rash, reckless thought: If Donny had taken me. If Donny had taken me, I would have brought Nora here. Every summer she came, I would have.

  I would have counted the days.

  He was going to need a bigger brain lid, with those kinds of thoughts.

  “I’ve been thinking about the apartment,” she said.

  So, she’d brought her own lid, then. He looked away from her, out to some spot on the horizon. They were getting to it, then, her real reason for coming all this way. He hated how disappointed he felt, having his suspicions about it confirmed. He’d been having such a nice time.

  “I haven’t changed my mind,” he said, and hoped the breeze off the lake softened his tone. He felt hard all over, frustrated more with himself than with her. He should’ve finished this in the parking lot. Now sunset was going to be all fucked up for him, too.

  “I was waiting until—”

  “Until I wasn’t sick anymore,” she finished for him. “I know.”

  He dropped his eyes to his hands, embarrassed again. He hadn’t told any of the neighbors—when he was making his rounds—that he planned to wait. He hadn’t even really known himself, not until he’d gotten back to his own place. He’d sat on his couch and pulled his computer onto his lap and thought about what he’d said to Nora. He’d thought about her puffy eyes and quivering chin, the soft, stuffy snore that had lulled him into an unplanned sleep in her bed.

  Give her a couple of weeks, he’d told himself, pushing the computer aside again. You can list it
in a couple of weeks.

  But it was more than a couple of weeks now. He’d left it too long, and look what had happened. She’d shown up with a great meal and a gleam in her eyes, because he’d given her some kind of false hope about his plans. Reckless, he thought. He needed to get it up on the site tomorrow, first thing. Tonight, maybe, if he could get his head on straight.

  “That was nice of you,” she said. “Not necessary, but nice.”

  Wait—not necessary? His brow lowered. Maybe she hadn’t gotten her hopes up, or maybe—

  “I actually meant my apartment,” she said.

  He turned to look at her, could feel the surprise that was surely registering on his face. “Your apartment?” he repeated, confused.

  She nodded, her eyes still out on the water, and he watched her chest lift on a deep inhale. He couldn’t quite see her eyes, but he had a feeling.

  He had a feeling she was about to say something rash.

  “I want to make mine like yours.”

  Chapter 11

  So, she’d said it.

  Will was quiet beside her, and at first she was grateful. It meant that she could spend the first few seconds following her confession—was it too much to call it a confession?—with her eyes ahead, out on the sunset waters of this place she’d never seen, letting the feeling of her words wash over her. She hadn’t quite planned to say them, or at least she hadn’t fully decided yet, but now that she had—

  “You want to rent your unit?” he broke in.

  “What!” Nora exclaimed, snapping her head toward him so quickly that she nearly lost her balance. She shifted, turning to face him. “Not rent it!”

  He looked at her from behind his glasses (of course he was wearing his glasses; that’s probably why she’d made the confession! There was no telling the power of those spectacles), the dark mass of his hair blowing gently across his forehead. He looked like he could be in a calendar—twelve months of men looking terrific by a lake—but also the expression on his face suggested he thought Nora could be in a monthly calendar featuring people who made absolutely no sense.