Nora felt conflicted, and that was an unusual sensation for her. Normally she created an action plan quickly and stuck to it. Should she break up the lip-lock knowing Matt wouldn’t approve of his sister’s involvement with the groping letch or let Karen, a grown woman capable of making her own bad decisions, carry on as desired? Her phone buzzed again. “Hey. She’s not answering her cell, either. Was there a dance tonight?”
That Nora could answer with honesty. “Yes. We’re at the armory.”
“Oh, you’re with her? That’s reassuring. Don’t get into any trouble. Ask her to check that pipe to make sure the seal is good when she gets home, please.”
“I will.”
“That’s goodnight, then. I’ve been recruited to work the Blu-ray player for family movie night. It’s as fun as it sounds.”
Nora felt as if she’d been pulled off the ledge at the last minute and sighed her relief. When she looked up again, both Chad and Karen were gone. Nora sat there in her hard chair for a while, fidgeting and refreshing the email on her phone, and occasionally glancing around at the dead crowd that seemed more intent on staring at each other from their own chairs than doing any actual mingling. Well, she wanted to get to know Chowan County culture. This was her chance.
She blew out a raspberry, shrugged, and when Sugar Hill Gang’s “Jump On It” began playing through the rattling speakers, she ran out to the middle of the hardwood court and did what the men on the track instructed.
Of course, Nora didn’t notice the camera flash going off behind her as she danced because it was in her nature to do so with abandon. She popped and locked with her eyes closed, opening them occasionally to find that people were closing in on center-court around her, busting some moves of their own. She may have even taken a swig or two of smuggled-in malt liquor when it was being passed around, because that was the only way to account for the fact that she’d entirely missed the big black camera being wielded by the reporter from The Albemarle Times that had taken not one, but two unflattering shots of her contorting her sweaty body into gravity-defying poses.
When she woke up around noon the next day, after having been dragged off the dance floor by an agitated Karen at around one A.M., she turned on her phone to find at least seventeen missed calls and messages. From Bennie:
“Bitch! Oh my god. You know, it’s a good thing I run a web search on you every day as your agent. What’s this? You went out dancing with the bourgeoisie last night? Your mug is all over your local newspaper’s website and some jackass made a video of you dancing like Carlton Banks and put it on YouTube. I’ve done some damage control and linked the article to your fan page so it looks intentional, but OMG, why can’t you just hide and be mysterious like other hipster artists? Now, quit rubbing elbows with the huddled masses and Do. Some. Work!”
Nora didn’t even know she had a fan page and thought maybe she should pay Bennie after all. From Matt:
“Had fun last night? I subscribe to the paper and get alerts on my phone when the new editions go live. I would have been jealous of all the homeboys grinding against you if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve already seen your moves in person. Hey — ‘Cell Block Tango,’ right? Took me that long to find out who ‘Lipschitz’ was. We watched Chicago last night. My oma likes Richard Gere.”
She blushed hard at that. And from Hattie:
“Ooh, chile! You must have been cuttin’ up something terrible last night. If everyone in the county didn’t know who you was before they sho do now.” Hattie ended her voicemail with a cackle that gave Nora the distinct impression that she had in a couple of hours of dancing developed unwanted notoriety.
Well, hell.
There were numerous other messages from people who’d read the paper and surfed to her website out of curiosity and then, finding her to be a legitimate craftsperson, wanted to know about the availability of certain works. What Nora wanted to know was who had told the reporter her name, and that turned out to be easy to figure out. After she chugged down a couple of scalding mugs of black coffee and ate the previous day’s biscuit leftovers dry, she pulled on her rubber boots and hooded windbreaker and flung herself into her car to drive to the electronics shop.
Nora fumed all the way there — a full eight minutes south on Highway 32. It wasn’t that she was angry that she’d been caught in an embarrassing situation: she’d been captured on film doing much more entertaining things. In fact, the year she graduated from college one of her classmates filmed a short documentary about creatives and their outward appearance. The filmmaker encouraged them all to delve deep into why they chose to emphasize certain features. Nora insisted that she didn’t actually pay all that much attention to how she looked, but the filmmaker, an astute young man named Corey who probably would have been as successful as a therapist as he was as a cinematographer, gently informed her that if that were true she wouldn’t spend so much time each day engaged in the artful manipulation of her hair.
Nora tried to argue with Corey that she wasn’t vain and that her hair was no more important to her than the shoes she selected each morning or the smock she wore to protect her clothes. But one evening, staring into the bathroom mirror in Elvin’s cramped apartment, she discovered something important about herself. Instead of the post-coital glow on her forehead and cheeks or the smudged mascara streaking her skin, what she paid most important to in that glass was how her slick, shiny hair had become disheveled during their lovemaking and that it needed immediate repair.
At that time, Nora’s hair fell to her bra band. She straightened it regularly, and curled it to the perfect amount of flip and bounce. She’d always been careful with her hair and spent nearly as much money on its upkeep as she did on painting supplies, although she’d never done the math to figure that out. Standing there in that bathroom, overly concerned with the condition of her hair rather than the state of her lover, she knew Corey was right. The next day, in front of twenty peers and one rolling camera, Nora shaved her head. She found, however, that her hair didn’t stop being a constant concern. Instead of wanting people to notice it and admire it, she spent an untenable amount of energy trying to get people to ignore it. Five years after her “big chop,” her hair was the same length it had been when she shaved it, but completely different in appearance. Nora handled it as little as possible, and by extension, prevented people from seeing it. Bennie regularly criticized her unwillingness to show what was beneath her multitude of scarves, but Nora wasn’t ready to defend her hair or be judged for what she didn’t do to it.
Nora’s anger at Chad was due to her belief that he was diverting attention toward her so that his own deeds were ignored. She wondered just what happened between him and Karen the night before that had Karen rushing out of that gymnasium so quickly with a look of disgust on her young face. It was better if the deed surfaced while big brother was away so he would have time and distance to burn off his anger.
Unfortunately for Nora, and probably fortunately for Chad, he wasn’t at the appliance shop when she arrived. “Hey, can I help you?” The woman behind the register counter wore some sort of hot pink stretchy infant wrap over her plaid flannel shirt. If it weren’t for the fact she was cradling the bottom of her ample chest with one arm, Nora wouldn’t have been able to tell there was an actual infant in it.
“I’m looking for Chad,” Nora said cautiously, watching the expression on the woman’s face shift from idle curiosity to disdain.
“Oh, me too, honey,” she said, patting what seemed to be the baby’s bottom and rocking from foot to foot repeatedly. “He was supposed to install some satellite dishes yesterday and didn’t come in. Haven’t seen him this morning. Anything I can do for ya? Ooh ooh! Weren’t you in the paper this morning?”
Nora ignored the last question. “I needed to ask him some questions about … ” Nora read the attentiveness in soon-to-be former Mrs. Dillard’s face and remembered what M
att had said about her fickleness. It seemed wise to keep her in the dark. “My dish installation,” she finished, fondling the price tag on a lockable deep freezer. It was actually reasonably priced.
Patricia picked up the pen chained to the register and poised it over a scrap of receipt tape. “What’s your number? I’ll have him call you whenever he comes in. Can’t promise when that’ll be.”
“That’s fine, it’s not pressing. It really has more to do with picture quality than the installation itself. I can just call the satellite company … ”
“No!” Patricia shrieked, scaring her baby awake.
Nora raised one brow at her.
“Shh-shh,” she cooed to the squawking baby. “You got to give us a chance to fix it before you get them involved. If they get too many folks calling them directly they might pull our contract. That’s a big chunk of our business.” Patricia was starting to get frantic and was rocking the infant way too quickly in the wrap. Her hazel eyes looked wild and nearly manic, but that may have had to do with sleep-deprivation and not so much Nora’s plight. “We try to do right by folks but you got to give us the chance to fix it.”
Nora started backing toward the door, twirling her key ring around her index finger. “Um, can you just have him stop by whenever you get a hold of him? I’ll just hold off on that phone call.”
“You got it. I’ll find him even if I have to close up the shop. He’ll be out there first thing next week.”
“Thanks, Patricia. I’m counting on it.” Nora left the woman to her crying baby and headed home to paint before the muse left her. She had an idea.
Chapter Seven
“Between our two properties we have enough land to bury a body without anyone ever finding it,” Matt grumbled, stomping heavily as he paced through Nora’s sunroom. Nora sat still as death on the wicker sofa, hands folded on her lap and only her eyes moving as the big man worked off his frustration. Matt had been home from his three-week vacation for just under a week which was just long enough for shit to hit the fan.
Matt had been in the laundry room replacing the hoses behind the washer when Karen bolted in through the back door without a word carrying an opaque plastic bag and locked herself inside the bathroom for twenty minutes. She didn’t flush or run water or anything, and since Matt had wanted to tell her she’d need to re-wash her laundry, he’d knocked on the door to see what was up. When she wouldn’t respond, he’d trudged across the wooded area between his yard and Nora’s and interrupted her painting. Nora was unshowered and hadn’t slept in a day because of the painting that was so close to completion, but put on her boots and let Matt drag her over.
Karen had let Nora into the bathroom and locked it again before Matt could slink in. Later, Nora told him, Karen showed her not one but three different brands of pregnancy tests. She had one plus sign, one happy face, and one digital “pregnant” read-out. “He did it on purpose,” she’d shrieked while waving the “pregnant” stick at Nora.
“You can’t kill him, Matt,” Nora said calmly. She stood and climbed the few steps to the kitchen, took her whistling teakettle off the heat and poured the water into the prepared teapot. “What Chad did was dirty, but you have to be the bigger man here. Metaphorically speaking. The fact that it actually took is what surprises me, given how short the window of fertility is.”
Matt sat heavily on the sunroom stairs and emitted a low grumble. “There’s something seriously wrong with that guy,” he said, scrunching his fingers into his shaggy hair and yanking it. “Why would he fuck my sister, Nora? She’s practically a baby.”
“Matt, she’s twenty.”
“A baby! And for what? To get back at me because I told him to stay away from you?”
Nora was quiet and stared down at the steeping tealeaves. When she didn’t say anything, Matt turned around on the step and faced her. “What are you not telling me?”
“Hey! Did you see my new deep freezer? I got it for a steal,” she said with forced cheerfulness. Matt narrowed his eyes at her.
“Nora.”
Nora sighed and poured the tea. “I didn’t want to say anything to get you upset, but I actually tried to confront Chad after that social at the armory because he was the one who tipped the reporter off that I was there.”
“His sister Maggie?”
“Yeah. Well, I tried to find him at the shop but he had sort of gone AWOL. Patricia tracked him down and he showed up here around Wednesday of last week to see what I wanted. In a nutshell, I dressed him down about his waiting until you were out of town to move in on Karen, but he sort of wasn’t hearing it. He just stared at my face while I was talking and when my lips stopped moving he tried to kiss me.”
Matt sprang up from his compact seated position and was on his way toward the door, but Nora got in front of him. His choices were to barrel over her or stop. He chose to stop, but bumped Nora full frontal in the process.
“Matt, I don’t need you to defend my honor. I’m scrappy and I can take care of myself. Chances are good he’s got one less working nut right now thanks to my reaction so impregnating anyone in the future won’t be so easy for him.”
Matt wasn’t convinced and instead started to grind his teeth.
“Not that it makes things any easier to stomach,” Nora added, resting her hand on Matt’s arm and gently guiding him back toward the kitchen. “But I think what Chad did was in retaliation against Patricia as much as it was you. You’re right. He’s a sick puppy. He’s probably been jealous of you since you were kids.”
She nudged Matt toward the new kitchen set. He sat reluctantly in one of the high-backed chairs and put his head down on the table, mumbling indecipherably. Nora walked around behind him and kneaded her fingers into his tight shoulders, rubbing until he allowed them to droop and picked his head up to turn and look up at her. He wrapped his hands around hers on his shoulders and squeezed. Oh yeah. Any woman that could talk him down from a rampage was a woman for him.
“The question now is what are you going to do for Karen?” she said softly. “It’s not about what you can do to Chad. Hurting him won’t help anything.”
“She’s been on the pill for years. I don’t understand how this could happen.” He stood again, but this time with controlled ease rather than pent-up rage, and delicately lifted a mug of tea.
“It doesn’t matter how.” Nora shrugged and bridged the gap between the two of them, planting a hand at the small of Matt’s back and rubbing the hard knots up and down his spine.
“When’d you get to be so wise?” He lifted the back tail of his shirt and let Nora place her soft warm palms on his skin. She obliged him, gliding her hands from knot to knot all over his back and ended back up on his high shoulders, which forced her to get up on her tiptoes close enough to him that her clothed breasts grazed his naked skin. Matt looped his arms around the back of his body and held her in place there for a moment with the side of her face pressed against his back.
“I’m not wise,” she said softly. “Just practical.”
“You must think we’re rednecks.”
“I have no idea what that even means, really.”
• • •
The following morning, barely after sunrise, Matt banged on Nora’s door to fetch her for the Christmas parade she’d promised to accompany him to. A small part of her had hoped he’d forget, but no such luck. She’d been up until three A.M. putting the finishing touches on her armory social painting and by the time she finished cleaning her tools she’d only managed a few hours of sleep before she had to get up again. When she let Matt in, he was clad in black leather from neck to toe. It was an impressive sight with his height and broad shoulders, but didn’t seem appropriate for a holiday parade. Nora said as much around the toothbrush she had in her mouth.
“I figured we’d take my bike into town,” he said through a broad grin. “Wea
ther’s pretty mild and dry, and you’ve never ridden before, right?”
“Right,” Nora called aback from the bathroom where she decided to add a pair of thermal underpants to her ensemble. “You in a better mood today?”
“No, but I’m okay with faking it. If I see any unsavory characters downtown all bets are off.”
“Do I need to frisk you for weapons? Should I take my checkbook in case I need to bail you out?”
When Matt didn’t answer immediately, Nora poked her head out of the bathroom and saw that Matt was no longer in the living room. She buttoned up her jeans and slid her feet into her well-worn leather riding boots and walked from room to room in the cozy downstairs, finally finding him in the sunroom. He was standing in front of the newest painting, assessing it with one hand on his chin and his head cocked to the side.
“I take it the dancer isn’t you,” he said, the corners of his eyes wrinkling with mirth. Nora stood beside him and looked at the painting as well.
“What was your first clue?”
“She’s too skinny.”
Nora cut her eyes over to Matt malevolently, causing him to bark with laughter. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, turning her to face him and skimming his hands down her arms. “What little extra you have is well-placed.” He gave her ass a stealth squeeze and then spun her one hundred and eighty degrees to face the door. “Let’s go. Don’t want to miss the line-up.”
“What line-up?”
Matt didn’t answer.
Thirty minutes later, Nora was standing next to Matt and his bike propped up on its kickstand, holding a plastic bag filled with tiny candy canes and scowling as if her life depended on it. Of course, no one could tell because she hadn’t taken off her helmet since she and Matt arrived in Edenton. They, along with about twenty other bikers, were waiting in a clump in the parade line-up that congregated near the waterfront. Matt was cheerfully socializing with the other members of the North Chowan Bikers (and their chicks) while Nora nodded occasionally whenever Courtney Arrington’s voice rose to a question pitch. Nora had tuned out about fifteen minutes into Courtney’s Matt adoration. “He’s such a great guy,” she kept repeating. She got it — Matt was nice. Great! She already knew that.
Romance in Color Page 50