Casket Case

Chapter 6

Nora knocks on Garrett’s apartment door on Friday, holding takeout from her favorite Mexican restaurant and a jigsaw puzzle she’d found still sealed in plastic wrapping in the top of her hall closet. He opens the door with a grin on his face. When he leans down to kiss her, he immediately starts making fun of the puzzle.

“You really expect us to do a puzzle?” he asks as he transfers the takeout to real plates.

“What’s wrong with puzzles?” She crosses her arms and leans against the counter.

“I don’t think I’ve done one since I was a child.”

“Well, this is not a child’s puzzle.”

He hands her a plate of tacos, and they sit down at the table to eat.

Nora waits until he’s biting into a taco to ask, “Are you worried it will be too difficult for you?”

He tries not to laugh, to keep the food in his mouth. Once he finishes chewing, he answers, “I’m more worried I’ll fall asleep in the middle of it.”

“It’s okay if you’re not the best at something, Garrett. I’ll help you.”

He gapes at her. “You really think I can’t do a puzzle.”

She pretends to consider it. “I think there’s only one way to know for sure.”

“I walked right into that,” he says, shaking his head. “Well played.”

“Thank you.” She smirks.

When they’re done with dinner, they take the puzzle to his coffee table and sit down cross-legged on the floor to work on it.

“First, you want to spread out the pieces and turn them all over,” Nora explains, pouring the pieces out onto the table. “We need to find the ones for the corners, and we can probably separate any that look like they go on the sides.”

He starts flipping pieces over. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah, I brought it, didn’t I?”

“What is this supposed to be?” he asks, examining the box. It’s a glittery scene of a city on an ocean with small boats docked at the shore.

“I think it’s somewhere in Italy, but maybe it’s not a real place. I don’t know.”

“Where did you get it?” He stands the picture against the couch, so they can see it while they’re putting it together.

“I found it in a closet. I guess my parents bought it. Or maybe someone gave it to them.”

“Did they like puzzles?”

“I don’t remember them ever mentioning it, but they might have started after I moved out. I don’t really know what theydid.”

He nods. “I don’t know what my parents do, either. I guess I just assume they do the same things they did when I lived there.”

“I’m sure they’ve found new things to do since then.” She flips a few more pieces over and gestures at the pile of pieces on his side of the table. “Not that this is a race, but if it were, I would be winning.”

“How competitive are you, exactly?” He starts moving pieces around and flipping them over with impressive speed.

“Not very,” she admits. “But something tells me you are.”

Once they get the border put together and organize the rest of the pieces by color, Nora suggests they take a break.

“We’re just getting somewhere,” Garrett says, working on the pieces of what he assumes is a red boat.

“Most people do a puzzle over multiple days, Garrett.”

“So, we’re just supposed to leave it here in piles? What if a piece gets lost?”

She laughs. “I’m trying to give you an out. You didn’t want to do this in the first place.”

“Well, I’m invested now.”

“Fine, I’ll work on the yellow ones.”

Nora takes a break to close her eyes somewhere around midnight. At one, Garrett sits next to her on the couch and nudges her awake. He’s turned off all the lights in the apartment except for the lamp on the table next to her.

“Did you finish?” she asks, sitting up to look over at the table.

“Not even close. Let’s work on it tomorrow.”

“You do like puzzles.” She smiles. “I knew it.”

“A pretty girl talked me into it,” he says, kissing her slowly.

She winds her arms around his neck to pull him closer, and their kisses grow more desperate. “Stay with me,” he whispers.

She nods. “I was hoping you’d say that.” She starts to tell him that she didn’t want to fall asleep on the drive home, but her mind goes elsewhere when he turns off the lamp and leads her upstairs to his bedroom. He tugs her against him and kisses herwith determination, as if he had been waiting all night, or maybe longer. When she feels his hands against her waist, sliding under her shirt, she grabs the edge of his T-shirt and forces it over his head.

“You cannot possibly look like that,” she says, barely above a whisper. She runs her hands across his chest to make sure he’s real. Maybe healthy food and exercise is less of a scam than she thought.

“I don’t know what to say to that,” he laughs.

She kisses a spot just above his collarbone. “You don’t have to say anything.”

He pulls Nora’s shirt over her head and unhooks her bra, letting it fall to the floor. Before she can think about it, they’re kissing again, their hands roving until he nudges her backward toward the bed. Nora unbuttons her jeans and stumbles out of them, laughing when she has to grab Garrett’s arm to hold herself upright.

She points a finger at him, saying, “Now is not the time to make fun of me.”

“I’ll save that for later.” He steps out of his shorts and tugs at the comforter on his bed, making room for them to climb in under the sheets.

Nora rolls him on top of her and groans at the sensation of their bodies moving together. He kisses her jaw and her neck. She slides her hands down his back, pulling him even closer. Her mind is spinning about what might happen next. What she should say. How she should act.

He leans back to look at her, cupping her cheek with his hand. “I don’t want to rush this.” She wonders how he knows she’s not ready, as much as she wants to be. As much as her body is telling her to make a different choice.

She nods. “I feel the same way. But I do want to keep touching you.” She snakes a hand between them to show him exactly where she means.

This time, he lets out a groan. “I want that, too.”

When she wakes in the morning, she’s nestled against his very warm bare chest and wearing his T-shirt. She leans back to look at his face, and he opens his eyes.

“Are you awake?” she asks.

“I am now,” he says with a scratchy voice before leaning up to kiss her. “How did you sleep?”

“Like the dead.” She kisses him. “Tell me you have an extra toothbrush.”

Nora is thankful for the Sam’s Club package of toothbrushes under Garrett’s sink and less thankful for the soap in the shower she uses to try to scrub off last night’s makeup. She puts on a pair of athletic shorts he left out for her and finds him in the kitchen making coffee and scrolling on his phone. She wanders over to see how far he got on the puzzle during her nap, then bursts out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” He pokes his head out from the kitchen.

“Your job on this puzzle.” She points at an area of the ocean. “None of these are right. These two aren’t even close to fitting together!”

He looks over her shoulder. “They’re close enough.”

“That’s not how this works.” She laughs. “You’re going to have to redo it.”

“I was tired, okay.”

“Now I know what happens when I leave you to your own devices.”

He puts an arm around her. “So it’s your fault?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Let’s work on it later. I’ll need caffeine for that.”

After they’ve had coffee, Garrett wants to go for a run, so Nora drives home to shower and change clothes before meeting back up with him for brunch. She also packs a bag in case she winds up staying with him again, even though he hasn’t mentioned it.

Garrett and the mimosas at brunch convince her to go to the movies to see some three-hour western that he swears will win awards. She sleeps through half of it, drooling on his shoulder.

They don’t finish the puzzle on Saturday night either, because they can barely keep their hands off each other. Nora turns on the Alabama football game, but it’s difficult to pay attention since Alabama is winning by three touchdowns before halftime. They wind up in bed before the sun is fully down, and neither of them is bothered by it. She can’t believe Garrett is real and that he likes her, and she can’t stop touching him to make sure she’s not imagining it, but also just because she can.

Garrett makes her feel like she can be herself, no matter what that is. Her past relationships had been fraught with potential and expectations, and she was always afraid that she was doing the wrong thing. Like she was always walking a tightrope. Garrett doesn’t make her feel like she’s being graded by an unwritten rubric. He seems to want more of her, whatever that might turn out to be.

Garrett asks Nora to stay again on Sunday. And again, after he cooks dinner for her on Monday. Every night when they go to sleep, he pulls her into him and wraps an arm around her waist. He whispers, “Good night” into her ear, and he doesn’t pull away until the next morning. Nora sleeps more soundly than she has in a while. The room is not too quiet or too dark, and she doesn’t have to sleep with the TV on.

“Good morning,” Garrett says, kissing Nora on the cheek as she walks into the kitchen already dressed for work.

“Good morning,” Nora says.

She leans against the countertop while Garrett continues tossing frozen fruit into his blender. He tops it off with a handful of spinach, a splash of oat milk, and some sort of protein powder before pressing the blend button. Nora winces at the sound, and in response, Garrett puts a coffee pod into his Keurig and hits the start button.

“Sorry,” he says, turning off the blender. “I forget you’re not a morning person.”

“I thought I was until I met you, but I can’t handle this much noise before eight a.m . Is the sun even up all the way?”

“Yes. It’s a beautiful day,” he says, his voice sounding eerily similar to the birds chirping in Cinderella .

“And you know this because you went for a run already?” she asks.

“Did you think I just wake up sweating?” He laughs. “Please drink some coffee before you hurt yourself.” He hands her the mug of French roast, and the smell alone helps her feel more whole.

“You act like I’m the crazy one, but it’s definitely you. No one in this time zone is as awake as you are right now.”

She sits on a barstool while he pours his smoothie into a cup with a reusable straw. Her eyes travel from his grassy Nikes up his calves to his basketball shorts and to his T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, presumably to show off his biceps. He catches her eyes once they make it to his face.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks.

“Because I feel like it,” she says. “Is that okay with you?”

He joins her at the bar. “Is it okay if I kiss you?”

She nods, pressing her lips to his. They taste like strawberries.

“So, I have to tell you something,” he says, pulling away. He takes a sip of his smoothie, and Nora’s mind goes to every worst-case scenario she can think of.

“Are you married?” she asks.

He tilts his head. “Why do you keep asking me that?”

She tilts her head back at him. “Why did you answer the question with a question?”

“No, I’m not married. I’ve been with you for the past four days.”

Nora decides to ignore the second part of that answer. “What did you want to tell me?”

“I have to go out of town for work. We’ve had some turnover, and I have to train a new employee.”

“Oh,” she says, grateful for a survivable scenario. “Where do you have to go?”

“I just got the assignments this morning. It looks like I’ll be all over the state. Well, not here, but everywhere else. Montgomery first, and we end up near Huntsville.”

“When do you leave?”

“This afternoon,” he says. “I’ll get back on the twenty-fourth.”

Her heart sinks. “Wow, that sounds like a long time.”

“Fourteen days.”

“Weekends, too?” she asks.

“Weekends, too. We’re short-staffed.”

“Can I ask a stupid question?”

“You can ask whatever you want.” He puts a hand on her thigh, and the butterflies in her stomach almost distract her.

“Does this mean we won’t see each other for fourteen days?”

“Yes, that’s what it means.”

She takes a preemptive deep breath, but the anxiety comes anyway.

“Hey,” he says. “That’s all it means. We’re going to talk every day. I promise.”

She nods. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not a long time. I’m being crazy.”

“Don’t apologize. You’re not crazy.” He takes her face in his hand. “I don’t want to leave you, either.”

“I’ll be fine.” She feels the guilt seeping in around the panic. He’s working. He said he doesn’t want to leave. She shouldn’t make him feel bad about it. “Is it something you’ll enjoy doing?”

“I’ll mostly be watching the new guy talk to clients and then telling him what he does wrong.”

“You’ll get to see new places,” Nora says.

Garrett sighs. “I’d rather see new places with my girlfriend.”

“Your girlfriend?” Nora asks with a smirk. “Is she around? Can I meet her?”

He takes her hand, lacing their fingers together. “I guess that’s something we have to discuss.”

“Discuss away.”

He glances down at their hands, and Nora wonders if he’s embarrassed or nervous. It’s an interesting shift in their dynamic when she’s not the one feeling anxious about something. When he meets her eyes, a smile covers his face, and she can’t help but smile in response. “I want you to be my girlfriend.”

“Does that mean you would be my boyfriend?”

He tilts his head as if considering it. “I think so.”

“I accept those terms.”

“Yes?” he asks.

“Yes. Obviously.” She laughs and leans over to kiss him.

“Can I tell you something else?”

“Sure.”

“Work has been a problem for me in the past. In past relationships, I mean. I have to be away a lot.”

“You told me that when we met,” she says.

“I don’t want my job to mess this up. I like you.”

She smiles and rests her forehead against his for a moment. “I like you, too. We’ll be fine. It’s just fourteen days.”

When Garrett leaves town, the anxiety shows up in his place. Nora knows their relationship is fine. She’s happy. A level of happy she had forgotten about. She has no reason to doubt him. But the thoughts start to creep in on day two. What’s he doing? Why hasn’t he texted back?

On day five, Garrett tells her the fourteen days will actually be fifteen. Even though she knows it’s not that long of a trip, the thoughts get worse. If he said he would call, but he hasn’t yet, maybe he won’t. She doesn’t even know exactly where he is. He could be lying about all of this. He could be at his apartment. He could be with someone else at his apartment. Should she drive by?

The Instagram therapy accounts Nora follows say that she needs to get out of her head, so that the thoughts don’t control her, but that’s easier said than done. She can’t seem to find anything to take her mind off of her worries. Television won’t do it. Reading is too passive. Instagram makes it worse.

Nora turns to her usual coping habits: wine and Cheers . On day eight, she crawls into bed with a bottle of red wine, a plate of reheated leftover pizza, and a pudding cup for dessert. She starts Cheers where she left off: the episode where Sam and Diane get engaged after sorting through the usual high jinks of a sitcom.

After she’s eaten all of the pizza and the pudding and drunk most of the wine, Garrett calls. Nora lets the phone ring twice before answering, as if she hasn’t had the phone next to her since the day she met him.

“Hey, what are you doing?” he asks.

“Watching Cheers . Drinking wine. What are you doing?”

“The same thing.”

“You’re watching Cheers ?” she screeches.

He laughs. “Yes, you convinced me.”

“You must really like me.” She barely recognizes the sound of her own giggle, a side effect of drinking one glass too many.

“I was getting a little jealous of this bartender you were spending all your nights with.”

“If you’ll come home, you can spend your nights here, too,” she says. A very small, more sober part of her wonders if this is a step too far, considering that he has never even been to her house.

“Is that the wine talking, or are you serious?”

“I’m serious! The wine is only whispering.”

“?‘Whispering’?” He laughs. “What does that mean?”

“You know what it means!” They both laugh, and then they keep laughing because they’re both laughing, as if they’re in the same room instead of more than a hundred miles apart.

“How’s Montgomery?” Nora asks.

Garrett groans.

“That’s our capital, you know. You should have a little respect.”

“Montgomery is fine. This hotel is a different story.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It smells weird.”

Nora laughs. “What does it smell like?”

“Bleach.”

“Well, at least it’s clean.”

“Too clean. You have to ask yourself why they need so much bleach.”

“Murder, probably.”

“That’s not comforting, Nora.”

“Do you want me to come and protect you? From the bleach?”

“That is exactly what I want.”

Nora sinks down in the bed and hugs the pillow next to her. “Is the bed comfortable?”

She hears him rustling around. “Not particularly.”

“Do they have free breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re complaining?”

“I don’t eat the breakfast.”

Nora gasps. “Why not? It’s free!”

Garrett laughs. “I stop for coffee and eat then.”

“The hotel has coffee.”

“Not decent coffee.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re lucky you’re handsome, because you’re kind of a snob.”

“I’m not a snob!”

Nora laughs. Then she thinks about Garrett in his bleached hotel room, and she laughs again.

“It’s not funny. Take it back.”

“The truth hurts sometimes. Don’t worry. I still like you. I wish you would come home, though.”

“I wish I would, too.”

On day eight, Nora is driving home from work when she gets the urge to roll down her window. Summers in Alabama begin without warning, after two weeks of spring that can be difficult to recognize as the only chance for picnics or riding bikes or any other outdoor activity without bugs and clothes soaked with sweat. Fall arrives in a similar fashion, as if someone has opened the oven door to let a breeze in after months of constant convection.

Since the summer heat is fading into fall, maybe, Nora thinks, she can use her house as a way to distract herself. This idea hits her while sitting on the back porch in the dark being eaten alive by mosquitoes. Normal people invite their boyfriends over to their houses, but Nora can’t do that because she lives in an early 2000s time capsule, and no one needs to see that. She hasn’t changed anything since her parents died, and they never changed anything if they could help it. She could at least change the light bulb on the back porch. Are there light bulbs in the house? Do light bulbs go bad after an extended period of time? These are the sorts of things her dad would know. Or he would pretend he knew and ask her mother for the answer.

After work the next day, Nora drives into the city to go to Home Depot. She comes home with light bulbs, a few boxes of outdoor string lights, citronella candles, and cleaning supplies that the salesperson swore would work on any back porch. She unwraps new scrub brushes and a new broom and cleans every inch of the porch until the cobwebs and dust are gone. Once she changes the porch light bulb, lights the candles, and hangs the string lights, she feels accomplished. Like she could have someone over without embarrassment. The inside of the house needs the same treatment, but that’s a whole other thing to tackle, on another day. She pours a glass of wine and sits down at her newly cleaned patio table to take in all of her effort. That’s when she notices the garden. Or the jungle where the garden used to be.

The next afternoon, she opens the storage building in the backyard, which her dad painted to match the house. She hasn’t been out here in months. No one has. There are cobwebs everywhere. Possibly spiders. Probably snakes. Someone could be living out here, watching Cheers and drinking wine, and she wouldn’t know. She doesn’t want to think about that right now. She just needs a shovel.

She grabs any and all tools with a long handle and chucks them through the front door of the building and out onto the ground. She has no idea what half of these things are because she’s not usually an outdoorsy person. She doesn’t have memories of helping her dad in the yard, since they were both fine if she just stayed out of the way.

Her mom’s floral-print gloves are still in a drawer in the garage, so she takes a pair, assuming this is what they’re for. She steps over the railroad-tie border of what used to be the garden, immediately waist-deep in tall weeds. This would be a good home for a snake. A snake family, even. Some of the weeds are loose enough that she can pull them out by hand, so she makes a little progress before she has to turn to actual tools. She’s sure someone in the neighborhood has some sort of machine that will do this—what exactly is a Bush Hog? But the destruction is cathartic. She might almost call it fun.

She’s using a post-hole digger like a giant pair of tweezers when she senses movement behind her.

“What’s going on out here?” Grandpa asks, eyeing the mess. Half of the yard is covered in dug-up weeds and roots. She thinks about what she is going to do with all of the remains once they’re out of the ground. Maybe set them on fire. That feels right.

“I’m being productive,” she says, wiping sweat from her forehead.

“Are you digging to China?”

“I’m trying to get the garden in order,” she says. “I’m sure I’m not doing it right.” She removes her gloves and sits down on the nearest railroad tie to wait for the lecture.

“There are easier ways,” he says. “You know, your mama used to come out here when she had something on her mind.”

“Is it that obvious?” She laughs.

“Ginger thought there was a stranger in your yard, then she realized it was you having some sort of tantrum, so she called me.” Nora’s next-door neighbor has always paid a little too much attention to what everyone else in the neighborhood is doing, and she feels a sense of duty to share everything she knows with parties who might be interested.

“It’s not a tantrum,” Nora says, eyeing her dirt-covered tennis shoes. “I’m not having a tantrum.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“It’s really nothing,” she says. She looks down at her hands; they’re disgusting even though she’s been wearing gloves. She doesn’t know the last time she had actual dirt on her hands, under her fingernails. “I’m just overthinking things.”

“About that boy?”

“Sort of. I guess.” When she and Grandpa had dinner last, Nora refused to say much about Garrett. The more she talks to the people in her life about her relationship with Garrett, the more she will have to come to terms with how strong her feelings are, and she knows it’s too soon to have feelings like that. In the same vein, the more people she tells about her relationship, the more she will have to tell about the breakup. People feel sorry enough for her already. “He’s out of town, and I’m just antsy.”

“?‘Antsy,’?” he says, testing the word. He grabs a plastic chair from the patio, positions it next to the garden, and sits down. “Have you heard from him?”

“Yes. He’s fine. Great, actually. He’s the most reliable person I’ve ever dated. It’s me with the problem.”

“Well, what’s the problem?”

She has to be honest with her grandpa. He knows her too well to accept anything else. “I’m just waiting on the other shoe to drop. I like him and he likes me, but he could easily find someone normal instead of me.”

He nods. They sit in silence for a few minutes, and Nora notices that the lightning bugs are out. She catches one in her hands and watches it crawl around on her palm. She wills herself to feel the tiny feet as it moves, but she can’t. When she was little, she used to catch them in Mason jars and seal the metal lids to keep the lightning bugs inside. After many jars of dead bugs, her dad used it as an opportunity to teach her about oxygen. Nora stares at the bug on her hand until it flies away, ensuring its own safety.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I have no reason to doubt Garrett, but I do anyway. Or maybe I doubt myself. He’ll find out how crazy I am.”

“You’re not any crazier than anyone else.”

“Oh, really?” She gestures to the mess around her, truly seeing it for the first time. The garden looks ten times worse than it had when she started. It would take days to fully clean it up.

“Home improvement doesn’t make you crazy,” Grandpa says. He’s always given her too much credit.

“I just wanted it to look like it used to look. Mom worked hard on it, and I let it go to weeds. I can learn to garden, can’tI?”

“Do it how you want,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be her way.”

“Can I burn this when I’m done?” she asks, holding up a long stalk of something she can’t identify.

He arches an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t.”

“You think I’ll burn the house down.”

He shrugs. “Do it how you want. Once you get all this dug up, it’ll be easier. This is the hard part.”

“I hope so. At least it keeps me from wondering where Garrett is.”

“Where is he?”

She starts to pick the dirt out from under her fingernails. “I don’t know. Somewhere near Jasper or something. I can’t keep up. He’s training someone.”

“Training them for what?”

“Honestly, I still have no idea, but there’s only so many times you can ask.”

“Have you heard from him lately?” Grandpa asks.

“Yeah, this morning.”

“That’s not so bad. You should give him a chance.”

“You haven’t even met him,” she says.

He shrugs. “I have a good feeling. He’s got you out here doing yardwork. He has to be worth something.”

She laughs. “I probably won’t tell him about this. I’m still trying to keep the crazy to myself.”

“Gotta let it out sometime. Rip the Band-Aid off. You’ll feel better.”