7. Norah
Chapter seven
Norah
The last ceiling fan I bought before this one had a pull chain that grabbed.
Every time I reached for it, the mechanism would catch and stick.
I’d stand there on my step stool, yanking it with both hands like I was starting an outboard motor, doing this for four months before it finally surrendered the chain entirely and I had to run it on high until the motor burned out.
I’m not doing that again.
I’m going to stand in front of the display models and pull every single chain before I commit to anything, requiring me to get close to the display models mounted approximately ten feet off the ground.
Hence the ladder.
Not my ladder. The store’s ladder. The tall orange one next to the display shelving with a small sign that says EMPLOYEES ONLY in a font that is in every way authoritative.
I unchain the ladder at eight fifty-seven Monday morning and position it under the third display fan from the left, because the store is barely staffed this early, and I will be done before anyone notices. I climb for my inspection.
The fan I’m interested in is brushed nickel with five-blades, a decent span, and a remote, which solves the chain problem entirely. I reach up to check the blade pitch because the last one had blades that were basically decorative and moved air with less than adequate enthusiasm.
These are better.
I reach a little further to check the housing, rising onto the balls of my feet because the ladder is one rung shorter than I need it to be. I lean too far.
It moves.
Not catastrophically. Not yet. A small sideways drift along the smooth concrete floor, maybe three inches, and I grab the display shelf with both hands and hold on and wait for it to stop.
It doesn’t. The torque of my hands on the shelf only serves to keep the ladder in motion. I watch, horrified, as the ladder swings around, leaving the security of the shelving unit and moving toward the center of the floor.
It stops.
I am fine. Completely fine. The situation is entirely under control.
I blow out my breath and start to climb down.
I glance over my shoulder, and I find Silas Coulter standing directly behind me with a tube of caulk in one hand and the other hand firmly on the offending ladder. Of course, his expression is one of pure amusement.
He’s close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him, which is an absurd thing to notice while perched on a teetering ladder in a hardware store, and yet here I am noticing it with my entire body.
My skirt has ridden up somewhere in the commotion and I am suddenly, acutely aware of how much leg is currently visible from his vantage point, and how little I can do about it while still gripping a display shelf for dear life.
“Gotcha,” he says, showing off his pearly whites.
I look at him, trying to decide if I should turn all the way around and walk down the ladder steps like it’s a staircase—this sounds particularly dicey—or present my backside in my short skirt at a level that is squarely at his face.
I’m suddenly thankful I shaved and put on lotion this morning. Jesus, you vapid woman. I curse myself under my breath and look at him sternly.
“Okay, I got this. Can you back up?”
Silas accommodates me, trying to wipe the shit-eating grin off his face, only irritating me more.
He’s in a dark henley pushed to the elbows and jeans I have resolved not to have any thoughts about. That resolution lasts about two seconds.
I’m going to need a minute.
“The sign says employees only,” he says.
“The sign is a suggestion,” I say, stepping off the bottom rung with the dignity of someone who was never in any danger whatsoever. “I needed to check the pull chain.”
“From the top of a restricted ladder.”
“From an optimal vantage point, which the ground does not provide.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “And?”
“Grabby,” I say. “I’m not interested. The brushed nickel might work. I need to check the housing.”
“It has a remote. It won’t matter if the chain is grabby.”
I look at him properly then, because I haven’t focused on him for the last thirty seconds.
It’s been five days—almost a week. Two days of handling the weekend.
Now here he is standing in the lighting aisle holding caulk, and I want to say something that acknowledges the five days without making them significant.
I throw out the best that comes to mind. “You’re a long way from Coulter Enterprises.”
“Clement’s is on my route. I have guys here picking up supplies.”
I glance down the aisle and back. “And you needed to supervise the caulk situation.”
“I like to stay involved.”
“I can see that,” I say. “Seems odd that you’re here in my hardware store.”
“Your hardware store?”
“I’ve been coming here for three years. It’s mine in all the ways that count.”
He smiles, brief and real, and I like being the reason for it more than I should. My chest gives an inconvenient little squeeze.
He glances up at the fan. “What happened to the one you have?”
“Dying. Loudly and without dignity. And the pull chain kept grabbing on the one before that...” I stop, because I am describing a ceiling fan malfunction to Silas Coulter in a hardware store and this is apparently my life now. “It was a whole thing. I need one with a remote.”
“The brushed nickel is good,” he says, looking up at the display. “Motor’s quiet. Blade pitch is decent. Housing doesn’t rattle.”
I study him. “How do you know that?”
“We use them in the laundromat locations. High ceilings, runs all day. If the housings were going to rattle, they would have by now.”
This is not the conversation I expected to be having with him, and it is somehow more disarming than any of the conversations I could have expected.
Silas solved my problem without making a thing of it with that already-decided efficiency of his.
It would be maddening if I didn’t think about how attracted I am to him. “So, the brushed nickel,” I say.
“Unless you want to keep climbing restricted ladders to check the others.”
“I was going to do that anyway,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “I watched you unchain it from the end of the aisle. I could tell you were on a mission.”
I process this. “How long were you standing there?”
“Long enough,” he says.
“Not an answer.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.”
“Were you there long enough to see me pull my underwear out of my crack?”
“You pulled your underwear out of—you pulled your underwear down?”
“No, that’s a trick question, and your face shows how long you were there.”
A full-throated laugh escapes me, and I throw an elbow, bumping his rock-hard bicep.
I look at him for a moment. This man watched me unchain a ladder with an employees-only sign on it and waited to see what I was going to do with it. He didn’t step in to do it for me, instead only stepping in when the ladder wandered.
“You could have said something when you saw me climbing.”
“You looked like you knew what you were doing.”
“I did know what I was doing. I always know what I’m doing.”
“The ladder wasn’t stable,” he says.
“The ladder was fine.”
“You grabbed the shelf.”
“As a precaution. A totally unnecessary precaution that I took entirely on purpose.”
When I look at him, everything in the immediate vicinity is temporarily irrelevant. I look back up at the ceiling fan.
“I’m taking the brushed nickel,” I say, mostly to give myself something to do. “I’ll need someone to install it.”
“I can send someone,” he says.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“It’s not a problem. We have an electrician on the crew. He does installs.”
“Silas.”
“Norah.”
We look at each other, and the aisle is empty around us, the low hum of the store’s ventilation, the distant sound of a forklift somewhere in the lumber section, the faint voices of his crew in the next aisle talking about PVC fittings.
“Why didn’t you come back?” I ask. Direct, because it saves time, and I’ve always found it more interesting to move toward the question than around it.
He considers that for a moment. Five days have passed, and apparently both of us have been counting.
“I thought about it,” he says.
“Every day,” I say, “or only once?”
“More than once.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why?”
He meets my eyes. “Because I wanted to, and that seemed like a reason to wait.”
I turn that over in my head.
It is an absurd answer. It is also the most honest thing anyone has said to me in recent memory.
“That’s a very controlled response to wanting something,” I say.
“I’m a controlled person,” he says.
“I’ve noticed,” I say. “It’s annoying.”
That gets me the laugh, low and real, the one that doesn’t match the rest of him. Two of his crew members appear at the end of the aisle, one of them with a cart loaded with PVC pipe. They see Silas and me, and slow slightly, clearly unsure whether they’re interrupting.
They’ve broken the moment between us. I appreciate that they’re not sure.
Silas glances at them. “Give me a minute.”
They reverse without comment, telling me everything I need to know about how that dynamic works.
“I have to get back,” he says.
“I know. You’re important people. I got a crew, too, you know.”
This time, he elbows my arm gently, almost reverently. “We’re both important people.”
He doesn’t move right away. He looks at me the way he looked at me across the table in my back room, quiet and focused. I wait to see what he does next, perfectly comfortable following his lead now.
“Thursday,” he says. “Are you open Thursday evening?”
“Until seven,” I say.
He nods once, apparently satisfied. “I’ll have a couple guys come by to do the install. And I’ll come with them.”
It’s the straight-ahead declaration of a man who has been waiting five days and has identified exactly how long he’s willing to keep doing that.
“Okay,” I say, and it comes out steadier than I feel, which I’m counting as a win.
He nods and moves off down the aisle toward his crew, already pulling out his phone, already back in the day’s business.
I look back up at the brushed nickel fan turning overhead. It does sound quiet. Good blade pitch. It’ll move a ton of air in the shop.
I take a photo of the model number, re-chain the ladder where I found it because I am a responsible person who respects store policy, and I walk toward the registers to check out.
His crew is two aisles over, loading more PVC into the flatbed cart. One of them, young and broad-shouldered, with an easy grin, glances over and catches my eye and looks away quickly, like he knows exactly what just happened and finds it entertaining.
I face forward.
Thursday, he’d said.
Three days.
That’s fine. Completely fine. I have a shop to run and an endcap that still needs tweaking. Three days is nothing.
I check out and push through the door into the morning heat.
Larkin is loud and bright and entirely indifferent to the fact that Silas Coulter told me he’ll be in my shop on Thursday, like it was a simple logistical fact and not the thing that is currently making it slightly difficult to remember where I parked.
Three days.
Completely fine.