Chapter 13
The kiss ended, she went back across the grass, and Rognar stood alone in his kitchen at eleven at night and discovered he was furious.
Not at her. Not at Charlie, asleep with her fist against her cheek.
At the arrangement. At what they’d built without meaning to—the doorways, the tunnels, the four-second goodbyes stolen over a diaper bag while a monitor threatened them both from the counter.
He’d been telling himself for two weeks that it was working.
It was working the way a bucket under a leak works.
He could go a long time before admitting he’d rather fix the roof.
He wanted to take her somewhere. He wanted an evening that started somewhere and went somewhere and didn’t end because a small person down the hall had a strong opinion about the state of her diaper. He wanted a table and two chairs and no exits available to either of them.
He planned the ask carefully. He rehearsed it, which he’d never done for anything that wasn’t a media scrum. He knew exactly how he was going to do it.
Then he did it, the next morning, in her kitchen doorway, holding the diaper bag, and it came out like a male confirming a delivery window.
“Friday,” he said. “Are you doing anything Friday?”
She looked at him over the top of her glasses. She had a pen behind her ear and a client’s shoebox of receipts open on the table behind her.
“That depends on what you’re asking me.”
“That’s fair.” He set the diaper bag down on her floor. Put it right down, both hands free, like a male surrendering a weapon. “I did that badly. Come out with me on Friday.”
“Out.”
“Out. Away from here. On a date.”
She took the pen out from behind her ear, which for Nora was the equivalent of anyone else standing up.
“Do you know how those work?”
“I’ve seen them on television.”
“Because your reputation would suggest a certain—”
“My reputation,” he said, “is going to come up on Friday. Say yes and I’ll ruin it for you in person.”
She said yes. She said it the way she did everything, dry and level, fine, Friday, I’ll move a call—and he carried it around all day like a boy who’d been passed a note by the cutest girl in the class.
Then Friday came and Rognar Stonebreaker, whose file supposedly made him a professional at this, stood in his bedroom at ten to six with three shirts on the bed and no idea which of them was the right one.
He’d made the mistake of asking Fen.
“Green,” Fen had said, with the confidence of a male who’d never been right about anything. “Not the mohawk green. Your green. Skin green. Match yourself. Powerful.”
“That’s insane.”
“It’s coordinated. And roll the sleeves. Show the arms. The arms are the whole product, Stone, don’t hide the product.” Then, delighted: “Wait. Wait. Are you nervous? Cap—Tarmek—he’s nervous, he’s got shirts out—”
He’d hung up. He regretted asking. He regretted, separately and more deeply, that he’d taken the note about the sleeves, because he’d rolled them, and now he couldn’t unroll them without admitting it to himself how much it mattered.
He got in the truck, backed out of his driveway, and parked on the street outside a house he could see from his kitchen window.
Eight feet of grass. He’d traveled eight feet and arrived early.
He sat there and looked at her lit front window.
He was going to have to go up and knock on a door he’d knocked on about eggs and diapers and never once about this.
His hands were clenched so tightly on the steering wheel that his knuckles were white. He only lasted a few minutes before pride got the better of nerves. Then he went and knocked.
She opened it in a dark green dress that clung to the body that had been against his on a counter with her hair down, and no glasses, and whatever he’d rehearsed left the building entirely.
“You match,” she said, looking at the shirt.
“I’m going to kill Fen.”
“Don’t. I like it.” She grabbed her coat, then stepped out and pulled the door shut. “You parked.”
“I did not park.”
“Your truck is on the street. You live next to me. You parked on the street.”
“I’ve asked you not to keep records.”
The Broken Stick sat two blocks off Main Street, a low brick building with a neon sign in the window that had been half-dead for as long as anyone could remember.
It smelled of char and hops and fried food.
Booths down one wall. A long dark bar down the other.
Somewhere a jukebox was losing an argument with a hockey broadcast.
“Four years,” he said, waiting for her to take a seat in the booth at the back, the good booth. “You’ve done these books for four years.”
“How do you—”
“You told me. At the fence. March, I think. You said you’d never eaten here.” He slid in across from her. “You’ve sent Grimshaw an invoice every quarter since he bought the place, and you’ve never had the pie.”
“I don’t remember telling you that.”
“You told me a lot of things at the fence. You thought you were being unfriendly.”
The waitress came. He ordered without a menu. She watched him do it, and he watched her watch him, and it was the best three seconds of his week.
Two booths down, working extremely hard at a basket of fries, sat Fen and Jensen.
They were not looking over. Fen had his back half-turned and his neck at an angle that would need a physiotherapist by morning.
Jensen was reading a laminated drinks menu with the focus of a male defusing a bomb.
Neither of them glanced across even once, which was how he knew they’d been briefed, probably by Grimshaw, probably by text.
Under the studied indifference the pair of them were as pleased as two enormous idiots could be.
“Your teammates,” Nora said, “are pretending not to watch us so hard they’ve stopped blinking.”
“Ignore them. They’re not teasing. That’s the terrible part. If they were teasing I could work with it.” He picked up his water. “This is worse. This is them being happy.”
She laughed, and it changed her whole face, and he lost the thread of whatever he’d been going to say next.
They talked. It turned out to be easy, which he hadn’t been sure about. Banter over a fence was one thing, and banter over a child was another, and this was a table with nowhere to hide,. He’d half-braced for it to go stiff. It didn’t. She asked about before, and he told her.
He told it lightly. Junior hockey at fifteen, billeted with strangers in three different towns. The Andersons, who were kind, and the other family, who weren’t.
He’d learned fast to be easy, to be the kid the family liked having around—because the kid they liked got fed properly and the kid they didn’t got a lot of closed doors.
“So that’s where it started,” she said. “The easy thing.”
“Probably. I’d have to ask a professional.
I’ve been told I should ask a professional.
” He turned his glass. “There was a year I didn’t get the contract.
I was twenty. Everyone I came up with got signed and I didn’t.
I spent a year working the loading dock at a distribution warehouse in a town I won’t name.
Skating at six in the morning before shift on a rink a guy let me into because I fixed his Zamboni once. ”
He told it like a good story, timed for the small laugh, and got it.
And she stopped laughing halfway through when something recalibrated behind her eyes.
And he knew she’d caught that there was a lot behind the lightness.
She didn’t say anything about it, which he was grateful for, and it made him want to tell her the true version some night when it wasn’t a first date.
Then it was her turn, and she told him about Summer.
She did it the way he’d just done his—light, funny, timed.
The addresses, she called them, and counted a few off on her fingers with a comedian’s rhythm.
The apartment above the yoga studio, the friend’s farm during the pottery phase.
The four months in a van that Summer had described as an adventure and Nora had described, at eleven, as a van. He laughed at all the right places.
Then she said, in exactly the same dry, funny register, “When I was nine the power got cut off. She’d forgotten the bill.
It happens, it’s fine. So I found the account number on one of the letters she hadn’t opened and I walked down to the payphone on the corner and I called the power company and I got it turned back on. ”
She reached for her water like it was the punchline of the joke.
“Nine,” she said. “I had to stand on the phone book to reach. I remember being annoyed there was a phone book in the booth because it meant I had to explain to the man why I sounded like a child.”
She’d told it like an anecdote, as if she’d told it a million times before. Except he suddenly thought, watching her, that she hadn’t. That this was the first time she’d ever said it out loud.
He didn’t laugh.
She noticed that too. She looked at him over the water, and her shoulders came down a half-inch that had probably been up for twenty years.
“You’re supposed to laugh there,” she said.
“I know where I’m supposed to laugh.”
Grimshaw sent over a dessert nobody had ordered.
Some enormous chocolate thing with two forks, set down by a waitress who said it came from the kitchen and left before he could argue.
Grimshaw stood behind the bar, wiping a glass that was already dry, and very carefully not looking in their direction.
“We didn’t order that,” Nora said.
“No.”
“Is this going to happen the whole time we’re—” She stopped, hearing where that sentence was going. “The whole meal.”
“The whole meal. The whole everything, probably. You do understand what my team is like.” He picked up a fork. “They’re not subtle and they don’t stop. I’d apologize but they’d only take it as encouragement.”
They split the huge chocolate thing nobody ordered, and he told her the part he’d promised.
“My reputation.” He said it flatly, like reading an item off a menu. “I’ve been to a lot of parties. I left most of them early.”
She didn’t say anything, so he kept going.
“I let people think whatever’s easiest. It’s a bad habit and I’ve had it a long time.
” He set the fork down. “You’d have heard the colorful version.
The colorful version is mostly a guy leaving a party early to go home and sleep, and a lot of people filling in the blanks in a direction that’s more interesting. ”
“I may have noticed.”
He looked up. “When?”
“The eggs.” The tiniest hesitation. “No. Before the eggs.”
He drove them home, pulled into his driveway, and cut the engine. The engine ticked as it cooled. Through the windshield he could see her lit front window, and his dark kitchen window, and the eight feet of wet grass between the two houses that they had spent a year not crossing except on business.
He knew where this was going. So did she.
Neither of them said so. Saying so would have made it a decision, and it had stopped being a decision somewhere around the payphone.
Somewhere she’d been standing on a phone book at nine years old, trying to sound like a grown-up so a stranger would turn the lights back on.
The engine went quiet.
Nobody reached for a door.