by Mimi Strong
He got up, stretched, and lay down a few feet away, just out of reach.
“Playing hard to get, huh? I couldn't take you with me. My apartment doesn't allow pets, and Mom would miss you.”
He flicked his tail and closed his blue eye, looking at her only with his green one. He was mostly deaf, but he still knew when he was being spoken to, and usually purred in response.
Nora took off her clothes to get ready for bed and put her compression sock on the bottom of her right leg. She had a startling thought that made her pulse race. Was Aaron afraid of her body, and what he might find underneath the prosthetic? Was that why he hadn't tried to take her clothes off?
He hadn't seen her leg since the time he visited her in the hospital. Her residual limb had been wrapped in a cast, under the blanket. He'd kept staring at the flat part of the blanket, where the leg should have been, his face pale and his voice trembling. Then Nora's father had come in and shouted at them both. Aaron ran off, and it was the last time she'd seen him, until he showed up at the radio station. By then, it had been so long that she hadn't even recognized him. In her mind there were two Aarons: the scared, guilty-looking boy, and the funny, charming man who gazed into his webcam and asked her about her day.
She wondered if he saw Nora as two people, or one. If he saw her as one person, was it the funny radio station DJ, or was it a victim—a disfigured, damaged person to be put on a pedestal as some courageous hero, some champion for disabled people everywhere.
Nora did not sleep well that night.
On Sunday morning, Nora's mother asked if she was allergic to the new laundry softener she'd used on the bed sheets. “Your cheeks are so red,” she said, reaching to touch them with her cool fingers.
“Oh, no. I'm afraid it's chin-burn. From a guy.”
Nora's mother poured a cup of coffee and leaned back against the kitchen counter. “And …?”
Her father was in the garage, and it was just the two of them. Nora would be leaving in a matter of hours, so she could be back to her place in time to prepare for her work week and get a decent night's sleep. If she was going to tell her parents, or at least one of them, about seeing Aaron, now was as good a time as any.
She told her mother, starting from the point when she'd first seen Aaron Edward at the station, and ending by saying she'd been to his house the night before. Even though she and her mother didn't usually discuss Nora's sex life, Nora made a point of telling her they had not slept together.
Nora's mother grabbed a stool, carefully, and took a seat at the kitchen island. Finally, she said, “I do not know what you see in that boy.”
“He's thirty, Mom. He's not exactly a boy.”
“He's trouble, all the same. And look at you. You think you're so smart, with your new morning show and your bohemian little apartment that you won't invite your parents over to. You've still got a lot of growing up to do, young lady.”
Nora pressed her tongue to the top of her mouth to stop herself, but then she filled with anger that couldn't be contained. “At least I'm not ancient, like you. At least I still know how to have fun and be open to life. I'm not sitting on my hands, or crocheting every night, waiting for retirement and some imaginary new life that's going to start up. Get real, Mom! People don't change. You and Dad are boring now, and you're going to always be boring.”
“Young lady, this boring life I live is one that's supported and raised you, and my and your father's boring income pays for your medical bills.”
“I'm grateful!” Nora yelled. “I'm so fucking grateful, okay? If you could just stop being a Saint for a minute and live your own life, I'd be even more fucking grateful.”
Nora's mother got up from her stool slowly, crossed to the sink, and wiped invisible spots off the counter with the sponge. “We don't swear in this house,” she said.
Feeling ashamed, Nora apologized for swearing. She turned to see her father standing at the doorway between the kitchen and the garage. By the look of him, he'd heard everything, or at least enough to know something was up.
“I put together a set of tools for you,” Nora's father said calmly. “They're on your bed. You've got a hammer and a screwdriver of every kind. Why don't you go get them and get your stuff ready to drive out.”
Nora bowed her head and went to her room, fighting the childish urge to slam the door. Behind her, she heard her parents' hushed voices, her mother winding up, and Nora's father calming her back down. Strangely enough, Nora had expected the exact opposite reaction.
By the time it was time for her to drive back to her own apartment, things were calm, but unresolved.
Nora drove to Tianne's house instead of immediately returning to Portland. Nora stood at the front door, about to knock, when she heard yelling inside. An angry woman was ranting, raving, and swearing. Nora banged on the door, worried some crazy person had broken into her friend's home. She gasped when it was Tianne who opened the door, her hair standing up on end, and wearing a puke-stained grey sweatshirt.
“Oh shit,” Tianne said.
“Oh shit times three, was that you screaming in there? Who were you yelling at?”
Tianne threw her hands in the air. “Who wasn't I screaming at. Well, you may as well come in.”
Nora stepped in the door, shocked at the transformation that had taken place since she'd last been to Tianne's house the previous day. There were giant, plastic toys everywhere, dirty cups, bowls, and plates on every flat surface, and poor Tyson sat in the middle of everything, a beer in his hand and nothing on but a pair of threadbare tightie-whities.
“What's going on?” Nora asked.
“Surprise,” Tyson said, raising his beer bottle, his dirty-blond hair disheveled. “This is how we live when we're not entertaining.” He hiccuped.
“It's not even noon,” Nora said.
“Everybody gets a bottle,” Tianne said. “Baby gets a bottle, hubby gets a bottle, and with any luck they stay out of my way for an hour or two so I can brag online about my wonderful life and make twenty dollars in shoe coupons.”
Nora stammered, at a loss for words. She squeezed her lips together, but at the first sign of mirth from Tianne, she began to laugh. Her friend joined in, then invited her to hide out in Tianne's office, where it didn't “smell quite so much like farts.”
“Sorry,” Tyson said. “Taco night.”
They walked down the hall to Tianne's office, a tiny room at the back of the house, and Tianne took a key from her pocket and unlocked the door.
“You lock your office?”
Tianne swung open the door, revealing her pretty room with woven ribbons on lampshades and delicate lace curtains on the window. She locked the door again behind the two of them, then clicked a white-painted panel along one wall, revealing a mini-fridge. She took out two bottles of cranberry juice and handed one to Nora.
“I had no idea,” Nora said.
“Well, I'm the topless, baby-nursing, sexy black yoga instructor. I'm the woman who has it all, and the photographs to prove it. I have to maintain the image.”
“You could have told me,” Nora said.
“I have my pride.” She toasted her cranberry juice against Nora's. “What was with Kylie and that Wind Beneath my Wings speech yesterday? I like the girl, but I thought all that outpouring of feminine emotion was going to make me spontaneously get my period.”
“Oh, she's not bad. You're still going to hang out together, even if I'm not around, I hope.”
Tianne wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “She's no Nora, but she's a keeper. So, what brings you to the nuthouse today?”
Nora put her face in her hands and told Tianne about her blossoming friendship with Aaron, her date the night before, and the reaction from her parents.
Tianne said, “You're not going to like this, but I have to side with your parents. If someone caused bodily harm to one of my kids, I'd probably have to chain myself to this desk.” She pointed to the table next to her computer stand, which was a he
avy-looking, antique sewing machine table.
“That's pretty,” Nora said.
“And heavy. I'd have to chain myself down, because I'd never forgive the person who harmed my child.”
Nora sipped her cranberry juice and imagined the situation from her mother's perspective. I'll give it some time, she thought optimistically.
There was always time. What did people say about time? It heals old wounds, and so forth.
Through the door, they could just barely hear Tyson yelling at Matthew to stop cutting his sister's hair.
Tianne put on some music.
Seeing that Tianne had problems beneath the pretty surface of her life was almost comforting to Nora. Almost.
After Nora left the house and got in her car, she wondered what people thought of her life. On the surface, she seemed to have everything under control.
She wanted to call Aaron, to hear his voice, but she also enjoyed the quiet of the drive, alone with her thoughts on the highway.
Nora didn't call Aaron until she was back in Portland, at her apartment. She climbed into her bed with her phone instead of trying to video chat, because she preferred to deal just with Aaron's voice and not his face.
On the drive, she'd thought about her options. There were other fish in the sea, other men she could date. The cosmetic surgery had given her confidence, and her dating prospects weren't bad. She was only twenty-seven, with a nice, stable career, and she ought to find someone who wasn't in the music industry—maybe an engineer, or even a teacher.
“It would be a lot simpler if we didn't see each other anymore,” she told Aaron.
“Simpler?”
“For everyone. Me, you, my parents.”
“I don't agree with that,” he said.
Nora rolled her eyes. Why were guys always under the impression she needed their approval to break up? Were women like this when men broke up with them?
“We live in different cities, we have different lives. It was fun to relive old times, but that's all it was. A reunion. Oh, I just remembered… my high school reunion is next year. So weird.”
Aaron didn't say anything.
“Did you go to your high school reunion?” she asked.
“I should let you go,” he said. Nora couldn't tell by his voice if he was hurt, angry, or actually busy. She didn't want to know, either. These things were better with a nice, clean break—a smooth amputation.
After she ended the call, Nora stared at the ceiling in her bedroom—the bedroom that she didn't own, but paid a monthly rent for. She wondered what the loft might sell for and how long it would take her to save a sizable deposit. A mortgage would probably put a damper on her newly-developed shopping habit. Some of the tops and jeans in her closet still had their price tags affixed.
The phone buzzed, and Nora picked it up with a sigh, expecting it to be Aaron, but it wasn't. The caller ID showed the name of a hospital.
“Hello?”
“Nora, it's Mom.”
Nora's blood turned cold. “Mom. What's wrong.”
“Your father.” There was a long pause. “He's had a stroke or something, I don't know. They won't tell me anything.”
“Mom, it's going to be okay. I'll come right over.”
“No, don't.”
“It's important. I'm coming.”
“No, it's too late,” Nora's mother said, her voice flat and cold.
In the pause that followed, Nora knew.
Her father was dead.
Nora's father, Roger, was sixty-one on the day he suffered his first stroke, which killed him. He was survived by his wife, Kathy, his daughter, Nora, and his brother, Don.
The funeral was held on Friday, and was well attended by out-of-town relatives who'd already been planning to come to town for Don's retirement and send-off party on Saturday.
Nora's mother insisted Don still hold the party as planned, because it was what Roger would have wanted. Nora went to Don's party, but left early, because she couldn't take all the grief spectators—people staring at her with teary eyes.
It reminded her of how people had treated her after the accident. As if staring at someone with wet eyes is supposed to make anyone feel better. Countless people hugged and touched her, morphing into an endless sea of body trying to come in contact with her grief, to share it or ease it or perhaps simply to squeeze it out of each other, like sponges being wrung dry.
They'd put the wrong glasses on her father for the viewing, and the ceiling lights had triggered the lenses to darken to their sunglasses mode. Nora's father had looked cool and ready for the afterlife with his sunglasses on. Maybe it was better that she couldn't see his closed eyes. His familiar, wrinkled, hard-working hands crossed over his chest had been almost too much to bear. Though the man never wore his wedding ring in life, citing possible accidents and the risk of losing the finger, he wore it on the day of his funeral. The ring was bright gold and flawless, brand new. The funeral people removed it before the burial and gave it to Nora, along with a wooden box that held the key to the coffin.
At Don's retirement party, on Saturday, there was a lot of talk about celebration of lives well-lived and stars shining brightly. Don's wife asked Nora about once an hour if she was “okay.” Nora didn't know what okay meant anymore, but she was looking forward to going back to her loft and back to work. After a week off to help her mother with funeral arrangements and get started with the necessary paperwork, Nora felt she would only be okay again once this was behind her.
When she got back to the house after Don's party, her mother went straight for bed, but Nora couldn't sleep. She climbed out of bed, and using her crutches, she hopped out to the garage, the place her father had spent all his time.
She circled the car, glaring at it. “This is how you spent your time, Dad. You tinkered and you restored and you waxed this car. You worked at your job, where you connected with so many young people, according to all those folks at your funeral, but what about me, Dad?”
She opened the passenger-side door of the car and slid in. “What about us? Why didn't we ever go for a drive in this car?”
She put her forearms on the dash and began to cry, quietly at first, and then sobbing. He'd been a good man, her father, and she felt ashamed for feeling sorry for herself. He didn't know he was going to die before they could take a road trip together. Her father didn't know he'd be working in the garage and notice something wasn't quite right. He'd thought maybe it was a headache, or because he was hungry for dinner, and he'd sat down in the camping chair next to the workbench. He didn't know that instead of saying goodbye to his wife of thirty-eight years, who was cooking on the other side of the garage's door, he'd spend the last few seconds of his life slumped forward in a lawn chair in his garage.
Now he was gone, and Nora could look at all the photos from his life and talk to people he'd known, but she'd never get to know him any better than she already did. The stories other people told were their, personal versions of him, not the truth.
Spent from crying, she sat back up and dried her face on her housecoat. A glint of something caught her eye, and she leaned down to look at the car's pedals.
There was a bar installed between the gas and the brake pedal, exactly the same as the one in Nora's own car—a safety precaution to prevent her prosthetic foot from being lodged under the brake.
Her father, who'd never driven the car anywhere except to the shop where he'd had it painted, and had merely laughed at the mention of Nora taking it for a spin, had installed safety equipment so that his daughter could drive the car. He had surprised her.
“Oh, Dad,” she said.
On Monday at work, Stevey had booked some manicure artists to come in and do custom nail art on both of them. Nora worried that she should have taken more time off, but when she sat down across from Stevey, she slid into character as easily and comfortably as she did her right leg. Her on air personality reflected her, related to her, but it also hid her true self, her scarred and imperfect sel
f, from the world.
The manicurist painted hearts in various styles on every one of Nora's fingernails. Off the air, Nora asked that her thumbnails be painted black, in honor of her father. Stevey excused himself for a washroom break, and when he came back, he looked like he'd been crying. Nora put an extra-large smile on her face when they went back on the air.
The hands on the studio's clock kept moving at their regular pace; life continued.
Eventually, Nora's life did feel okay again. She worked from Monday to Friday and drove to her mother's house for the weekends. This went on long enough for her to lose track of how many times she'd made the journey.
The first weekend in August, Nora was putting her key in the front door of the house when she heard her mother laughing inside. She came in and found her mother at the kitchen table with a neighbor, Randall. Randall had lost his wife a year earlier to stomach cancer. He was fifty, a good decade Nora's mother's junior, but if Nora wasn't mistaken, he looked guilty when she walked in.
Nora noted there were no signs of dinner on or in the stove.
“I thought we'd go out for Chinese,” Nora's mother said. “Randall will come too, if that's okay with you.”
“Okay. Sure. Okay.” Nora dropped off her suitcase in her room, then came back out. “Actually, no, it's not okay, I came home to spend some time with my mother. Not my mother and Randall.”
“Thanks for the coffee, Kathy,” Randall said, getting up quickly. “I'm sorry about your father,” he said to Nora on his way out.
Nora's mother held out her hands proudly. “Look, I got flowers.” Each of her fingernails had a pink rose on them, including her thumbnails. “It sounded like so much fun when you had that girl on your show a while back, and I had a gift certificate from some of the women at work. Did you know Rochelle is going to be a grandmother? They're putting together a really quick wedding, a shotgun wedding, as they say.”
“Mom, did your doctor double your medication or something?”
“No, just the pills I've been on the last two months. I think they're really kicking in now.”
“Is this what our life is going to be like now?”
