“Yeah. I take all my vacation time at once every year. Me and Karen go to Kansas to stay with my mom’s family. I’m going alone this year since Karen has to work.”
“Wow. Have a good time, I guess. I’m going on a working vacation next month with my friend. A cruise. I think Kansas actually sounds like the more desirable location between the two.” She rolled her eyes and scoffed. “Are your parents going to be there?”
“Our parents are dead, baby.”
Nora gaped with embarrassment and worked her mouth open and shut repeatedly, trying to squeeze out an appropriate apology but coming up with nothing.
“It’s okay. They’ve been gone for a long time, Nora.”
“Still, it must be … ” She didn’t know what to say, so she just dropped the subject altogether. “Maybe I’ll take Karen some meals while you’re gone, assuming I’m not up to my elbows in paint.”
Matt put a hand out and tweaked the bill of Nora’s hat. “I’m sure she’d like that. She’d probably starve to death otherwise, and she’s skinny enough as it is. So, you’ll go to the parade with me when I get back?”
“Yes. Certainly,” she answered quickly, thinking perhaps if she did that small thing with him it would make up for her carelessness in the conversation. How did she not think to ask about their parents in all that time? Anyone else would have found it odd that two siblings, ages widely spaced, would be living together in a four-bedroom ranch house with no family around. Nora thought that if she had been a better friend, she would have asked. Perhaps she didn’t deserve to have friends with the lifestyle she kept. And when she looked up into Matt’s kind gaze, she thought she didn’t deserve for him to be looking at her with as much tenderness as he was … even if she needed it so badly.
*
Matt was a moving target until he left on Saturday, running endless errands and doing house repairs after work every day, so Nora didn’t see him until he folded himself uncomfortably into the front passenger seat of Karen’s small car and waved at her as they drove slowly past her yard on the way to the airport. Nora had been on her porch assessing paint swatches on the siding and trim when he left. She’d looked up at the last minute, so flustered by the varying shades of white and taupe smeared across the siding that she almost missed him. Nora couldn’t tell if he’d seen her waving back or if he assumed she was seriously that aloof.
“Damn it! I should have gotten his number,” she said to herself, snapping her fingers. Not that she knew what she would say if she called, but maybe a friendly text message or two would keep him wondering about her. She knew it was selfish to lead him on, but at the same time she didn’t know what her own intentions were. She just knew that thinking of him cleared away all the vitriol she was feeling about Elvin. Thoughts of one man brought her down. The other propped her up.
Nora woke up her phone and dialed Bennie’s number.
“Hey, you seen Chad?” Bennie asked in lieu of saying “Hello?”
Nora rolled her eyes and put Bennie on speaker. “No, hon. I don’t go looking for him, either. As long as my satellite dish does what it’s supposed to, I have no reason to be anywhere near his field of gravity.”
“Geez, you make it sound like he’s some sort of leper.”
Nora held her tongue. If she thought Bennie was more serious about the blond weirdo than the occasional roll in the hay whenever she drove down to visit Nora, she would have to let her down gently about Chad’s true nature. If she was just in it for the dick — well, they deserved each other. “Listen, I wanted to get your opinion about the paint choices we’ve narrowed down for the house,” Nora said, steering the conversation away from Bennie’s potential conquests. “The shingles are a moss green color, so I’m trying to figure out how bold I want to go with the trim.”
“Send it.”
Nora stepped down from the porch and walked out into the yard to get a bit of the porch roof and the paint swatches together in the same shot. “Can you see that?” she asked at the exact moment an old hatchback coupe puttered slowly past the property. The driver craned her head out the window as if she had an ostrich neck. Nora didn’t pay much attention; it wasn’t unusual for people to see her in the yard and slow down to see what was going on. The property had been unoccupied for so long that people were rightfully curious about their new community member and the rapid series of changes going on to the house. Money greases the construction wheels, she quickly learned.
“Are you going to paint the barn?” Bennie, the graphics designer, asked sagely.
“You think I should?”
“Should, shouldn’t, doesn’t matter. Point is the trim should match the barn color.”
“Huh. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Of course you didn’t. You’re too busy looking at fine brushstrokes to see the big picture in the real world. I’m a big-picture person, Nora. That’s why I get paid the big bucks to push pixels around.”
Nora couldn’t niggle about the statement. It was true: Nora sometimes couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Back when she and Elvin were newly married, she might have said that Bennie was wrong, but Nora learned from her own mistakes.
“That gives me some room for creativity, I guess. I wonder if I could get away with painting it black.”
“Uh, no. You going all emo on me? Our people don’t do emo.”
“Our people? I didn’t realize you were descended from African slaves. My bad.”
“Don’t go there, you wretch. You’ve got like, what, two slaves in that side of your family tree? Don’t start going all militant Black Panther on me. I was referring to the old Baltimore clique: our
people
, man! Anyway, you can’t have a black barn unless you’re going to hang strobe lights and shit inside it and throw raves.”
That actually didn’t sound like a bad idea, but Nora didn’t say so out loud. She loved to dance. Still, she suggested dark gray as an alternative barn color, but didn’t hear anything Bennie said in response because the little hoopty coupe was back and pulling into Nora’s driveway.
“Let me call you back,” she said, ending the call before Bennie could respond and starting to walk the long driveway. A thin dark-skinned woman got out and waved wildly. Nora identified the visitor before she got close enough to see her missing teeth or read the logo on her heather gray sweatshirt. “Hey, Miss Hattie. Whatcha doing on this side of the county line?”
“Ooh, girl. Ain’t you gon’ offer me a cup of coffee? Cold as shit out here today.”
Nora laughed. “Sure. Come on in. I think I’ve got some sludge left in the pot.”
Once Hattie was settled onto one of Nora’s four kitchen chairs with a cup of milky coffee warming her hands, she said, “You ain’t come by the store since you dropped off that picture you printed off wit’ the painting. Oooh, girl, we was so tickled.” Hattie flicked a hand at Nora as if to emphasize that point. “Bossman wanted to know how he could get the real painting and another one besides, so he sent me out to fetch you.”
“You know, you could have just called,” Nora said, nursing a cup of coffee of her own. No one ever called her anymore. It was either email, text, or they just popped by if they saw her standing in the yard, apparently.
“Oh, I know. I made like I didn’t know the number, though, so I could haves me a little break. Bossman’s behind the grill right now, and oooh, girl. It is fun-nee. He ain’t put a hot dog together since he was no bigger than a tick’s dick.”
Nora snorted and sprayed tepid coffee through her nose at the bad mental imagery. When she managed to clear the caffeinated dreck from her sinuses she said, “You know, it may be possible for him to buy the painting, but that’s assuming it doesn’t sell at the gallery. It’ll be up for at least five weeks before the owner entertains any offers of purchase. If it doesn’t sell within a couple of months, it’ll be up to me to sell it or not.”
“Likely he’ll get it?”
“Hard to say. Art buyers are unpredictable. When all is said and done, though, if he wants to hire me to paint something, I’ll certainly consider the offer for what it’s worth.”
“Now let me make sure I got this right, because he gon’ ask me two o’ t’ree times. That painting goes up January sixteenth.”
“Right. In D.C.”
“It hang there for five weeks then he might could buy it.”
“Right. The gallery owner sets the price according to what the market might bear, so it might be a bit steep.”
“Oh, okay. I tell him. He don’t want nobody else to have that painting.” Hattie laughed as if the idea truly amused her. “He was talkin’ about sellin’ postcards and posters of the painting down at the chamber o’ commerce. You think anybody’d buy it?”
“Hattie, there’s no telling what people would buy. I bought these pants, right?” They both looked down at Nora’s acid wash jeggings and said nothing. Point proven.
Matt had listened to Nora’s tentative, halting message at least ten times in the seven days immediately after arriving in Lenora. The trip had been grueling, as always, since his destination was in the middle of absofuckinglutely nowhere and the closest major airport was several hours away by car. The ride from the airport with his aunt, Minnie, was always painful with her non-stop chattering about people he didn’t know nor have any desire to. When she started asking about whether or not he’d met any nice girls since he wasn’t “getting any younger, ya know,” he answered vaguely and steered the conversation elsewhere.
Matt didn’t want to talk about Nora with meddling Aunt Minnie or anyone in Lenora for that matter. Liberal bunch that they were, he wasn’t sure they’d wouldn’t wig out at the prospect of browning the family tree, even if just by a shade. “It’s always hardest for the children,” he expected they’d say, and of course they would in a place that had a black population of about one percent. He’d always lived in Chowan County, so he was used to one out of every two people being some shade of brown or tan or red. It seemed natural to him. Nora would have been a novelty to his Lenora family.
Matt had a hunch that Karen might have mentioned Nora in vague terms to his grandmother but had left the details up to Matt to sort out, God bless her. She kept asking questions like “I hear you got a new neighbor. That’s so nice. Is she single?”
The folks visiting at his grandmother’s house hadn’t left him alone for more than five minutes in nearly a week except for when he was fast asleep, and he hadn’t had a chance to sneak away to call Nora back. He just kept playing back the same message over and over:
“Hi, Matt? It’s Nora. Karen gave me your number. I hope that’s okay? I took her dinner and asked if you’d made it okay, so, here I am. I’ve been outside all day watching the painters tackle the barn. It’s kind of fascinating watching them up on the ladders, but I’m a bit wind chapped now. Um … Chad was poking around your house right after you left, so I don’t know if you expected him, but I thought I’d tell you. I … well. Call me back, okay? I never showed you that painting and want to text you a picture of it if you still want to see. Oh my God, I’m rambling. I’m sorry. Hey, just checking in. Bye.”
Then she clicked off. He wanted to call her back and ask her about her painting and her barn and Chad, especially, but the best he could do was lock himself in his grandmother’s powder room and send a fairly inadequate, in his opinion, text back: “I’m not ignoring you, Nora, I swear. I’m being stalked by nosy old bitties who think smartphone technology is fascinating. Every time my phone buzzes they drop what they’re doing and run over with their reading glasses. I really don’t want these nuts witnessing me courting you over the phone.”
About four minutes later, Nora responded: “Are we courting?”
Matt flushed the toilet to justify his occupation of the room and sent back: “Feels that way to me. Your mileage may vary.”
About seven minutes later, Nora returned, “There are some things you really need to know about me. I’m not a cut-and-dried girl.”
Matt, by then hiding in the back seat of his grandmother’s town car, sent “Good. I’d like you less if you were. Don’t worry about the skeletons. They’ll stay put until I get back. If I make it back. These people are intent on nagging me to death. I have to go figure out what’s wrong with the hay baler now.”
*
“So, how often do you come to these things?” Nora asked Karen as she took in the sloppily applied fall décor in the old armory.
Karen had wanted to go out and insisted Nora join her. “I like you, Nora,” Karen had said, giving Nora a reassuring pat on the back that’d made Nora raise a brow. Nora conceded just from pure curiosity.
The armory interior looked like someone had raided the clearance artificial flower bin at A.C. Moore and went to town with their hot glue gun. Nora assessed the gaggles of women dressed in various levels of skank-chic around her, and suddenly felt very overdressed in her fitted sweater dress. Some pop hit from the nineties was blaring through inadequate speakers propped atop flimsy particleboard stands and most people in the expansive room weren’t even bothering to sway — forget about dancing.
Nora had thought she’d be a dancer up until college. Drawing was an elective she took for fun. First class in, some professor figured out she had talent and guided her toward studio art. She changed her major after determining art would be a better long-term career. Still, she was a dancer at heart and the awful music just wouldn’t do for her. She looked around for the deejay and found a middle-aged woman sitting behind a plastic-covered card table squinting at CD cases.
“Oh, they have these things about once every quarter to raise money for the local veterans,” Karen finally responded, scanning the crowd studiously as if she was looking for someone in particular who was not the deejay.
“Admission is a bit steep, huh?” Nora gazed toward the “open bar,” which had turned out to be stocked with little more than fruit punch, fizzy caffeinated beverages, and store brand bottled water. She’d seen at least two “gentlemen” taking surreptitious nips from bottles sheathed in brown paper bags tucked into the back pockets of their baggy pants. Nora wondered what else they possibly had stored in those droopy bottomless pits and whether the contents could be loaded with bullets and discharged. She swallowed hard and tried to compose herself. Guns and small boats: her two favorite things.