My Nora (11 page)

Matt sat heavily on the sunroom stairs and emitted a low grumble. “There’s something seriously wrong with that guy,” he said, scrunching his fingers into his shaggy hair and yanking it. “Why would he fuck my sister, Nora? She’s practically a baby.”

“Matt, she’s twenty.”

“A baby! And for what? To get back at me because I told him to stay away from you?”

Nora was quiet and stared down at the steeping tealeaves. When she didn’t say anything, Matt turned around on the step and faced her. “What are you not telling me?”

“Hey! Did you see my new deep freezer? I got it for a steal,” she said with forced cheerfulness. Matt narrowed his eyes at her.

“Nora.”

Nora sighed and poured the tea. “I didn’t want to say anything to get you upset, but I actually tried to confront Chad after that social at the armory because he was the one who tipped the reporter off that I was there.”

“His sister Maggie?”

“Yeah. Well, I tried to find him at the shop but he had sort of gone AWOL. Patricia tracked him down and he showed up here around Wednesday of last week to see what I wanted. In a nutshell, I dressed him down about his waiting until you were out of town to move in on Karen, but he sort of wasn’t hearing it. He just stared at my face while I was talking and when my lips stopped moving he tried to kiss me.”

Matt sprang up from his compact seated position and was on his way toward the door, but Nora got in front of him. His choices were to barrel over her or stop. He chose to stop, but bumped Nora full frontal in the process.

“Matt, I don’t need you to defend my honor. I’m scrappy and I can take care of myself. Chances are good he’s got one less working nut right now thanks to my reaction so impregnating anyone in the future won’t be so easy for him.”

Matt wasn’t convinced and instead started to grind his teeth.

“Not that it makes things any easier to stomach,” Nora added, resting her hand on Matt’s arm and gently guiding him back toward the kitchen. “But I think what Chad did was in retaliation against Patricia as much as it was you. You’re right. He’s a sick puppy. He’s probably been jealous of you since you were kids.”

She nudged Matt toward the new kitchen set. He sat reluctantly in one of the high-backed chairs and put his head down on the table, mumbling indecipherably. Nora walked around behind him and kneaded her fingers into his tight shoulders, rubbing until he allowed them to droop and picked his head up to turn and look up at her. He wrapped his hands around hers on his shoulders and squeezed. Oh yeah. Any woman that could talk him down from a rampage was a woman for him.

“The question now is what are you going to do for Karen?” she said softly. “It’s not about what you can do to Chad. Hurting him won’t help anything.”

“She’s been on the pill for years. I don’t understand how this could happen.” He stood again, but this time with controlled ease rather than pent-up rage, and delicately lifted a mug of tea.

“It doesn’t matter how.” Nora shrugged and bridged the gap between the two of them, planting a hand at the small of Matt’s back and rubbing the hard knots up and down his spine.

“When’d you get to be so wise?” He lifted the back tail of his shirt and let Nora place her soft warm palms on his skin. She obliged him, gliding her hands from knot to knot all over his back and ended back up on his high shoulders, which forced her to get up on her tiptoes close enough to him that her clothed breasts grazed his naked skin. Matt looped his arms around the back of his body and held her in place there for a moment with the side of her face pressed against his back.

“I’m not wise,” she said softly. “Just practical.”

“You must think we’re rednecks.”

“I have no idea what that even means, really.”

*

The following morning, barely after sunrise, Matt banged on Nora’s door to fetch her for the Christmas parade she’d promised to accompany him to. A small part of her had hoped he’d forget, but no such luck. She’d been up until three
A.M.
putting the finishing touches on her armory social painting and by the time she finished cleaning her tools she’d only managed a few hours of sleep before she had to get up again. When she let Matt in, he was clad in black leather from neck to toe. It was an impressive sight with his height and broad shoulders, but didn’t seem appropriate for a holiday parade. Nora said as much around the toothbrush she had in her mouth.

“I figured we’d take my bike into town,” he said through a broad grin. “Weather’s pretty mild and dry, and you’ve never ridden before, right?”

“Right,” Nora called aback from the bathroom where she decided to add a pair of thermal underpants to her ensemble. “You in a better mood today?”

“No, but I’m okay with faking it. If I see any unsavory characters downtown all bets are off.”

“Do I need to frisk you for weapons? Should I take my checkbook in case I need to bail you out?”

When Matt didn’t answer immediately, Nora poked her head out of the bathroom and saw that Matt was no longer in the living room. She buttoned up her jeans and slid her feet into her well-worn leather riding boots and walked from room to room in the cozy downstairs, finally finding him in the sunroom. He was standing in front of the newest painting, assessing it with one hand on his chin and his head cocked to the side.

“I take it the dancer isn’t you,” he said, the corners of his eyes wrinkling with mirth. Nora stood beside him and looked at the painting as well.

“What was your first clue?”

“She’s too skinny.”

Nora cut her eyes over to Matt malevolently, causing him to bark with laughter. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, turning her to face him and skimming his hands down her arms. “What little extra you have is well-placed.” He gave her ass a stealth squeeze and then spun her one hundred and eighty degrees to face the door. “Let’s go. Don’t want to miss the line-up.”

“What line-up?”

Matt didn’t answer.

Thirty minutes later, Nora was standing next to Matt and his bike propped up on its kickstand, holding a plastic bag filled with tiny candy canes and scowling as if her life depended on it. Of course, no one could tell because she hadn’t taken off her helmet since she and Matt arrived in Edenton. They, along with about twenty other bikers, were waiting in a clump in the parade line-up that congregated near the waterfront. Matt was cheerfully socializing with the other members of the North Chowan Bikers (and their chicks) while Nora nodded occasionally whenever Courtney Arrington’s voice rose to a question pitch. Nora had tuned out about fifteen minutes into Courtney’s Matt adoration. “He’s such a great guy,” she kept repeating. She got it — Matt was nice. Great! She already knew that.

“Whoop! First float’s pullin’ off,” group leader Gus Alberton called back, straddling his own bike and strapping on his spiked helmet. “Keep it clean for the kiddies, folks! You ladies riding double, keep the groping to a minimum and save some candy for the end.” Courtney ran after him and climbed into his sidecar, waving back in Nora’s direction. “We’ll see you at the end. Maybe we can go have drinks.”

“Hey, that’d be fun,” Matt said, putting his own visored helmet on and giving Nora a playful nudge. Nora narrowed her eyes at him. “Okay, maybe not.” Nora saw one of his green eyes wink behind his visor before he threw one leg over the seat of the bike and held out an arm for Nora to lean on as she put one of her own short legs over.

“Any specific candy-tossing instructions?” Nora mumbled into her helmet.

“That’s up to you. Normally Karen rides with me and she has some complicated system about how much to throw and to whom, but no need to get fancy.” Matt started to walk the bike up a bit as the line moved, and when it stopped again, he put one booted foot against the road to prop them up.

“Is Karen upset I usurped her this year? If I had known it was her gig, I would have said no. Might be her last chance.”

“Nah. Karen hates it. Folks don’t know who she is under the helmet and they assume we’re a couple.”

The irony of that wasn’t lost on Nora. Didn’t she assume they were a couple that first time she knocked on their door?

Once the parade got moving and the cluster made their slow vigil down Broad Street through the downtown business area, Nora actually started to have fun. The little boys on the sidewalks loved seeing the bikes, and the folks riding in sidecars occasionally jumped out with red velvet sacks and distributed die-cast motorcycle toys to all the kids who were old enough. Nora tossed candy indiscriminately, even dropping some directly into the palms of the many children who were bold enough to go right up alongside the bikes. The fact that their parents didn’t try to stop them from weaving between the motorcycles suggested to Nora that it was expected.

As Nora hadn’t heeded Gus’s warning to save some candy for the end, near the terminus all she could do was wave and make exaggerated shrugging motions to the kids who ran up to her. In the rear parking lot of the medical center where the parade ended, the bikers congregated to debrief and decide on their next meeting date, so Nora took the opportunity to peel off her helmet and wipe the sweat from her brow. She’d never been so happy to be wearing a headscarf because without it her hair would have surely started to mat from the moisture.

Some of the bikers loaded their vintage choppers and cruisers into the backs of their trucks, not wanting to ride on the open road with the forecast predicting sleet. The wind was picking up, so without too much dawdling Matt returned to the bike and said, “I wanted to buy you lunch, but I don’t think the weather’s going to hold. Wouldn’t want your first time on the bike to come with a memory of freezing rain.”

Nora mashed her helmet back on and climbed up behind him. “I’ve got a deep freezer full of soup to tap into.”

“Offer me a couple of crab cakes, too, and I may invite myself.”

With her knees spread wide and pressed into Matt’s sides behind him on the bike and her arms wrapped around his chest, Nora thought about other things she wanted to offer, too.

*

“I’m pretty sure these people are out to get me,” Nora said as she stomped through her living room with her cordless phone, occasionally pausing in front of the open storm door to gaze at the inch of unseasonably early snow coating the fields around them.

“I think you’re overreacting this time,” Bennie said from her end with the sound of her computer mouse’s button clicking in the background occasionally. Nora could imagine her friend’s expression as she scrolled the website of the
Edenton Post
. “I hardly even notice you in the picture with the leather-clad giant beside you. And holy hotness! Why didn’t you tell me you had a fox for a neighbor?”

Nora sighed. Matt hadn’t seen the paper yet. The
Post
came out weekly, and the only reason Nora thought to pick up a copy was because she was getting gas in town and saw through the window of the vending box a huge picture of her with her helmet off after the parade covering the front page. The caption: “Local Harley enthusiast Matthew Vogel idles after holiday parade with his girlfriend, painter Nora Fredrickson.” Nora tossed the paper onto the ottoman and groaned with frustration. “Bennie, I don’t even know where to start picking this apart. For starters, I’m not his girlfriend. Isn’t there some sort of journalistic standard that prevents the use of the phrase ‘girlfriend’ in a newspaper article?”

“It’s a small-town paper. They’re probably a bit loose on AP standards.”

“Also, my divorce just got finalized. How’s this going to look?”

“Hey! You didn’t tell me about that.”

“Sorry. I didn’t want anyone to pity me so I didn’t say anything. The divorce was granted that day I drove up the painting.”

“You’re a horrible friend.”

“And a horrible wife.”

Now it was Bennie’s turn to groan. “Ohhh, honey. You know that’s not true. You and Elvin were just too different. He was always itching to do something and go somewhere and you were just swallowed up by your work.”

“If it was a problem for him, it’s going to be a problem for anyone I see seriously.”

“That may be so, but what’s to stop you from having a little fun while you prove it?”

Nora thought of Matt’s smoldering gazes and how the roughness of his hands brushing slowly against her skin aroused her more than Elvin’s intricate, thorough, but utterly routine, foreplay ever had. Then she quickly wiped away the thought. “It’s impossible for me to just have sex without getting involved. Yet every time he’s around me I want to put my hands into his pants. This is nuts.”

“So you’re going to be a divorcee for the rest of your life? That is pathetically sad. You’re twenty-eight. It’s not like you’re rolling into your grave anytime soon. Speaking of sad, have you seen Chad? He’s ignoring my texts.”

“Let’s not even go there.”

“Huh?”

“Listen, the new painting is cured and I’m going to ship it UPS overnight tomorrow directly to the gallery. Can you follow up on it to make sure it gets there unharmed?”

“Why don’t you let me come get it? We’ve got some time.”

“I don’t really want to be interrupted right now.” To anyone else the statement would have been cold and jarring, but Bennie had known Nora too long and too well.

“Got another painting in mind?”

“Yeah. Mapped it out this morning. I need to get going on it or I’ll start getting anxious.”

“You got it. Hey, before you go — why don’t you let me find an assistant for you? Someone to come over and clean up and ship your packages when you get busy? Given the unemployment rate in that area, it should be a breeze.”

“I don’t want anyone here.”

“Suit yourself. I’ll go examine the painting on Friday. Sure you don’t want to send me a preview before it gets here?”

“Nope.”

“Jeez, you need to get laid. All right, bye, you snot.”

“Matt, you’ve been with the company since you were a teenager. You’ve been a loyal, valuable employee of the fishery and I think it’s high time you were rewarded for it.”

Matt perked up in his seat and rubbed his palms together anxiously. Could it be the raise he so badly wanted? He wanted to be able to finance a bowrider he’d been eyeing for a while but didn’t want to take the risk with his current salary. His canoe and small aluminum fishing boat were nice in a pinch, but he really wanted something family-sized. Maybe Nora would tolerate something with actual seats. Unfortunately, his old pick-up truck needed to be replaced soon, and having two loans at once wasn’t an appealing idea.