Pretty Girls Don't Cry Page 16

  Tianne put on some music.

  *

  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 self, 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.

  *

  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?”

  “Sweetie, I told you to stay at your place some weekends. I'm fine. I'll be back to teaching in a few weeks and I'm really looking forward to having something to do. I've been so bored.”

  “Bored?”

  “I have an empty nest. Daughter gone, off living her own life, and I don't know if I'll ever have grandbabies, what with how you are.”

  “What do you mean how I am?”

  “Well, sweetie, you push men away. What about that Stevey? I looked at his bio and he's not married. Is he gay? And if not, what about him?”

  “I am so not having this conversation with you.”

  “Fine. I'll get my purse. Let's go get Chinese food. Your father didn't like spicy food, but you know what I've discovered? I love it. I know a place that has spicy spring rolls. You won't believe it until you try them.”

  Nora looked around the house while her mother fetched her purse. Their wedding photo had been taken off the mantle and replaced with a clock. She found the framed picture on a bookcase, but for a moment, she'd feared her father was being erased. Nora did want her mother to be happy and to move on, but she worried that it seemed to be happening a little too easily. People didn't just get over catastrophic loss with the snap of their fingers.

  The previous weekend, Nora and her mother had cleaned out the refrigerator together and had cried over the hand-written labels Nora's father had placed on some leftovers pushed to the back of the fridge. They'd debated peeling them off and keeping them in a scrapbook with some of his other personal papers, but in the end, they'd simply thrown them out. Then they'd sat on the kitchen floor and sobbed together.

  Now, with Nora's mother buzzing around the house, putting on earrings and fluffing up her curly hair, it seemed the fever of grief had broken.

  *

  They had dinner at the Chinese food restaurant, where the staff all knew Nora's mother by name and seemed delighted to finally meet her famous daughter. “We miss you on the radio in the afternoons,” said the man who owned the restaurant. “The new woman, Raven, she's not as good. Too much talk. Talk, talk, talk. And I think there are more advertisements now.”

  Nora agreed that there were more ads, up to twenty minutes per hour. The owners had been trying to squeeze a little more profit out of the business, and while the station she was now at boasted more music and fun, eventually it would probably go the same way.

  “Such is life,” the man said. “I'd like to feed the whole city, for free, but you have to pay the bills.”

  Nora's mother nodded and stared off at unseen horizons. “Such is life,” she agreed.

  *

  When they got back to the house, Nora thought about what her mother had said about her pushing men away. She composed a text message to Bobby, trying to sound flirty, but she deleted it without sending.

  Instead, she sent an ambiguous text to Aaron Edward. I'm in town, she said.

  Come on over, he replied.

  Nora put down the phone and looked at her mother, who was humming and filling the kettle with water for tea.

  “I'm going to Aaron Edward's.”

  Nora's mother plugged in the kettle, and without turning around, said, “I suppose that'll be fine.”

  “It'll be fine?”

  Nora's mother turned around and faced her daughter. “Yes. It's not wonderful, and it's not terrible, but somewhere in the middle. It's fine. I'm fine, you're fine, everything's fine.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  She took two mugs out of the cupboard, then put one back. “You should get going, before it's too late.”

  It was barely seven-thirty. Nora grabbed her purse and ran out the door, not even stopping to check a mirror.

  Chapter 13

  Aaron Edward opened the door. “You're here.”

  “Did you think I was pulling your leg about being in town?”

  He leaned against the door frame. “No, but I thought you might be, uh, joking about coming over.”

  “I'm here.”

  “Do you want to go out for some dinner?”

  She leaned to the side to look around him. “Why, do you have someone over?”

  “I might,” he said, his mood difficult for her to read.

  Behind him, someone made some noises.

  Nora backed away two steps. He held his ground.

  From within the house, a vacuum cleaner turned on.

  “Your housekeeper is here,” Nora said.

  His grin started small, then spread to his whole face. “I can kick her out, if you want to come in.”

  “She can stay.”

  He shook his head. “Oh, I don't think so. She was done twenty minutes ago, but she's been cleaning the same spot since she heard you were coming over. I guess she finds my love life very interesting.”

  He turned sideways and waved her into the house.

  Nora stepped inside. “Is it? Is your love life interesting?”

  “Not as interesting as I'd like it to be.” He grabbed her gently by the shoulders, turned her to face him as the door swung shut, and kissed her.

  The vacuum cleaner turned off as they pulled apart.

  “Hi Nora!” the housekeeper said.

  “Hi … Helen, is it?”

  Helen giggled. “I guess I'll be on my way, unless you need anything else, Mr. Edward?”

  “I'm fine, Helen, thank you. Have a good night.”

  Helen quickly gathered up her things, gave them a knowing smile, and went out the front door.

  The door clicked shut, and Nora pulled her shirt off over her head. They were still standing in the front room, where Helen had been vacuuming.

  “The windows,” Aaron said.

  “So what. You live in the country. Let the trees watch.” She unlatched her bra and let it fall to the floor.

  He stepped up to her and wrapped his arms around her, swaying for a moment to music that wasn't there. He ran his fingers over her hair, then down the sides of her face.

  “Do I look different?” she asked.

  “You're not fourteen anymore.”

  She turned her face to profile and touched the bridge of her nose. It was still a little sensitive, but felt almost normal. “I had a little cosmetic work done. Remember I had a bump here, and now it's gone.”

  “Hmm,” he said, then he shrugged. “I'm a guy, we don't notice stuff like that. Honestly, I'd forgotten your hair was so curly until I saw you again at the radio station. Time is a strange filter.”

  She swallowed.

  He backed up a step and looked down at her breasts. He touched them, softly, and kissed her on the mouth, the chin, the neck.

  She unbuttoned his shirt, starting at the bottom, and running her hands along his stomach.

  He leaned back, grabbed her by the hand, then led her to the stai
rs, and up to the master bedroom.

  “I'll leave the curtains open for you,” he said. “I just didn't want to give you rug burn. And I would have. Terrible, terrible rug burn.”

  She sat on the bed, grabbed him by the belt, and pulled him toward her.

  He said, “I'm so glad you came over.”

  “Shh,” she said, and she undid the rest of his clothes. His jeans dropped to the floor, and then his shirt.

  She still had her slacks on, and he sat on the bed beside her and fumbled nervously with the button and then the zipper.

  “I'll get it,” she said, standing to take them off. She'd slipped off her shoes downstairs, and she wasn't wearing any sock or stockings. He kept his gaze on her face, not looking down. She slid down the jeans and then her underwear.

  Then, quickly, she sat on his lap facing him and kissed him.

  His hands went up to her head and his fingers slipped up between the curls, against her scalp. His touch felt so good. They rocked back and forth, and then they fell back on the bed.

  And then, it was just the two of them, and they didn't have names or identities, and she didn't care what had happened or might happen. He was strong, and he moved her easily, but he didn't push.

  When she couldn't take his hesitation for another second, she climbed on top and showed him how much she wanted him.

  She felt herself letting go of everything.

  *

  When they were finished, she lay alongside him, her left arm and left leg draped across him.

  She waited for the feeling, the uneasiness. Aaron did not belong to her, and within minutes, her body would remind her of this, urging her to leave.

  He playfully rubbed her arm and the side of her body. His touch didn't tickle, because it didn't feel like another person. It was Aaron. He was not a part of her, and he was not separate, but something in between.

  She relaxed and moved in closer to him, wondering when it would be too much, too intimate.

  She nodded off.

  When she awoke about an hour later, she knew exactly where she was.

  She kissed him on the ear, and he stirred in his sleep. After a few minutes, she got up and put on the long-sleeved shirt he'd been wearing, and went to the kitchen to get a drink.