CHAPTER THREE
Nora’s cell phone started to ring, right when she was juggling her purse, keys, shopping bags, and a copy of today’s newspaper. She hurried through her new apartment and dumped her armful onto the tiny kitchen table, but as soon as she’d gotten a hand free to answer, the phone stopped ringing.
And one of the bags tipped over, sending her apples to the floor.
Nora checked the screen, heaving a sigh when the voicemail notification popped up.
Sighing was an improvement. For a solid week, her reaction at getting a call, a text, or a voicemail had been a lurching stomach, burning cheeks, and the overwhelming urge to crawl under her covers and stay there forever.
After that week, she’d replaced her old phone with the cheap yet serviceable model she’d picked up at a gas station outside Phoenix, Arizona, and since only her parents had the new number, no more humiliating calls.
By the time she’d left town, everyone she’d ever met had already given her their opinion on the whole Vince debacle, anyway.
Switching to speakerphone, Nora played the voicemail as she crouched and began to gather up the apples.
“Nora? It’s me.” As expected, her mother.
Nora piled the apples in the hand-carved wooden fruit bowl she’d bought at a local craft market on one of her first days in the city.
The message continued, “I haven’t heard from you for a couple of weeks and I’m starting to worry. Also, I have to talk to you about all those boxes you left behind. Call me back, sweetie.”
Most of the apples had escaped damage, but one had a big dent in its glossy green skin. Nora took it out of the bowl and rinsed it clean under the faucet. No point in letting it sit and develop a bruise until no one wanted to eat it, was there?
She unpacked the rest of the shopping while eating the apple, and decided to get the call over with. Otherwise she’d add it to the to-do list at the front of her fancy new Filofax planner, and keep moving it to the next day, and then the next, until she finally gave in.
Hopping up to sit in the patch of bright sunlight that spilled onto the kitchen counter, she called her mother. “Hi, Mom.”
“Nora! That was quick. Were you screening?”
“Nope. I had my hands full. Just got back in.”
“Good. You know I don’t like it when you screen me.”
Ninety-nine percent of the time, she took her mother’s call—and wasn’t that a hell of a statement about her life, that she was almost always available to take her mother’s call—but that one percent was the important percent, it would seem.
“What’s up, Mom?”
“How’s Nebraska?”
“Getting on just fine without me.”
“You’re still on the move? Honestly, Nora, how far are you going to run?”
This again? She clenched her teeth. “It’s a road trip. Not running.”
“Teenagers take road trips when they steal their parents’ cars and make bad choices. Twentysomethings take road trips when they’re trying to pretend they’re not a grown-up with a nine-to-five job. You’re thirty-six. You have absolutely no excuse for a road trip. And you’ll be thirty-seven soon.”
“Yes. In ten months. Is this why you called? Early birthday congratulations?”
“Don’t be silly. Where are you if you’re not in Nebraska? Vermont? Kentucky?”
The road trip had been a last-minute decision. Her lease had run out, her long-term relationship was about as over as a relationship could get with both parties still breathing, people were talking, and then there’d been the issues at work.
Two days after finding Vince romping around in a bathrobe with his new wife, Nora had woken alone in her soon-to-be-ex-apartment, dry-eyed and exhausted, and it had hit her: there wasn’t a single reason for her to stay in Beacon Falls.
Considering the whole Vince situation, it was the last place on earth she wanted to be.
In the end, it had been surprisingly simple to get the hell out of town. She’d rented a storage unit and a van. She and her father had shuttled between her apartment and the storage facility until all her worldly possessions were locked up tight, except for the last few boxes, which held the remains of her childhood.
Nora had been on the fence about the storage unit. If she could have gotten away with it, she’d have piled up every reminder of her sad adult life in the apartment building’s parking lot, and set it on fire.
Stuffing it into the unit, slamming the door, and throwing the key at her father had been the next best thing.
She’d crammed the contents of her closet into every suitcase she owned, filled her laundry basket with her bathroom toiletries, packed it all in her car, and that was it.
She’d left.
Stereo blasting. Power ballads. Eat my dust.
The works.
Despite what her mother, Vince, Melissa, her ex-boss, and everyone else with an opinion on her thought, it wasn’t running away.
Nora was running toward something.
She debated whether to let her mother believe she was, in fact, in a state on the other side of the country, but she’d signed a short-term lease with sweet Mrs. Valdez who owned and lived in the ground floor of the little Victorian, so she may as well come clean.
“I’m in San Francisco,” she said. “I think I’m going to stay here for a while.” Nora braced for her mother’s reaction.
“That’s nice. You’re not planning on coming back to Beacon Falls? That’s good. Nice. That’s nice.”
Nice?
Nora had expected her mother to insist she grow up, come home, and get on her knees to beg for her job at the dental office back. She hadn’t expected…nice.
“In that case,” her mother said. “There’s something else I want to talk to you about.”
“What?” Nora asked cautiously.
“It’s all those boxes. As you’ve finally stopped running, I’ll go ahead and send them to you.”
The boxes that, no matter how she’d shoved and rearranged, she hadn’t quite been able to force into the storage unit. “I’m trying a fresh start here, Mom.” Her eye fell on the fruit bowl, and she smiled. “Can’t you keep them for me?”
“They take up a lot of space.”
“It’s four boxes. Do they take up that much space? Really?”
“I can’t abide clutter, and they’re cluttering.”
Moira Bowman was not the kind of mother who had bronzed her daughter’s baby shoes, hung mismatched family photos all over the walls, or kept ugly but well-meant handmade gifts.
She was the kind of mother who had turned Nora’s bedroom into a craft room before Nora had been at college for a week, and had the entire house repainted, inside and out, every five years.
“The thing is, Mom, the apartment I’m renting is tiny. I don’t have the room.”
“As you said, it’s four boxes. You don’t want the clutter, but I have to put up with it?”
“All right. I don’t want mementoes of a life I’m trying to forget hanging around.”
“You’re trying to forget your life? I like that. You’re welcome. For life. And for the happy childhood your father and I gave you. I hardly think it’s my fault you went off the rails. I won’t be made to feel responsible.”
Nora clutched the phone in her fist and pressed it to her forehead. She took a deep breath. “Mom? I got drunk once—”
“Twice.”
Once when she was eighteen and discovered she had no tolerance whatsoever for alcohol, and once when her fiancé had married another woman. Both were stupid decisions. Both were totally normal.
“Yes,” Nora said. “Twice. Almost twenty years apart. I don’t think it counts as going off the rails. My gratitude for the gift of life you and Dad bestowed upon me knows no bounds. And if you can’t bear to store four boxes in one of your many, many closets, or the basement, then go ahead and donate my memories to Goodwill.”
“Honey. No need to get all upset.”
There was need.
“I’ll make room. It’s not a big deal. Now, I have to go, but since you’re settling, I want you to text me your new address.”
“Why?” If she sent the boxes, Nora would freak out.
“I want to send a housewarming gift. I have the best idea. You’ll love it. Also, if I don’t hear from you in a few weeks, I want to know where to send the police to check for a body.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I’m not joking. Call me in a couple of days, or I’ll have to come and check on you.”
Her mom drove her crazy and could be the most insensitive woman in the world, but she cared. She’d bitch and moan about the inconvenience, but she’d come and check. If Nora was on the International Space Station and didn’t take her mother’s calls, she’d come and check. “Maybe I won’t give you my address, then you can’t come, and your conscience can remain clear.”
“Text me, and look out for the housewarming gift.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Bye, honey. Be happy!”
“Yep.”
Nora microwaved one of the three takeout coffees she’d bought earlier that morning. While she waited for it to reheat, she opened her Filofax and moved buy coffee maker to the top of her to-do list. Sitting at the kitchen table with her steaming cup, she plodded through the job listings in the newspaper twice, found nothing, and decided to book a computer at the library and expand her search.
The road trip had taken a great chunk out of her savings, and her checking account got leaner by the day. Driving aimlessly about the country for two months sucked down money like you wouldn’t believe.
She’d been in San Francisco for a month, and after the deposit and rent for the apartment, she needed a job soon. It wasn’t desperate, but it would be.
In, say, a week.
Exhausted by her adulting, Nora flopped onto the twin bed that came with the apartment, and took a nap.
~ ~ ~
Hours later, Nora sat up and stared at the door in confusion.
Unless she’d dialed for pizza in her sleep, there was no reason for her doorbell to be ringing. And yet it was, ringing like someone was leaning on it.
Apart from the infrequent food delivery, no one, not one single person, had rung the bell in the entire time she had lived there. She rolled off the bed and headed for the door. “I’m coming!”
The bell stopped ringing and her visitor landed a few solid thumps on the wood, yelling, “Open up, nerd!”
Nora stopped dead. It wasn’t. Her mother wouldn’t...
She scurried over to the peephole. Her shoulders sagged.
Ah, crap. This was her housewarming gift, wasn’t it? Nora opened the door.
A woman stood there, tall and slender. An expensive purse hung in the crook of an elbow, she held an iPhone in the other hand, and her natural five-eight was lifted to an intimidating six feet by a pair of stilettoes that matched the purse.
Her mother had sent Nora’s baby cousin, Anna.
“I hear your life has gone to shit,” Anna said. “Thank God. It’s perfect timing.”
She moved in, and Nora automatically reached out to hug her. She hadn’t seen Anna for years, and hadn’t thought to let her cousin know she was in town because, while seven-year-old Anna had worshipped the ground thirteen-year-old Nora walked on, thirty-year-old Anna with her successful interior design company and effortless cool flat-out intimidated her.
Still. It was…good…to make contact.
With a human being.
Contact that was more than an accidental brush of the barista’s fingers as she handed over change at the coffee shop.
God, she was in a bad way.
“Oh,” Anna said. “We’re hugging? Sure.”
She gave Nora a quick squeeze, a brisk pat to signal that the hugging was over, and strolled into the apartment. She dropped her purse and phone on the couch, put her hands on her narrow hips, and surveyed the space with a critical eye. “Wow. Nice apartment.”
“Thanks.”
“Sarcasm, sweetie. Have to tell you, I was already feeling down before I came over. This is the universe kicking me in the ovaries.”
“Come on, Anna. I like it. It’s mine.”
“It looks like a teenager’s. Make that a tweenager’s. Pink fluffy pillows? What’s going on with you? I don’t remember you having pink fluffy pillows even when you were a tween.”
“I’m in San Francisco. Thought I’d cut loose. Be arty.”
Anna looked around. “Uh-huh.”
“Of course for you uh-huh, this is your career—”
“Saying no to ugly?”
“—but for any mere mortal, it’s artistic.”
“Was that your defense for spray-painting Vince’s house? It’s artistic?” Anna’s flawless face scrunched up into the pixie smile that used to get her out of trouble all the time when they were kids.
Nora groaned. “Mom told you about the spray-painting?”
“Yeah. Why the hell did you get drunk, Nora? Didn’t you learn your lesson the first time?”
You’d think she would have, but no.
Anna continued, “It’s like the movie Gremlins, except instead of a cute fuzzball turning into a creepy monster, you get near alcohol and you turn into Satan. As in, the actual Devil. I remember overhearing your mom talking to my mom. Did you know she thought about getting you exorcised?”
Nora wasn’t surprised. Her mother had a tendency to overreact. She had not handled Nora’s one teenage rebellion well.
Anna laughed. “How did Aunt Moira take having to bail you out this time?”
Nora scowled. “No one bailed me out. Vince and Melissa didn’t press charges. They hadn’t even wanted the cop to arrest me in the first place. It was all a big misunderstanding.”
Melissa hadn’t wanted him to arrest her, Nora amended. She’d even sprung Nora from jail a couple of hours later and, insisting it had been nothing more than a prank, had charmed the cops into letting her off with a warning. Once Vince had gotten a good look at what Nora had sprayed over the siding of his dream house, his initial let’s all be reasonable, officer, attitude had cooled somewhat.
When Nora had turned eighteen, her grandmother had given her a bottle of twenty-four-year-old Scotch. This was a couple of months after the first and only other time she’d drunk alcohol.
Naturally, she’d thought her grandmother was trying to make some kind of point.
Instead, her grandmother had insulted all of Nora’s feminist sensibilities when she’d told her not to drink it herself, but to save it for her husband to drink a toast on the day she presented him with his firstborn.
So of course when Nora was going through her apartment in a whirlwind of outraged feelings, gathering up Vince’s surprisingly few possessions with the idea of driving to his new house and dumping it all on his new lawn, she’d stumbled upon the dusty bottle in the broom closet.
Along with the red and silver spray-paint she’d used to make Christmas decorations the year before.
A couple of bad decisions later and, as Anna put it, her life had gone to shit.
She was never drinking again, she knew that much.
“Oh my God.” Anna had been prowling around the apartment, and her voice now drifted from the bedroom. Nora saw her by the nightstand, looking down, and she ran to intercept.
“What is this?” Anna was saying.
“Don’t touch it!”
Too late. Anna picked it up. She turned it over in her hand, holding it to the light and gazing at it in fascination.
“Put it down, Anna. You are violating my privacy!”
“You know, this kind of thing is considered acceptable these days.” She waved the bright pink Filofax at Nora.
“Anna! Private!”
“In fact, this shit is even considered cool. In hipster circles.”
Nora snorted a startled laugh. “Hipster. Yeah. That’s me.”
“The way you dress? Look like one.”
“Did you come here just to insult me?”
In response, Anna undid the clasp of the Filofax with a loud pop.
Nora lunged. “Don’t read it!”
Anna held the Filofax over her head. She’d been taller than Nora since she’d hit a growth spurt at age twelve, and the stilettos gave her an extra advantage. She read aloud from the page it had flopped open at. “Number one: get job. Number two: get dog. Number three: get… Nora! Rude.”
“You are such a child.” Nora poked Anna in her flat stomach, and when she doubled over with an exaggerated oof, snatched the Filofax off her.
“Yeah,” Anna said. “Don’t tell anyone. I have a sophisticated image to uphold. Guess what? This is your lucky day.”
Nora refastened the clasp and slammed the Filofax back onto the nightstand. “I feel lucky.”
“I can help you with the job. With the job you can get the dog. Item number three, however? Girl, you are on your own. Although, there is a great sex shop not too far from my office. Might want to look into it.”
“Thank you so much.”
Anna jerked her chin at the Filofax. “Do you have a sexual bucket list in there?”
“No.” Not yet. Now I know what I’ll be working on this evening. “Back to the job. What kind of job is it?”
“Interior designer’s assistant.”
“Let me guess. You’re the interior designer?”
“See, you’re smart. I need that in an assistant. You’re hired! Good interview.”
“Is this a pity thing? Did my mother call you, tell you to come over and offer me a pity job?”
Nora hoped not. Because she kind of wanted it, but she also kind of thought that accepting a pity job from her hotshot baby cousin arranged by her mother would be the death blow to any pride she had remaining.
“Nope. Aunt Moira told me you were living here, and asked me to take you out to dinner some time. And to introduce you to any nice youngish men I knew.”
“Youngish?”
“Her words. The job is you taking pity on me. My ex-assistant Gretchen left me in the lurch and I need the help.” Anna heaved a sigh, shaking her head. “I don’t need the help, I’m desperate for it. If I don’t get my shit together, Nora, my business is going to fail, and I’ve worked too damn hard for—”
“I’m in.”
“You’re in?” Anna slumped with dramatic relief.
“I don’t know a damn thing about interior design, but if I can help, I’ll do it.”
“Yay! My savior! I knew I could count on you, No-No.”
Nora wrinkled her nose. “Pay me back by never calling me that name again. I hated it when I was thirteen, and I loathe it now.”
“It’s cute. Okay. I’ll save it for when I can embarrass you in company.”
“Go ahead. I’ll retaliate. What was it they used to call you in middle school…?”
“Before we go any further, I should tell you that the pay will be shit. Really shit. I’d go so far as to say insultingly shit. Which is why I’ve been struggling to find anyone to take the job.”
“Will the pay remain shit, or is there the possibility of improvement if things get better?”
“Nora, if you help me before I lose it all, I’ll make you a partner. I said that without wincing, and that fucking migraine of a pink pillow is pulsing in my peripheral vision. That is how serious I am.”
“All right. Let’s do this.” She had a job!
Anna cheered and threw her arms around Nora. Then she patted her back and tried to pull away. “All right. Hug’s over. Come on. Jesus. Might I suggest you make getting a dog a priority? You nearly broke a rib.”
Nora forced a smile, and cleared her throat. “Yeah. Good idea. I’ll do that.”
As Anna turned to collect her purse and iPhone, Nora blinked her eyes rapidly, stupid eyes she felt filling with tears.
“I have to go, but—” Anna said, and did a double take when she saw Nora’s face. “No. Oh, no. Don’t you do it. Don’t you dare cry.”
“I’m not going to cry. See you soon. Great to catch up.” Sniffing, she pushed Anna toward the door.
“Nora. Don’t cry.”
“Then stop looking at me!”
“Right. I forgot.” Anna covered her eyes, Tiffany charm bracelet jingling. “Got it together? I worry about you—”
“Stop it, you monster! You know the rules. Don’t look at me and don’t be nice! You know that makes it worse!”
Always had. The instant someone offered her sympathy, she turned into a sobbing, out-of-control mess.
She was not proud of this.
“Okay, jeez. You are so emotional.” Anna uncovered her eyes, reached out, and gave Nora a gentle slap. “There. Better?”
“Yes.”
“Good, because I don’t think I can slap you any harder. Come here.” She pulled Nora in for another quick hug. “I’ve got, ugh, a thousand things to do this afternoon, but you and I are going out to dinner tonight to celebrate your new life, and your new job. I’ll give you the lowdown on the client I’m trying to land. Let me rephrase that. The client I have to land. He’s some millionaire tech guy and he’s gone through five designers in three months. Word is, he’s a nightmare to work with.”
“Shit pay and a nightmare client?” Nora said. “I can’t wait.”