Chapter 17

"It was her fault everything was going wrong."

Jan 4, 2023

girl in white long sleeve shirt lying on dried leaves — Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash

It was all her fault, and Nora knew it.

She kept her feet to the edges of the stairs on her way down to the kitchen that morning. It was an old house, and three of the stairs creaked when she put her weight in the middle, and Danny was in a foul mood more or less all the time lately. Nora didn’t know what would set him off next, but making too much noise in the house had become a reliable way of sending him into a rage, and she didn’t want to get on his nerves by making the steps creak.

It wasn’t his fault he kept getting so angry, she knew. The emergency dentist had told him there would be a two-month wait while the lab made the implants to replace his incisor and canine. Nora had frowned and said it only took a couple of weeks when she had to get a crown for her back tooth, and the dentist had given her a blank look and told her the lab was backed up, and then he’d walked out of the room to tend to another patient and been too busy to answer any of her other questions.

They’d made Danny temporary teeth, but he’d been a little rude to the technician because he’d been so upset (yes, he smelled like pepper spray, but like Nora had sternly reminded her, it was none of her business), and there had been some kind of accident, because the dentist’s office had been so clumsy. The temporary replacements didn’t look right at all. They were the wrong color, and the canine was only half the length of the extended fang on the other side. Nora wished the dumb technician had been careful. Neither tooth fit Danny’s mouth quite right; they fell out when he smiled wrong. Now he was paranoid about the way people looked at him in public whether he had the prosthetic teeth in or not.

Besides. All that had happened to her was that her TMJ was a little inflamed, and she had a black eye that went halfway down her cheek. It wasn’t like she didn’t know how to cover that up with makeup. Nora knew how lucky she was that neither her jaw nor her orbital bone had broken that night, so she kept quiet about the dentist’s bill, which Danny had insisted she pay.

Nora was keeping quiet in general, in fact, until Danny forgave her and things were okay again. She knew she didn’t have any grounds to complain. She knew it was her fault the whole house reeked of pepper spray, she knew it was her fault Danny couldn’t find Ronnie anywhere, she knew it was her fault he was in so much pain that he had to scream at her because she kept fucking up. It was her fault everything was going wrong.

Danny was peeking through the Venetian blinds when Nora crept into the kitchen. She froze when she saw the pistol in the waistband of his jeans. It would probably be better if she used the front door to get to her car, she decided, as she crept back into the hall.

Maybe, she thought, as she pulled the driver’s side door of her little green Nissan closed ever-so-carefully so as not to startle Danny by slamming it. Maybe, she thought to herself, as she put the car into neutral and let it coast down the driveway to the street before putting it back into park and starting the engine so as not to alarm Danny. Maybe, she thought as she pulled into the parking lot at work and turned off the engine, breathing slowly and evenly until the moment passed and she was calm again, knowing that if she didn’t take the time to stop shaking she’d ruin her makeup.

Maybe she didn’t want to do this anymore.

Maybe she should talk to someone. A therapist or something.