“Should we yell surprise?” asked Miles, into the darkness.
“Ya know what?” Nora said. “You know what? Fuck you, Miles.
“This ain’t one of your goddamn surprise-ending stories: Then the guys who were hiding in the kitchen - who for ten pages you thought were murderers – finally jumped out of the darkness and yelled ‘happy birthday!’
“Listen to me Miles - this ain’t no fuckin’ birthday party.”
The idea for the skillet was from one of Miles’s stories - If you use a household object, it looks like an intruder.
Nora had a broomstick.
It was just last month that Miles had gone to the dentist.
It was Nora’s third - and although she didn’t know it yet - last day as the hygienist there. The dentist would be letting her go at the end of the day simply because the dentist’s wife - as Nora would declare at five o’clock - was a fat cow.
In the chair, Miles had told Nora that he was a writer - murder mysteries with surprise endings.
That night she texted him, “Hi Miles, it’s me Nora, your hygienist.” Then, “I think you’re kinda cute” and “my husband is an asshole.”
Miles didn’t stand a goddamn chance; she bled into him like ink on a blotter.
She would tire out her husband, then slip out to meet Miles at a bar, suddenly and gorgeous at his elbow - “Is this seat taken?”
Nora knew - and so did her punchdrunk husband - that she was the kind of woman that had what it takes to get away with something like that.
Nora fascinated Miles. She popped-up, unbidden, in his stories; she encroached on his writing like ants at a picnic.
Nora was different from every other woman Miles had known: She told the truth about what she liked and how she liked it.
It was a two-way street for Nora – she pumped Miles for the tricks of his trade.
The day before Nora and Miles were waiting in the kitchen in the dark, she invited one of her old guy-friends over for lunch.
“I was surprised to hear from you,” he said, as they stood close, sharing a cigarette. “I mean, things got pretty nasty after that shit with the cops.”
Her black eyes narrowed as she turned her head and pushed the smoke away through the tiny blowhole fixed at the side of her mouth.
“I’m full of surprises - hey, can you reach that skillet?”
The next night - her husband was going out - she invited Miles over and got him drunk.
She smacked his ass. “Buck up, Miles.”
As they waited there in the dark, Nora’s phone flashed and she looked down. “Goddamn it! - he’s not coming home – he’s ‘staying at his friend’s.’
“Bullshit – at his friend’s.
“That little fucker.”