Better Luck Next Time/ Chapter 2

FEBRUARY 4TH, 2016

Nora pulled Sport into her sideways tilted, dilapidated garage. She has to get out on the low side which means constantly battling the wildly swinging car door that seems to want to knock her out. Some days, Nora thinks she wants to let Sport have a crack at her. Leaving her groceries and work heels on the dirty floor of her garage as she took a nice, deep concussion nap. She manages to get inside with her arms overflowing, kicking the side door open and using her hips to slide her way into the kitchen. She grabbed a box of cat food out of the 24 in x 24 in pantry and filled Riley’s bowl. The sweet tabby cat jumped on the counter purring and rubbing her fuzzy ears onto Nora’s stomach. Nora gave her pal a good ear scratch and started telling Riley about her day at Techtron.

Nora turned some James Vickory on the speaker and really thought about her hellish day. Most days working at Techtron were hellish but on Fridays, Charles always turns up the harassment. Charles, her boss and the man Nora had interviewed with, unsurprisingly turned out to be a huge creep. Today he must have walked by her cubicle over 20 times, each time trying to say something that Nora poignantly ignored by putting in her headphones between calls. He would rub himself up behind her when trying to “get past her” in order to grab a single sheet of paper off the printer. He would make jokes about her tits growing when she would touch one of the huge bags of muffins in the faculty room. Charles made the hair on her arms and legs stand up and the more she worked at Techtron the more she realized that her job was taking her nowhere. Collecting money from other broke people seemed like bad karma to Nora but a job is a job for now.

She considered taking one of the little blue pills sitting in her medicine cabinet. A doctor prescribed them for her once in college and she still had more than half the bottle waiting for her. When they don’t make her violently ill, they put Nora in a trance, where she feels like she is watching everything from underwater. She decided against the blue pills, Nora lit up half a joint that was waiting for her on her kitchen windowsill and cracked the window. She took a deep breath in and let the jazz music soothe her, her day dissipating from her like a bad dream. She felt her jaw relax and realized she had been either grinding her teeth or biting her nail beds intermittently throughout the day. She needed to unwind. She grabbed the last of the cheap merlot out from her fridge and poured it into a mason jar that looked clean. She needed to cook. She was the furthest thing from hungry but cooking had always given her a sense of calm. It was the only time she felt like she could stand to live inside of her own body- hear her own thoughts happening in her head. She removed the eggs and the English muffins from her shopping bag. It was nice to be able to afford her own groceries instead of having to stock pile staff room doughnuts like she did for the first few weeks at work.

She got some water boiling on the two-burner gas stove top. She stirred some vinegar into water bubbling in the shallow pan and kept stirring while she gentle added the two eggs. As they poached gently in the liquid she grabbed sliced off some pork roll and started to crisp it in the pan. She remembered the first time she learned to cook scrambled eggs. Her dad taught her and it was probably the only thing of value he had ever given his only child because being a chef was the only thing he was ever decent at. She remembered he would yell at her, make her practice scrambling eggs over and over again until they were fluffy enough. She was only 6 years old at the time, and her wrists would be tired and her arm sore from whisking all those eggs. She would cry whisking eggs until he became so enraged by her tears he spanked her until she stopped crying and had her practice again. He tried to share with Nora the only thing he had ever liked or been good at but he didn’t know how. He was never a dad, only a chef and a person that she couldn’t rely on.

She grabbed a knife and lathered both sides of an English muffin with butter she dropped them into the toaster. She moved around the kitchen like an artist, a dancer. The gurgles and dings of the kitchen around her were like a symphony where she could get lost, just moving with the music all in perfect timing. Her whole life all she wanted to do was not suck. She didn’t even need a bunch of money or a crazy house, all she wanted was to have life be as easy as cooking. But Nora knew life was hard. She watched her dad, who was once cooked at a Michelin star restaurant, sink into a deep hole filled with booze and drugs when her mom left them when Nora was only 2 years old. The debt piled up and even though Nora wanted him to be a dad- wanted him to just be there to witness her life- he couldn’t. In 5th grade she remembered making them both breakfast for dinner. They had nothing but Miller light in the fridge so Nora collected all her change and went to the corner store to pick up some cheap eggs. She remembered carefully plating the scrambled eggs with a side of white toast. Clumsily cutting up green onion in different sizes and shaped before sprinkling it on top. She set out the small container of cream cheese and new jar of jelly she had enough change to pick up as well. Her dad came home with a bottle already in his hand and tossed the plate of food at the wall. She wanted to run away and hide but she found herself cemented to the spot, unable to keep from crying. When he finally left the house again with a slam of a door, Nora knelt on the ground crying, cutting her fingers while picking up the pieces of shattered plate and wet egg.

She shook the memory from her mind and began to whisk the eggs and butter together with a squeeze of lemon, careful not miss any seeds trying to sneak into her hollandaise. She dressed some spinach with olive oil and a tiny bit of balsamic that she mixed with water to get it to come out of the bottle. She put the browned muffin neatly on the plate next to the greens. She topped it with the crunchy pork roll, followed it with the smooth but jiggly pouches of egg before smothering the meal with her hollandaise. She diced the last of her green onion and sprinkled it on top. With a click she snapped a picture and threw it up on her Instagram account like she did with all of her favorite creations. Nora ate mindfully at the counter with Riley, savoring every slow and decadent bite between sips of wine. She felt her shoulders drop away from her ears and she allowed herself to sway a little bit with the jazz in the background. For the moment, she felt light. She relished the feeling and knew that it would be the only thing to get her through the sleepless night that would lie ahead.