The Backup Plan

Chapter 4: A Compliment

Norah's parents ran a diner on the ground floor of the building they lived in, and the whole place smelled like bacon and coffee by five in the morning and like fryer grease by nine at night. There was a cart, too — her father took it out to the curb on weekday mornings for the commuter traffic, and on weekends he hosed it down in the alley behind the building and left it there.

By the time we pulled up, Chloe's fiancé had already parked at the curb. Black sedan, detailed, two wheels up on the apron so nobody would door it.

"Great," Norah said, and got out.

The apartment was loud before we reached the top of the stairs. Her mother met us at the door with an oven mitt still on one hand. She kissed Norah's cheek, then, briefly, mine.

"You're late. Derek's been here an hour."

"Traffic," Norah said, which was not true. She'd had me circle the block twice.

The living room had been rearranged — two folding tables pushed together, a cloth over both, chairs borrowed from somewhere. Nine of us around it. Her aunt had taken the seat at the end, which put her where she could see the whole table.

Chloe stood up when we came in. Twenty-six, cream sweater. She hugged Norah with both arms, then held her out at arm's length like she was checking her for damage.

"You look good. You look happy."

"I'm fine," Norah said.

"This is Derek." Chloe turned, and Derek stood and put out his hand. Finance. Watch that cost more than my rent. One firm pump and done.

"Ethan, right? Heard a lot about you."

I doubted that.

"Nice to meet you."

We sat. Norah's mother brought out a pork roast, a bowl of potatoes, a bowl of green beans, and after that there was no room on the table for anything else, which did not stop her from adding a plate of rolls.

Her father carved. Quiet man, forearms like fence posts. He cut the meat, passed plates, said maybe ten words the whole meal.

Her aunt waited until everyone had food. She was good at that. She was good at waiting.

"So, Ethan," she said. "What is it you do exactly? Norah said something about computers."

"Software," I said. "Backend engineering."

"Which is?"

"I write the code that runs behind the scenes. The part nobody sees."

"Hm." She cut her pork into very small pieces. "And that pays all right?"

"It pays."

"Chloe's Derek just made VP." She said it the way you'd mention the weather. "A hundred and eighty a year, plus bonus. They're looking at a place in Los Altos."

Derek's eyes went to his plate. "It's mostly the market. Everyone's up right now."

"Don't be modest." Her aunt turned back to Norah with her fork in the air. "You know, honey, I've got to say — you've got to count your blessings. At your age, with your history, most men wouldn't take that on. You found one who did. That's not nothing."

The table got quiet in a specific way. Not silent. Just quieter, the way a room gets when everyone at it has decided at the same time to look at their food.

"Take what on," Chloe said, and it came out too fast, because she knew, and she'd been hoping the table had forgotten.

"Nothing." Norah's mother, from the end, the bowl of rolls still in her hand. "Eat."

But Chloe was already looking around the table, and the looking had turned into knowing: the small, unspoken, unanimous quiet. Her face went through something — and then she looked at Norah: quick, sidelong, and then away.

"No, I'm complimenting him," her aunt said, pleasantly. "I'm saying he's a good man. That's a compliment."

Norah's foot found mine under the table. Pressed.

I put my fork down and picked it back up. I didn't say anything.

Neither did Norah. She cut her pork and ate it. When Chloe, trying to save the table, said, "Derek, tell them about Switzerland—"

"January," Derek said, relieved. "Two weeks. She's been planning it for months."

Chloe laughed. "Two weeks in the Alps. You're not seriously telling me you two didn't take a honeymoon."

Norah smiled. It was a good smile. If I hadn't been sitting next to her I might have bought it. "We've both been busy."

"Busy." Chloe set her fork down. "You got married. You have to go somewhere. Even just a weekend. Cabo. Everyone does Cabo."

"Maybe later."

"'Later.'" Chloe laughed like it was a joke, and it was not. "I'm serious. You only get the one. You don't do it now, you never will."

Norah's mother said, "Chloe, leave them be."

"I'm asking." Chloe looked around for support and found none, which made her keep going. "It's a fair question. You go to the courthouse, and then — what? You go back to work? What is there to be busy with?"

Norah ate a green bean.

Under the table her heel came down on my shoe again, harder, and stayed there.

I ate my pork. I drank some water. I passed the rolls to Derek when he asked.

Her aunt, at the head of the table, watched all of it and smiled at nothing in particular and said, "Well. Some people like a quiet life."

After dinner the women cleared the table, which meant Norah and her mother and Chloe went into the kitchen, and her aunt went with them, and I could hear Chloe's voice through the wall going on about Cabo.

I carried my plates in and Norah's mother waved me back out.

"Sit," she said. "You're a guest."

I've been married to her daughter a month.

Her father went out to the little back porch to smoke, and I followed him because I didn't know what else to do with myself. Old coffee can on the rail with sand in it. He stood with his back to the door, looking down at the alley.

He held the pack out sideways without turning around.

"I don't," I said.

"Suit yourself." He lit his and shook the match out and dropped it in the can. For a while he just smoked.

Then: "You're not happy."

"I'm fine."

"Mm." He tipped ash into the can. "She doesn't talk about it. What happened with the other one. She came home that day and packed up the ring and the envelope they'd left on the table and put both in a box and put the box in the closet, and she hasn't opened it since. Her mother found it two months later."

I didn't say anything. He smoked.

"Always been like that. Since she was a kid. Won't let you see her get hurt." He looked down the alley. Somebody down there was dragging a recycling bin along the asphalt, one wheel screaming. "It hit her harder than she shows."

"I know."

"Her aunt—" He stopped. Started again, and the pause was where he decided not to lie to me. "Her aunt's got a mouth. I'm not going to stand here and tell you it's all heart, because it isn't. But she's family, and we've been at this table with her for thirty years, and there's no version of this where we stop."

He turned his head and looked at me for the first time.

"I'm not asking you to like her. I'm asking you not to hold it against Nory."

"I don't."

"Good." He faced the alley again and smoked the cigarette down to the filter and put that in the can too. "She's strong. But strong isn't the same as not needing anybody."

I stood out there with him a minute more, and then I went inside.

---

Norah drove us home and didn't say anything for the first ten minutes, which is how I knew it had landed.

"You're quiet," she said at last.

"So are you."

"I'm always quiet."

"No," I said. "You're not."

She looked at the road. It got dark early now. Streetlights were coming on over the 101, that low flat orange.

"She's not wrong," Norah said. "That's the thing. She's not even being cruel. She thinks she's being generous."

I didn't answer.

"The 'take that on' part." Her hands were at ten and two. "She doesn't hear it. She said it as a compliment, the whole table heard it as a compliment, and that's — that's what it is now. That's the actual, correct, generous version of what people think about me."

I said, "I could have said something."

"I know."

"I didn't."

"I stepped on your foot." She took the exit. "I meant it."

"I know."

She pulled into the lot behind our building and killed the engine, and we sat there with the headlights washing the wall.

"Thank you," she said. "For not making a scene in front of them."

"Your dad talked to me after."

She looked over.

"He told me not to blame your aunt."

"Oh, he did." A short laugh, through her nose. "He's been running interference on that woman since before I was born. That's his whole life. He does it, and then he apologizes for her afterward to whoever's still standing."

"He said she won't let anybody see her get hurt."

"Who, my aunt?"

"You."

She sat with that for a second. Then she opened the door and got out.

---

Upstairs she took her jeans off and got under the blanket on the couch and put on a show about people renovating houses. I sat down on the floor with my back against the couch and opened the laptop.

The first email had come back in the middle of October. A paragraph from a business development guy at a company I'd never heard of, saying they'd found LedgerLite through a forum post and wanted to talk.

The second came the night my mother had us over. Three pages of terms attached, which is a lot of pages for something that doesn't exist yet.

The third came Thursday, from a different company, subject line shorter and the body not friendly at all. It just laid out a number.

I read all three again, in order. I made a note in the file on my desktop, the one that's nothing but dates and what happened on them. Then I opened the analytics tab, because I'd stopped pretending I wasn't checking it, and looked at the day's line.

Three thousand four hundred new signups. Before this week, the six months combined had been a little over four hundred.

I sat and looked at that number for a while.

It had started with a video. Some guy in his sixties with a hardware store, a channel called Old Man Talks Shop, eleven minutes about LedgerLite the way you'd talk about a good pair of boots. A hundred and seventy thousand views in a day. I'd watched it at my desk three times with the sound off, reading the captions, and my face had done nothing the entire time. I'm good at that part.

Behind me Norah said something I couldn't hear, then said it again louder, and then I realized she was asleep. The show was still going. I reached up without standing and turned the volume down.

I opened the first company's message and started a reply. Then I stopped. There was one thing I wanted to check before I answered anybody — a licensing question, small, boring, the kind of thing that takes a day — and I wasn't going to put a number on the table until I had it.

So I left the draft in the box, unsent, and closed the laptop.

I sat there a while longer with my back against the couch, in the dark, listening to her breathe. The front window had a gap in the blinds, a stripe of streetlight down the floor, landing on my knee and then not on me, depending on how the cars went by.

Monday I'd call the guy about the license. Monday I'd know.

Behind me she turned onto her side, and her hand came off the couch and lay on the floor next to my shoulder, palm up, the way it does. I didn't move.

Two hundred and forty an hour. That's what Saturday had been worth on the dashboard while her aunt was explaining that I was a good man for taking her on.

The number kept climbing.