NORA
Sal looked around Nora’s family room, his dark eyes cataloguing, and Nora wondered what he saw. The room still had the brown shag carpet and fake wood paneling it had when it was built in the 1970s, and the La-Z-Boy, with the gouges Nora’s fingernails had carved in its arms the night of Jeremy’s championship basketball game, still sat next to the sofa where her mother had died. A flat-screen TV, their one extravagance, hung beside Jeremy’s framed championship jersey, and every night Nora’s father sat in the La-Z-Boy and watched whatever sport was in season, nursing the one Michelob Nora let him have. Something about the way Sal looked at the room made her think he saw all this, but of course he couldn’t.
She took the dusty display case from the bookshelf, then sat beside Sal on the
