The Man Behind The Mask. Barbara Hannay

“I stole Gerald’s bike because he was mean to me. He made fun of my hair in front of the whole class. You think it’s not hard enough being new? And everybody knowing your aunt does voodoo?”

      “Voodoo,” Brendan said, with just a trace of approval.

      “What do you mean, everybody knows I do voodoo?” Nora asked, horrified. “I don’t! I run a shelter for abused and abandoned animals. That’s all!”

      “No, it isn’t,” Luke said wearily.

      And suddenly she wondered if it had been about Luke’s hair at all. Or if it had been about her.

      “Anyway,” Luke continued, “Gerald said he’d back my story that I borrowed the bike if I gave him fifty dollars.”

      “You’ve made everything worse,” Nora said, but not too strongly. It was bad enough Luke was being teased about his hair. He was being teased about her, too! She was an adult and she could barely handle the mockery. That was why she wrote her column in secret.

      “I think the question now is how are you going to fix all this?” Brendan asked.

      “Naturally, we’ll give your grandmother back her money,” Nora said, hearing the resignation in her voice.

      “No. You won’t,” Brendan said.

      “Excuse me?”

      “Luke did it. He needs to figure out how to make amends to her.”

      “What’s amends?” Luke asked suspiciously.

      “Just what it sounds like. You broke something, you mend it.”

      He pondered that. “I don’t know how.”

      “I’ll give you a chance to figure it out.”

      Luke seemed to be back to his old self, arms folded over his narrow chest, bristling with barely contained hostility.

      Take charge, Nora ordered herself, so she added, “Figure it out. With no computer. And no cell phone.”

      “That sucks,” the boy said, and got up from the table and marched away.

      “You’re bossy,” Nora said to Brendan, feeling somehow she had to hide the fact that she was so grateful someone was helping her through this.

      “You’ve already said that.”

      “Sorry to bore you by repeating myself.” She needed time to gather herself. Needed to show leadership, and wasn’t. She was letting Brendan take charge.

      Only because it had been a strange week. She’d been injured. She’d let down her guard around Brendan. Invited him into her life.

      Still, it was a new blow that Luke was being teased at school because of her.

      “Tell me what you’ve heard about me,” she said to Brendan.

      “Deedee heard you were a healer. She was making biblical references, about the laying on of hands. She’s expecting a miracle.”

      Nora groaned softly. “I’m sorry. Do you think that’s what Luke’s classmates are hearing about me, too?”

      “I assume some version of that. You bring a dead dog to life, and you’re the talk of the town.”

      “I didn’t bring a dead dog to life!”

      “You’re not used to small towns, are you?”

      “No.”

      “It’s like that game you played in junior high school. The teacher whispers, ‘The green tree on Main Street is dying,’ to the first kid in the line, and they whisper it to the next. But twenty kids later it has become ‘Mrs. Green killed her husband on Main Street with a tree branch.’”

      “We never played a game like that in school.”

      “A shame. The power of distortion would not be such a surprise to you. What really happened with the dog?”

      “He’d been hit by a car. He was knocked out. Not dead.”

      “Technicalities. So, you have no gift with animals?”

      “I didn’t say that. I’ve always liked animals, sometimes a whole lot more than people. There is an energy element to animals that is very strong, and I seem to be able to connect with that. But I’m not a vet, and I don’t try to take the place of one.”

      “Ah.”

      She had said enough. But despite her vow to herself to keep the barriers up between her and Brendan, it felt strangely and nicely intimate to be sharing her kitchen with him, telling him things she didn’t always feel free to say.

      “What I have no gift with, I’m afraid, is adolescent boys,” she added, since she seemed bent on confessing private things about herself.

      “I see cookies in a jar and good food on the table every night. There are drawings on the fridge and homework being done. Where are his folks?”

      She could not quite keep the shaking from her voice. “My sister died.”

      “And his dad?”

      “He went before Karen. Luke’s never said anything to you? you guys have been doing chores together for days.”

      “Yeah, well, you know guys.”

      But she didn’t. She didn’t know guys at all. That was probably part of the problem with Luke.

      Brendan sighed. “We don’t talk about deep things. Discussion runs to who is the best hockey player in the world. Last night’s baseball scores. Who can clean a cat cage the fastest and with the least gagging.”

      Nora really didn’t want to confide one more thing to this man. But she heard herself saying, “I’m not sure that Karen would have trusted me by myself with this. She saw my fiancé, Vance, as the stable one, a vet with a well-established practice. I’m afraid I’ve always been seen as the family black sheep.”

      “It seems to me your sister would think you were doing well at making a home for your nephew.”

      “So, now you know! I’m an orphan,” Luke exclaimed from the doorway. “Doesn’t that just suck? Who even knew there was such a thing anymore?”

      Nora hadn’t seen him reappear, but there he was, bristling defensively.

      “And you think that isn’t bad enough?” Luke continued, jerking his head toward her. “She was going to get married. And then Vance wouldn’t marry her. Because of me.”

CHAPTER NINE

      NORA’S MOUTH FELL open. Her eyes clouded with tears. She’d had no idea Luke knew about that awful conversation between her and Vance.

      “Just because I glued his stupid golf clubs to his golf bag.”

      “Why’d you do that?” Brendan asked mildly.

      “He didn’t want Auntie Nora to get me a skateboard, because I’d been suspended from school. So she didn’t. So I glued his golf clubs to his bag. Super Duper Gobby Glue works just the way it says in the commercial.”

      “I’ll remember that,” Brendan promised.

      “‘It’s him or it’s me,’” Luke quoted. His mimicry of Vance might have been hilariously accurate, if it wasn’t for the context. “She picked me. Dumb, huh?”

      And then Brendan said, his voice steady as a rock, “I don’t think it’s so dumb.”

      Despite the fact Nora could have done without her whole life story being exposed, she could have kissed Brendan, she felt so grateful.

      Unfortunately, that made her look at his lips.

      The