Free Cold by John Smolens

laughed as she laid the paperwork on the counter—triplicate:   yellow for the customer, pink for the driver, white for the office.   “I just thought you might be married.   Don’t know why.”
    He said nothing, picked up the white and yellow copies and went to the door.
    “Pink,” she said.   “Yours is pink.”
    And he came back to the counter and handed her the white copy.   She’d never seen him smile before.   She didn’t trust guys who smiled all the time.   Or worse, grinned.   But he smiled at his own stupidity and she laughed again.
    At first Norman was unlike any other boy she’d ever dated.   He didn’t talk about himself all the time.   He didn’t just want to have sex.   He was polite.   He talked about going to school downstate.   Within six months they had decided to get married and go to school together, at Central, Western, or maybe Michigan State.  
    Then Getz’s Auto Supply went out of business.   Noel found part-time work at Ron’s IGA, and Norman began doing jobs for her father.   He plowed the driveways and parking lots of her father’s rentals.   He did yard work; repaired windows, doors, sinks, bathtubs.   He hung Sheetrock.   He painted apartments when they were vacant.   Daddy seemed to like him—as much as Daddy liked anyone.   In the fall, he took Norman north to Big Pine, his turn-of-the-century hunting lodge overlooking Lake Superior.   Hunting parties consisting mostly of business executives flew in on private planes from Detroit, Chicago and the Twin Cities.   Daddy and several locals acted as guides; Norman was all around go-fer.   They were gone for weeks at a time.   Occasionally Noel would drive up and help out with the cooking and cleaning.   Norman seemed increasingly uncomfortable about the hunting parties at Big Pine.   Noel thought it had to do with his working for his fiancé’s father.   She liked that about him.
    When his older brother Warren returned from San Diego, where he’d been in the Navy, everything changed.   Warren talked about himself all the time, which meant he usually talked about sex, and he wasn’t polite.   He had some kind of hold on Norman, some big brother thing; Noel saw it the first weekend Warren was back in North Eicher.   They partied day and night.   She thought that it might last a few days, but it went on and on, and soon she was talking to Norman about how manipulative his brother was, how she’d never seen Norman like this.   They were like Warren’s entourage; he couldn’t go out at night without bringing them along, buying rounds, providing the weed and, increasingly, offering pills or a vial of cocaine.
    She thought of Norman and Warren as a variation on the same theme.   Warren was a few years older, maybe a couple of inches taller.   His hair was a lighter brown, straighter than Norman’s.   Both were lean and hard muscled.   Norman’s limbs were more compact; his forearm muscles shifted beneath his skin, raising beveled edges effortlessly.   Warren’s face was longer than Norman’s, the proportions spread out and somehow less coherent. You looked at his eyes.   You looked at his mouth.   One thing at a time.   With Norman you took the whole in at once and saw the eyebrows raised in relation to the mouth.   The first night she had slept with him she had cupped his face in her hands, feeling the ridges and hollows, the bones beneath the taut skin.
    That winter Warren became an issue.   That’s how she thought of him at first—an issue that was coming between her and Norman.   It was like Warren was watching her all the time, waiting for her to do something.   The three of them would be driving somewhere, or in a bar or restaurant.   Finally—it was in The Green Flannel Tavern when they were doing shots and beers during a Red Wings game—she stared back at him, hoping her expression was asking What the fuck do you think you’re doing?   Perhaps she thought that he might just