A Decade For Nothing novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Blue Smoke

On Saturday morning Nan stood in my old bedroom doorway with a tin of oatmeal cookies and her good purse.

"I'm coming," she said.

"No."

"I'm seventy-three, I have a cast, and I have a tin of cookies. What are they going to do, call the police on me?"

"Nan."

"Gordon Oakes once told me my pound cake was too dry for his daughter's birthday," she said. "I've been waiting ten years to bring him a cookie."

Joel, lying across my bed with his shoes on, started to laugh.

I gave up.

I put on the grey suit I had worn to every funeral since I was twenty-four, and Joel tied my tie for me in the hallway mirror because my hands would not do it.

"Listen," he said, pulling the knot tight. "You walk in there like you own the lawn."

"I don't own anything. They took my down payment."

"Then walk in like you want it back."

The Oakes house sat at the end of a long drive lined with maples.

I had come up that drive on my first night, in a borrowed jacket, carrying a bottle of wine I could not afford.

Gordon had taken the wine and put it in the cellar without opening it.

It was still down there, I supposed.

The lawn behind the house was set with white tables and pink and blue balloons.

Forty or fifty people stood in small groups with plates.

A banner over the terrace said WELCOME LITTLE ONE in curling silver letters.

Lydia's late mother's rose garden ran along the fence, with the bushes in full bloom.

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