A Happy Family Without Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Sunday Boxes

Fenella hands Garner his boxes on the lawn in front of the street and Torsten stops him taking her grandmother's clock; by evening Lorna's video of the party is online with 41,000 views and the caption calling Fenella cold.

By six the next morning, the suitcase was gone from the porch.

He had come in the dark, taken it and left nothing behind, not even a note.

I knew because I hadn't slept.

I had sat at the kitchen table with my grandmother's mug and listened to every car that slowed on Lindell Street.

Maeve made pancakes at eight, in the scrubs she'd slept in, and Poppy ate one bite of hers and pushed the plate away.

"Is Daddy coming today?" she asked.

"To get the rest of his things," I said.

"Is he staying after?"

"No, baby."

She nodded and looked at the table.

Garner's SUV pulled up at noon.

I had packed everything by then: ten boxes, taped and labeled, lined up along the front walk.

Half of Lindell Street was out raking leaves, as it is every Sunday in October.

The woman next door had stopped raking and was just holding the rake.

Across the street, Torsten Reddick sat on his porch steps with a mug of coffee.

I had lived across from him for nine years and I could have counted our conversations on one hand.

Garner got out of the car in a clean polo and his good sunglasses.

"This is a lot of boxes," he said.

"It's what you own."

"Fenella, you could have been a little more reasonable."

"The key to the front door," I said, and held out my hand.

He looked at the street. Then he put his key in my palm, and I closed my fingers over it.

He loaded six boxes in silence.

On the seventh trip he walked past the boxes and into the front hall.

I followed him.

He had his hand on my grandmother's mantel clock, the brass one that sat over the radiator, before I got to him.

"This was a wedding present," he said.

"It was my grandmother's. Your mother gave us a toaster."

"I've wound this clock every Sunday for ten years."

"Then you know where it lives."

He lifted it off the shelf. It gave a small, offended chime.

"Garner," said a voice from the doorway. "Put it down."

Torsten stood on my front step with his coffee still in his hand.

He hadn't raised his voice. He was just standing in the door, big and quiet, with sawdust on the knees of his jeans.

"This doesn't concern you, Torsten," Garner said.

"The clock belongs to her. I watched her grandmother wind it on that porch for years."

"Nobody asked you."

"No," Torsten said. "But I'm here."

Garner looked at him, then at me, then at the street, where my neighbor was no longer pretending to rake.

He set the clock down on the radiator so hard it rang.

"Fine. Keep your junk."

He carried the last four boxes out in one trip, so that he wouldn't have to ask anyone for help.

At the car he turned around.

"I'll take Poppy on Wednesdays," he said. "That's non-negotiable, Cor."

"Wednesday after school. She's back at my door by seven."

"Seven-thirty."

"Seven."

He agreed too quickly, and I noticed.

I also noticed something else, standing there in the leaves with his key in my fist.

Lorna had a key to my house too. I had given it to her myself.

Garner drove off. The street went back to raking.

Torsten was already walking down my steps.

"Thank you," I said.

"I didn't do anything," he said, and went back across the road.

That evening Maeve found me in the kitchen with the phone in her hand and her mouth shut very tight.

"Don't look at this yet," she said.

"Give it to me."

It was a video, and it had been posted from Lorna's account at six that morning.

It had been cut so that Garner spoke first and I spoke last.

My face was filmed from below, at the moment I said "You did this now."

Over my face, in white letters, someone had typed: Watch her throw him out for helping two kids who have nobody.

Under the video, Lorna had written: I'm heartbroken for everyone. Please be kind to Fenella, she's hurting.

It had forty-one thousand views.

"She had her phone in the gift bag," Maeve said slowly. "She was recording the whole time."

I read the first comment.

It said: Imagine being so cold you do this on your kid's birthday.

I read the second one, and the third one.

The clock on the radiator struck seven, and Poppy called down the stairs to ask who was crying.

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