A Paper Plate at My Own Table novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Pencil Mark

Timothy's POV

I didn't ask for the house.

I stood in the dining room with turkey on the wall and a woman in a paper hat, and I thought about what I wanted.

Thirty-five years of wanting nothing had left me out of practice.

"Say it," Meredith said. "Whatever it is."

"I don't want your check."

"You wouldn't get one. I told you."

"I don't want the money back for the house, either. Seven years ago you paid a million one for it. When the court sorts it out, that money is yours. Every cent. I won't take a dollar of it."

"The house is worth more than that now."

"I know what it's worth." I looked at the walls. "My father built that porch rail. I fixed it twice. It was never worth a number."

She was quiet.

"Then what's the one thing?"

I took her hand and led her down the hall, past the kitchen and the stove with the burned spot on it from Norma's last Thanksgiving, to the pantry.

I opened the door.

The pencil lines ran up the frame in my father's square handwriting, a ladder of small dark dashes.

DEAN stopped at fifteen.

TIMOTHY went to eighteen, and then there was nothing, because nobody measures a grown man.

"I want you to stand against it," I said.

"What?"

"Back to the wood. Heels down. I want to mark you."

She laughed, startled.

"Timothy. I'm thirty-four."

"I know."

"It's a pantry door."

"It's a wall that kept track of the people who lived here," I said. "Nobody's been on it for twenty-one years. I want you on it."

She took a long second.

Then she slipped off her shoes and stood against the frame, with her chin level and her spine straight.

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