My Father Bet My Year at the Boucherie, So I Signed It Myself and Named the Terms novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: Her Mother's House
I did not drop the duffel bag, the pot or the school bag with fifty drawings in it.
I set the pot on the stove, where it had lived for thirty years.
I stood with my back to the counter and my hand on the drawer where my mother kept the good knives.
"Get out of her chair," I said.
Andrei's smile did not move.
"Dolly, I'm only here to help."
"You're sitting in my mother's chair, in my mother's kitchen, with a pen.
"Get up."
He rose slowly and stepped aside with his folio.
He did not look nervous, and that was what chilled me.
He looked like a man at the end of a long Friday who wanted to be done.
"Your father let me in," he said.
"He has a key."
"He has a key to a house he doesn't own."
"Cher," my father said, from the table.
"Hear him out."
I looked at him.
His hands were flat on the oilcloth, and he had shaved badly.
There was whiskey on him from the day before, and under it a smell I had not known on him in years.
It was fear.
"Daddy," I said.
"What did you promise him?"
"Nothing, Dolly.
"I only let him in."
"Say what you came to say," I said to Andrei.
Andrei laid his hand on the folio.
"I'd like to buy this house," he said.
"At a fair price.
"Two hundred and ten thousand, which is forty over what a bank would give you.
"The family forgives the whole of the sixty-one, cancels Seb's paper and pays you a year's salary on top for the trouble you've been put to."
He said it in a pleasant tone, as if he were reading me a menu.
"All you have to do is go back to teaching and forget the family.
"Forget Seb.
"Forget the child.
"This morning, if you like."
"Why?" I asked.
"Why what?"
"Why would the Broussards pay forty thousand over market for a house in the Breaux Bridge flats?"
"It's a gift, Dolly.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Father Bet My Year at the Boucherie, So I Signed It Myself and Named the Terms are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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