My Father's Best Friend Fixed My Roof, Then Never Left My Kitchen novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: The Loft
Milan closed the store at three on Thursday, and nobody on a stool said a word about it.
At five o'clock he walked me across the back lot of the farm to the barn.
His hand lay on the small of my back, and Gus ambled ahead of us.
It was a gray, high-roofed barn, old red boards gone silver, with a hay door that stood open on the fields.
The light came in through the slats in long gold bars.
It smelled of dry grass and old harness and the cold.
"Why a barn?" I said.
"You said you were done being quiet," Milan said.
I laughed.
He took me up a wooden ladder into the loft.
A quilt lay over a spread of straw, with a thermos and two mugs beside it.
He'd done that this morning, I realized.
He had come out here before the store opened and laid a quilt over hay for me.
My throat went tight, and I looked at the thermos so he wouldn't see my face.
"The photograph in your hall," I said. "Why does it say Mule?"
"Your father gave me that name when I was nineteen." He sat down on a bale and pulled off his gloves. "I wouldn't let go of a weld he told me to quit on."
"Did it hold?"
"It's still holding. He built that bridge rail in Kittanning with his own hands, and the weld at the north end is mine."
"He called you that for thirty-five years," I said.
"He did."
"And you called him Frank."
"I called him a lot of things," Milan said. "Come here."
I came.
He didn't stand up.
He sat on the edge of the hay bale with his knees apart.
He looked at me standing in front of him in my coat and boots.
"Take the coat off," he said. "Then the sweater."
I took them off and laid them on the straw.
The air was cold on my arms.
"Jeans," he said. "And the rest of it. Boots last."
"It's thirty degrees in here."
"You won't feel it long."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Father's Best Friend Fixed My Roof, Then Never Left My Kitchen are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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