My Husband Lent Me to His Best Friend for the Night, and the Man He Chose Was the One I Hated Most novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: After
"No," I said again.
"You didn't sign forty-four, Baba.
"You signed twenty, to a man on the South Side, and you signed whatever Stavros put in front of you in January because you do not read.
"You've told me so.
"You told me in the card room, with your own mouth."
Yiannis stood with the wine shaking in his hand.
Every head in the room had turned to him.
"I wanted to protect the family," he said.
"You wanted to protect the card table," I said.
"You'd have stood up here and lied in front of the priest so that the man who bought me could keep his house, and the man who bought me would have kept paying your tab."
"Kali."
"You did not say my name at the church," I said.
"You did not say it at the supper.
"You said it for the first time on Friday at the taverna, when you wanted a paper."
The old man in the brown coat put his glasses back on.
He looked at my father for a long time.
"Yiannis Vrettos," he said.
"Sit down."
My father sat.
He sat as if his legs had been cut.
Aris, across the table, had not looked up.
He sat with his bent hands folded on the cloth and his eyes on the red egg in front of him.
I walked back down the table to my own place, and the priest, who had said nothing, crossed himself.
The lamb woman from Randolph Street got to her feet, and then the thin man in the gray overcoat, and then, one by one, all along the cloth, the men of the market stood.
They did not stand for me.
They stood for the wreck of the house, the way a crowd stands at a graveside.
I put my hand on the back of my chair.
"Christ is risen," the priest said into the silence.
"Truly He is risen," said forty voices, ragged and low.
I took the red egg from the bowl at my place.
I cracked it against Aris's across the table.
It split, and his did not, and he looked up and gave me the ghost of a grin.
The next morning the church committee met in the hall on Union Avenue, and by Wednesday Yiannis Vrettos had lost the taverna.
It happened on the church steps in front of everyone.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Husband Lent Me to His Best Friend for the Night, and the Man He Chose Was the One I Hated Most are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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