My In-Laws Toasted Me at Dad's Seventy-Fifth Birthday and Handed Me the Care Schedule, So Dad's Tablet Read Out Every Email They Never Opened novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Sit Down, Tressa

The tablet reads out Rob's and Craig's emails too, Tressa tries to unplug it, and Gene types an order that sits her down; Jenna walks him out, he sends her to Water Street, and she finds a house in her name and a note, until someone knocks at 11:40.

Nobody in the hall moved, and the voice kept going.

"Sent. Delivered. Never opened."

Tressa had gone the color of the frosting.

"Tressa," the tablet read. "Jenna has not had a day off in a year. She will not ask."

"Take Tuesday and Friday nights for two weeks, and hire someone for the showers. I will pay. Love, Dad."

I had never heard that email, and I had never known it existed.

Gene was not looking at his daughter.

He was looking at me, and his one working eyebrow was up.

His finger came down again.

"Email thirty-nine. Rob. Come on a Saturday and bring a ladder. Jenna should not be on the roof cleaning gutters. Sent. Delivered. Never opened."

Somebody at the back table made a sound that was half a laugh and half a cough.

Rob's beer stopped halfway to his mouth.

"Dad," he said. "Buddy. I answer your texts."

"You send a thumbs-up to the group," Gene's voice said, a beat after his finger.

It was the loveliest timing I ever heard from that machine.

Tressa came out from behind the cake table in her cranberry blazer.

"Turn that off. Neil, is it Neil? Unplug it right now."

Neil stood with the cable in his fist and his feet planted.

"It's his tablet, ma'am," he said. "It's his voice."

"He's confused." Tressa turned to the room with her hands out.

"He gets confused. It's the stroke, you all know that. It's very hard on the family."

"Email thirty-three," the tablet said, flat and unhurried.

"Craig. If you take the Charlotte job, take your wife. If you will not, tell her the truth before you tell a room."

"Sent. Delivered. Never opened."

My husband had been smiling for thirty seconds, and now he stopped.

"It's glitching," Craig told the hall. "These things glitch. Everybody just enjoy the cake."

Rob's wife had not stopped filming.

She lowered the phone slowly, down to her waist, but I saw the red dot still going.

Tressa reached over the DJ's table for the cable herself.

Gene's finger moved faster than I had seen it move since the day he came home from rehab.

"Sit down, Tressa."

Three words in the voice of a GPS, and she sat.

She actually sat, in a folding chair beside a stranger's grandmother, with her mouth open.

Then Gene typed again and turned the screen toward me, because the speakers were done.

Take me out of here, it said.

I did not think about it, which was new.

I put the knife down beside the schedule, took his good arm, and got him up onto the walker.

The hall parted for us.

"Jen," Craig said behind me. "You can't just walk out. We're not finished."

"The cake's all yours," I said without turning around. "It comes with a schedule."

Out in the parking lot the air smelled like wet leaves and somebody's grill.

I folded the walker into the back of my Corolla and buckled him in.

My hands shook so hard I missed the clasp twice.

Gene waited, and then he typed, and the voice came out small in the dark car.

"Not the farm. Water Street."

"Gene, what's on Water Street?"

He lifted the cover of his tablet case and took out a brass key on a green paper tag.

The tag said, in his careful left-handed capitals, WATER ST.

"Your house," the tablet said. "Drive."

I drove, because I did not know what else to do.

It was the first time in three years that anyone had told me where to go, and it felt like a gift.

Water Street is the old end of town, where the mill foremen lived.

The house at the corner was narrow brick, two stories, with a porch light on a timer and a wooden ramp painted grey.

The ramp was new, and the grab bars on the porch were new.

The key turned in the door as if someone had oiled it.

The heat was on.

In the kitchen there was a yellow table with an envelope in the middle, and a lamp somebody had left lit.

I opened the envelope and read the first page twice.

It was a deed, with an address on it, and my name, and only my name.

It had been signed fourteen months ago.

Under the deed was a single printed sheet.

Gene had typed it and printed it, and he had never once mentioned it to me.

For the day she is ready to leave my son. Not before. Her choice.

I sat down hard in a chair that was not mine yet.

Behind me, Gene had stopped in the doorway with his walker, watching me read.

Fourteen months, I thought, and he waited.

At eleven-forty that night, someone knocked on the front door.

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