My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: Her Mother's Chair
I let him into my mother's house on Sunday night, with the snow coming down.
I had worked my shift and slept four hours in my own bed.
I had cleaned the kitchen, and lit the oven for warmth, and put on a pot of her soup from the recipe she kept on a card, and I stood in the middle of the floor in a gray sweater with my hands wrapped around a mug.
He knocked at six.
I opened the front door.
Cormick stood on the porch with snow on his hat.
He held a loaf of bread from the Corner Bakery, in a paper bag, and a bottle of milk.
"Enid said you'd want these," he said. "I'd not have come with nothing."
"Take your boots off in the hall," I said.
He took his boots off in the hall.
I watched a man of six foot three stand in my mother's narrow hallway in his stocking feet, with the wallpaper two inches from his shoulders.
He looked at the little pictures on the wall, the school photographs and the one of my father in his hard hat.
He looked at the coat hooks.
He did not touch any of it.
"It's a good house," he said quietly.
"It's small."
"It's a house a woman lived in." His voice was rough. "I've not been in one in years."
I took the bread out of his hand and walked him to the kitchen.
It was the room I had been afraid of, and I had put him in it.
My mother's table stood under the hanging light, with its yellow oilcloth and its scarred edge.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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