Chapter 24: Everyone Sang

Lacey's POV

By two o'clock on Saturday the Wyatt Street lobby had paper bats on the mailboxes and orange lights over the stairs.

Maureen had pushed the folding tables together under the window.

She had laid out three pans of brownies, a pot of chili and a cake the size of Ohio.

Hattie stood on a chair in a cat suit with whiskers drawn on in eyeliner.

"I'm eight," she announced to the lobby. "That's old enough to say who gets frosting."

"Who gets frosting?" the man in the bathrobe asked.

"Everybody. Even Dad."

"That's fair," Curtis said, from the doorway.

He had come in alone.

He was holding a gift bag with tissue paper sticking out.

He kept glancing at the door, waiting for somebody to tell him to leave.

Nobody did.

My mother arrived a minute later in a coat with a wrapped box in both hands.

She stopped inside the door.

She and my father looked at each other, and then at the floor.

"Denise," he said.

"Curtis."

That was all, and it was more than they had managed in two years.

I walked over to them in the green dress Maureen had lent me, with a paper witch hat on my head.

"There's chili," I said. "Hattie's by the cake."

My mother held out her box.

"It's for her. I also brought something small for you."

It was a card.

On the front she had drawn nothing, and inside she had written one line in her careful upright hand.

I should have sung.

I held it for a moment.

"Thank you," I said.

"I'm not asking you to forgive me."

"I know."

"I'm only asking if I can stay for cake."

"You can stay for cake."

My father cleared his throat and said nothing, and for once it was the right thing to say.

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Fought Over Who Had to Keep Me from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.