They Sold Me to the Crippled War God, So Why Was He Standing in My Father's Barn on Two Good Legs novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: Her Mother's Piano
Raymond Thibodeaux was sentenced on the first Thursday of December, in the courthouse in Abbeville, to nine years.
I sat in the second row in my blue dress and watched him hear it.
He had lost weight.
His pressed white shirt hung on him, and the warm face had gone gray and loose at the jaw.
When the judge finished, he turned and searched the room until he found me.
I did not look away.
He mouthed a single word, and I knew it:
Chère.
I did not answer.
Behind me, in the row by the wall, the woman from Biloxi sat with her children and held the little girl's hand.
The girl wore a string of old brown beads around her wrist, wound three times.
She saw me looking and lifted her wrist an inch.
I nodded to her.
That was all.
On the courthouse steps afterward, the deputy told me the state had recovered a little over six hundred thousand dollars from the Biloxi accounts and the casino ledgers.
It would go back to the farmers by the end of the month.
Seb stood beside me with his hat in his hand and said nothing.
He had taken back none of his own.
He had told the priest to let the state's check cover the rest and written the loan off.
When I asked him why, he said, "It was never a loan."
I let it be.
Gabe Landry sold the seafood business on Friday.
I heard it from the church clerk, who heard it from the buyer's wife.
He took what was left after the note and the debts, and bought a one-way bus ticket to his cousin's place in Texas.
He came to the church on his last afternoon to give the priest the keys to the freezer in the hall.
I was in the loft with the organ's lid open and a hook in my hand.
I heard him in the nave, and I did not come down.
He stood at the foot of the loft stair with his hat in both hands.
"Odile," he said.
I looked down.
"I'm going," he said.
"I'm not asking for anything.
"I wanted to say it once, to your face."
"Say what?" I said.
"That I'm sorry," Gabe said.
"Not for the supper.
"For the three years.
"I knew it wasn't right every time you asked me something.
"I let you think the waiting was the price."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of They Sold Me to the Crippled War God, So Why Was He Standing in My Father's Barn on Two Good Legs are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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