He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Care Home
Nolan Cormier was waiting in the day room at noon with his cap on his knee.
He had shaved.
He wore a clean work shirt buttoned to the neck, and he sat on a vinyl chair with his back to the window, and he looked like a man who had come to turn himself in.
"Mr. Reese," he said.
"Cormier," Cal said.
"Jo."
"Nolan," I said.
"She's expecting you," said the aide, who stood by Lenore's door with her hands knotted in front of her.
Lenore sat up in bed in the blue cardigan with her hair combed and her brooch pinned.
She looked small and clear and very afraid.
Nolan took the chair at the foot of the bed.
Cal stood by the window with his hands in his pockets.
I sat on the edge of the cane chair beside his mother, and she reached out without a word and took my hand.
Nobody spoke for a while.
"I'll say it plain," Nolan said. "I've never been good at the other way."
"Go ahead," said Cal.
"Sixteen years ago in September there was a storm that came up the Gulf faster than anybody called it. A Category Three. We had the Miss Beverly tied at the Guidry dock and three men aboard."
His hand shook on his knee, the one with the missing fingers.
"I was captain. Mr. Guidry was at the Biloxi casino. The boys were below. There were four of them in the hold that week, and you were the oldest."
"Seventeen," Cal said.
"Seventeen. You'd been on my boat three years. I called you 'the boy.' I never knew your name. I'm going to say that every day I have left."
Cal said nothing.
A muscle moved in his jaw.
"Wind came up at nine," Nolan said. "That week the boss had put a padlock over the pin, because a boy had tried the door. The key was on a nail in the wheelhouse. I went for it. A beam came down from the deckhouse roof and caught me across the chest, and I couldn't breathe, and I couldn't stand. I lay there in the rain and I could hear the boat working at her lines."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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