He Let Me Crash on Christmas Eve, So I Took Our Daughter novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Nineteen-Dollar Gloves

I read the page in Lorna's kitchen that night, with Joy asleep in the bouncer against my foot.

It was his bank statement.

There was a deposit from a framing crew every Friday, and a transfer to the hospital every Friday, and nothing else.

He hadn't bought a coat.

He had bought one pair of work gloves, for nineteen dollars.

At the bottom the balance read two hundred and twelve dollars and forty cents.

Lorna read it over my shoulder.

"Huh," she said.

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You said huh."

"It was a neutral huh." She poured the last of the coffee. "He's eating nothing but gas station sandwiches, Zanna. His mother told me. He gave her his watch to sell, too."

I put the page down.

I thought about a man in a cold truck cab, eating a sandwich off the dashboard so that my daughter's bill went down by a hundred dollars.

My eyes burned, and I was angry that they did.

My phone rang on the counter.

The screen said Pilkington Construction, and it was a number I had not seen.

I let it ring twice.

Then I picked up.

"Mrs. Ardrey," said an old man's voice. "It's Kendra's father."

He sounded tired and very polite.

"I want to talk to you and your husband," he said. "Tomorrow. At the diner on Route 4. Eight o'clock. Just the three of us."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because I have something to offer him, and it would be wrong not to let you hear it."

I hung up and looked at Lorna.

"Don't tell him I'm coming," I said. "Just ask him to be there."

"You want to see what he does."

"I want to see what he does when no one has a camera on him."

Lorna's eyebrows went up.

"That's cold," she said, with approval.

At eight the next morning the diner smelled of bacon and burned toast.

Mr. Pilkington sat at the corner booth in a gray cardigan.

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