He Let Me Crash on Christmas Eve, So I Took Our Daughter novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Two-Hour Pass

Sunday dinner at Lorna's started at four and was never on time.

By five, the roast was resting on the counter, and Lorna's husband was carving it with a face of deep concentration.

Peggy sat at the head of the table with Joy on her lap.

Joy was fourteen weeks old and weighed eleven pounds, and she had decided that her grandmother's chin was a toy.

Nate came in at ten past four with a casserole dish.

I looked at it.

"I said don't bring anything."

"It's not from me," he said. "It's from the foreman's wife. She says it's the only way I'll be allowed back in her house."

"What is it?"

"Tater tots, mostly."

Lorna took it from him and lifted the foil.

"Oh, it's a crime," she said. "Sit down, Nate. You look like a dropped sandwich."

"Thank you, Lorna."

"I didn't say it was a bad sandwich."

He sat across from me, and I watched him try not to look at the baby.

He failed.

His eyes went to her every few seconds.

"Go on," I said. "Take her."

"It's not my two hours."

"It's Sunday. Lorna's rule. Nobody counts hours at her table."

"I count them in my sleep," Lorna's husband said, from the kitchen.

"You do not," Lorna said. "You sleep like a stone."

Peggy passed Joy across the table.

Nate took her with his elbows already bent.

He held her against his shoulder, and he put his cheek down on the top of her head, and I looked at my plate.

Dinner went on around us.

Peggy told a story about the winter she drove a school bus into a snowbank with a full bus of second graders aboard, and how not one of them stopped singing.

Lorna told a worse story about a delivery in a grocery store parking lot.

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