I built a lookout room so I could watch my husband come home. On opening night, I found him screwing with another woman in it. novel · Chapter 5 of 24
Chapter 5: Paid in Full
Marla lived in a yellow house two streets behind the feed store, with a kitchen smaller than the one she cooked in for thirty.
She sat me at her table and put a plate of chili in front of me.
"Eat," she said. "You're gray."
I ate, because she was the kind of woman you obeyed.
The rain started on the roof while I chewed.
"What did he mean?" I asked. "About my father."
Marla took off her reading glasses and cleaned them on her shirt.
"Ray Rawlins never owed that club a cent," she said. "I'd swear it on my mother."
"Hoyt said he did."
"Hoyt says a lot."
She got up and pulled a green ledger out of the bread drawer, and set it down between us.
It was the club's kitchen book, with twenty-two years of her handwriting in it, and a rubber band around the middle.
"I keep my own copy of everything," she said. "Hoyt doesn't know. He thinks I only write down groceries."
She opened it to a page marked with a paper clip.
A line near the top had been scratched out in black pen, so hard that the paper had torn.
Under the scratch I could still read one entry.
R. Rawlins, back lot, $1 a year. Paid by club.
"A dollar a year?" I said.
"That's all I know," Marla said. "There was a page after it, with a name and a date, and Hoyt ripped it out in front of me the week your father died. He told me it was old business."
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