I Couldn't Pay My Three Landlords, So I Gave Them a Baby novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Bunk

Joey's POV

The porch on Oak Park Avenue had a green rail and a clay pot of dead geraniums.

I stood on the second step behind my brothers and could not feel my hands.

Cas knocked twice.

He had worn his funeral suit again, and his hand shook on the third knock.

Ren stood beside me.

She did not take my arm, but she let her shoulder rest against mine, and that was enough to keep me upright.

The door opened on a short woman with white hair pinned back.

She wore a blue housedress and a gray cardigan with the sleeves pushed up.

I had been nine years old when I last saw that face, and I knew it before she spoke.

"Casimir," she said.

She did not say Cas.

She said all four syllables of him, which no one had done in thirty years.

Cas opened his mouth, and nothing came.

She put her hand up and laid it flat on his cheek.

There was a long pale scar across her palm, from the base of the thumb to the wrist.

"You have his jaw," she said. "I am sorry you have his jaw."

Cas bent down, a man six foot two, and put his forehead against her shoulder.

I heard a sound come out of him.

Rudy was crying and laughing together, and he wiped his beard with his sleeve and said, "Hi, Ma."

"Rudolf. You have his belly too."

"I'm working on it," Rudy said.

"Don't. It suits you."

Then she looked at me over Cas's bent head.

I had grown up with a nine-year-old's memory of her, a smell of bread and a yellow kitchen curtain, and nothing more.

I was six foot four and thirty-nine, and a paramedic, and I could not say a word.

"Józef," she said. "You had a gap in your front teeth."

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