I Couldn't Pay My Three Landlords, So I Gave Them a Baby novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Wigilia

Wanda's flat smelled of beet soup, mushrooms and fish, and the table ran the whole length of the front room.

Twenty-two people stood around it on Christmas Eve, waiting for the first star.

There was a pile of straw under the white cloth, which is the custom.

There was one empty place laid for the stranger who might knock.

I stood in the doorway in my green wool dress, thirty-five weeks along, with my coat over my arm.

The three of them stood behind me, as I had asked.

Cas's hand rested on my right shoulder, Rudy's on my left, and Joey's lay at the small of my back.

Nobody led me.

I walked in.

The room went quiet in a ripple, table by table, as the parish ladies saw me.

I kept my chin up and my hand on the round of my stomach, and I crossed the carpet to Wanda.

She hugged me hard enough to bend my ribs, and then she bent and kissed my stomach.

"Hello, my girl," she said to it.

Beside her, small and upright, in a navy dress with a rosary pin, stood the brothers' mother.

She took my face in her scarred hand, kissed my forehead, and said nothing at all.

She did not need to.

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