I Set the Sheets on Fire, Then the Clubhouse novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: Eleven Answers
At noon the gravel lot was packed with bikes, trucks and people.
Nobody had brought chairs.
The oak table stood alone in the middle of the gravel with the burned shell behind it, and I climbed up on a bench so the back rows could see me.
Thirty wives stood in a ring.
The patches stood inside it, hat in hand.
Dario stood at the head of the table with two men holding his arms, his split lip swollen black.
I opened the ledger.
"Tulsa retainer," I said. "Five hundred dollars a month. Eleven names. When I read yours, you say your answer out loud. Not 'it's complicated.' Yes or no, and what you did."
Nobody spoke.
The first man I read was the young patch, red to the ears.
"I knew," he said. His voice cracked. "I saw them in the stairwell in August. I took the money so I'd stop thinking about it."
His wife was a girl with a toddler on her hip, and she stared at him.
"How much?" she said.
"Fifteen hundred."
"Was that our rent?"
He didn't answer, which was the answer.
"Next name."
The second man said yes and nothing more.
The third said yes and cried.
The fourth, a big man in the middle row, said, "I knew, and I thought it was none of my business."
"It was my bed," I said.
"I know it now."
The fifth was the husband who had brought his wife home a snow globe.
"I knew," he said, and turned to her. "I bought that in a gas station in Tulsa because I felt sick. I'm sorry."
His wife stepped through the ring and took the globe out of her purse.
She handed it to him.
"Give it back to the gas station," she said.
Somebody laughed, and the sound broke the quiet, and it ran around the lot.
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