I Woke Up at the Altar and Said No to the Mob Heir Who Let Me Die, but He Remembers Too novel · Chapter 12 of 40

Chapter 12: Closing Sale

"You can't close," I said.

"Watch me." Una laughed, and it cracked. "I've been watching me for two years."

"I have money."

"I know you have money. It's under your floorboard. You think I can't hear you prying it up at midnight?"

"Then take it. Take eighteen."

"No."

"It's a loan."

"No." She put her beer down hard. "That's your da's money, Orla. That's what he left you when they put him in the river. I'm not paying my landlord with a dead man's insurance."

"He'd want..."

"You don't know what he'd want. You were fifteen."

That shut me up.

She looked at the red envelopes.

"I'm not asking your fella, either, before you think it."

"He's not my fella."

"I know. That's why I'm not asking him."

I sat there in the dark with her for a long time.

Then I got up and turned on the lights.

"How long till the end of August?"

"Twenty-six days."

"How much do we make in a good week?"

"In June? Fourteen hundred. In August? Nobody gets married in August. Nobody gets hemmed."

"Then we make them."

"Make who?"

"Everybody," I said.

We started Saturday.

I made a sign for the window on the back of a pizza box.

ALTERATIONS WHILE YOU WAIT. ANY HEM, ANY ZIPPER, 30 MINUTES OR IT'S FREE.

Una read it and groaned.

"Thirty minutes? You'll kill us."

"I did yours in seven."

By eleven there was a line on the sidewalk.

Bus drivers with uniform pants. Nurses with scrubs. A man with a leather jacket he'd had since 1988. A grandmother with fourteen curtains.

We ran both machines and my mother's at once.

Nessa stood on a milk crate at the counter with a clipboard and took names. She couldn't write, so she drew each customer instead.

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