In Love with a Single Farmer-Daddy novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Courthouse Steps

"No," I said.

Kendra stared at me in the middle of Main Street with a truck waiting to get around her.

"You'd put your own grandmother out in the cold?"

"She put me in a storeroom. I'll come to the sale, Kendra. I'll be on the steps at ten."

Her face lit up.

She thought I meant I'd hand the envelope over.

I let her think it.

The courthouse in the county seat is gray stone with twelve steps up to the doors.

By ten on Friday there were forty people on them.

Tax sales don't usually draw a crowd.

This one did, because Kendra had posted that her sister was bringing the money back, and half of Alder Creek drove over to watch.

Roscoe stood one step below me with his hat in his hand.

He hadn't asked me what I was going to do.

He'd only asked what time to have the truck warm.

Mavis was at the top by the auctioneer's folding table, in her church coat and her good pearls.

She saw me with the bank envelope and smiled.

"I knew you'd come round," she said, loud enough for the steps. "Blood is blood."

The auctioneer was a skinny man with a clipboard and a cold.

He read out the parcel.

"Yellow frame house, lot nine, Elm Street, Alder Creek. Owner of record Mavis Garber."

"Opening bid is the taxes owed, twenty-two thousand dollars."

He looked out at the crowd.

"Do I have twenty-two?"

Mavis turned to me with her hand out.

I walked past her hand to the folding table.

I set the envelope down in front of the auctioneer.

"Twenty-two thousand," I said. "Cash. Betsy Ketchum."

Nobody on those steps made a sound.

Then the patty-melt mother, two steps down, said, "Oh my Lord," and somebody else laughed.

"Do I hear twenty-two five?" the auctioneer said.

He looked around.

Nobody else in Morrow County wanted a yellow house with a sagging porch and a seventy-six-year-old woman in it.

"Sold," he said, "to Mrs. Ketchum."

Mavis's hand was still out, empty.

"That's my money," she said.

"It was," I said. "You sold me for it. Now I bought your house with it. I'd call that even, except it isn't."

"You can't put me out."

"I'm not going to."

The crowd leaned in.

"You can stay, Grandma. No rent. As long as you want."

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