My Dad's Best Friend Moved Into My Spare Room After His Divorce, and the Promise He Made My Father Lasted Four Days novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Quiet

Ed hit his head on the rafter at the top of the attic stairs.

He said a word my mother wouldn't have allowed in the house.

"Duck," I said.

"I'm ducking."

"You're ducking after."

"That's the only time I know to do it."

My bedroom was the whole upstairs of the bungalow.

It was a low room under a slanted roof, with one window on the north side.

The double bed had an iron headboard that had never once been quiet.

The bed was unmade.

There was a pile of laundry on the chair and a hail-damage report open on the floor, and I did not care.

Ed stood in the middle of it all with his head bent under the beam and looked around.

Below us, Walter barked once at the foot of the stairs.

He couldn't climb them.

He'd made it clear he found that unreasonable.

"It's smaller than I thought," Ed said.

"It's the whole house, in miniature. Cozy."

"It smells like you."

He turned slowly, and his eyes stopped on the far wall.

An oval mirror in a cracked walnut frame leaned against it, taller than I am, with a bedsheet draped over it from top to bottom.

He looked at the sheet.

Then he looked at me.

"Don't," I said.

"I'm not."

"It was my mother's. It was on her dresser. I covered it the week of the funeral."

"I remember," he said. "I carried it up here for you."

"I haven't taken it off."

"I know."

He didn't say anything else about it.

He came across the room instead, ducking under the beam this time, and took my hand and placed it flat on his chest.

"You said you'd tell me what to do," he said.

"I did."

"Tell me."

I pushed him down to sit on the edge of the bed.

I opened the window.

The morning came in, warm and loud, a mower somewhere, a radio playing in Dawn's kitchen across the yard, twelve feet away through a screen.

"We have to be quiet," I said.

"Why?"

"Because Dawn's window faces mine, and she has a bet on this."

He laughed out loud.

I put a finger across his mouth.

"Quiet," I said.

He nodded against my finger.

I took off my shirt.

It was his shirt, the flannel one, and under it I wore nothing, and the light fell on me through the dormer glass.

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