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 24 of 24

Chapter 24: Walls

The house had walls.

I stood in the middle of the living room on Saturday the tenth of October with a glass of cheap champagne and looked at them.

They were white, and plumb, and a little rough where the paint hadn't taken.

There were windows in them that opened onto a lot full of goldenrod.

There was a floor under my shoes, hickory, the color of toast.

There was a kitchen with a stove and a refrigerator and a table made of one long slab of oak.

I put my hand flat on it.

"Lenny's," said Ed behind me. "A slab he's been saving since 1998 for something he never built."

Dad stood in the doorway to the kitchen, holding a paper plate of Dawn's cake.

He was looking at the ceiling, trying not to cry in front of a joist.

There were seven of us.

Dawn, on the new couch, with her slippers off and her feet in the lap of the lady from across the street.

Dad's neighbor and her deaf husband, eating a pie on the stoop.

Walter, flat on the hickory with his belly to the sun.

"All right," Dad said. "I'd like to say something."

"Len."

"Sit down, Eddie. I'm sixty and I'm saying it."

He set the plate down.

He held up his plastic cup.

"Thirty years ago," he said, "a skinny kid came into my garage with a split lip and a busted bicycle and didn't say a word for two hours. I taught him to weld. I told him he could have anything in that shop but my wife's pies." He cleared his throat. "He grew up. He grew up into the best man I know. And when his marriage broke and he needed a place, I did the smartest thing I've done since I married Lori's mother. I sent him to the one house in Omaha I knew he couldn't leave."

"You said you wanted me looked after," I said.

"I did. I wanted you looked after by somebody who'd look at you like that." He pointed his cup across the room at Ed, who had gone red to the ears. "I made him swear. I figured it for a week. The lady over there figured Tuesday."

The lady across the street lifted her cup with great dignity.

"And I put a dollar on it myself," Dad said. "I put my dollar on Tuesday. Because I'm a smart man and I know my friend."

Dawn screamed.

She dropped her cake.

Walter lifted his head.

"I paid twenty dollars for a week!" Dawn yelled.

"You were soft on him."

"I have been robbed!"

"To Tuesday," Dad said, and raised the cup, and the whole room said it back, laughing, and Ed looked at me across the walls he'd built with his two hands, and his eyes were wet.

By seven they had all gone home.

I locked the front door behind the last of them and leaned on it.

The house was quiet, and the light through the western windows was low and gold.

← Chapter 23 · All chapters

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend