My Family Wants Me Gone, I Take Their Luck With Me novel · Chapter 17 of 32

Chapter 17: The Night

I didn't go up the hill in the morning.

I went downstairs at five thirty and started the coffee.

Clarissa's deadline came and went somewhere between the pancakes and the lunch rush.

My phone stayed quiet all day. That was worse than a call.

At ten, I sat down with the bait-shop owner at the counter and told him the whole thing.

He listened with his hands around his mug.

"Fire," he said when I finished.

"That's what she said."

"Old piers catch fire." He snorted. "This pier's been standing since 1926. It's had three storms, a war and Arlo."

"I'm serious."

"So am I." He set down the mug. "I've got a camera on the lot. Put it up after somebody stole my outboard motor. Ugly thing. Works."

"Does it record?"

"Records everything. Mostly gulls."

The fishermen said they'd walk the boards at night, one at each end.

The nurse said she'd tell the night crew at the firehouse to keep an ear open.

Nobody asked me why my sister would say something like that.

Nobody told me to go home, either.

At noon, the chalkboard said SIGNATURES: 704.

At five, a minivan pulled into the lot.

Marigold came down the stairs with a sleeping bag twice her size and her carousel backpack.

She stopped in front of me on the diner step.

"Don't let Uncle Arlo cook dinner," she said. "He burns the garlic bread. Every time."

"I heard that," Arlo said from the kitchen.

"You were supposed to."

She hugged my waist hard and ran for the van.

Arlo came out and stood beside me while it pulled away. He waved until it was gone.

Then the lot was empty, and the diner was empty, and it was just the two of us and the gulls.

He didn't look at me.

I didn't look at him.

"So," he said.

"So."

"I'm going to make dinner."

"She told me not to let you."

"She's eight. She doesn't know everything."

He burned the garlic bread.

I laughed so hard I had to sit down on a stool.

He scraped the black off with a knife and served it anyway, with spaghetti, at the counter.

He lit one of the storm candles and stuck it in a coffee mug.

"This is the nicest date I've ever been on," I said.

"You were engaged to a millionaire."

"He took me to dinner on his phone. I watched him answer emails for seven years."

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