My Father Bet My Year at the Boucherie, So I Signed It Myself and Named the Terms novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Property Tax

In the first week of January Seb tore up the paper at the cypress table, and I made him wait until I had finished my coffee.

It was the one-page typed sheet, with Andrei's neat title and my three lines in pencil.

He had kept it in the drawer by the telephone for eleven months.

"You want to do it, or should I?" he asked.

"I'll do it," I said.

I took it from him and read it through once.

The house is mine and the tax is mine.

In public I am his wife.

In private nobody touches anybody unless I say.

My handwriting looked very young.

I tore the page in half, and in half again, and put the pieces in the stove.

Seb watched them go.

"I'd like to keep the last line," he said.

"I know," I said.

"I'll write it again, if you like."

"I'd like that very much."

The sheriff came back twice that week.

Once he came for Seb's statement, and once for Margot's.

She gave hers in the kitchen with her great-aunt beside her and a tin of crayons in her lap.

I sat in the doorway while she drew.

She told the sheriff about the lollipop, and the truck, and the phone.

Then she looked at him and said, "That's all I remember."

"That's plenty," the sheriff said.

He did not say anything about charges.

He did not need to.

Andrei had not asked for a lawyer a second time, because he was one.

By the second week he was talking to the district attorney in Lafayette about the drivers, the freezer and a night route that had run for eight years.

Blake had stopped asking for his brother.

He had a different lawyer now, from Baton Rouge, who wore a very good suit.

On the fifteenth of January Seb drove into Lafayette and walked into the old men's meeting room at the back of a bar on Jefferson Street.

I waited in the truck with Margot.

He was gone an hour and ten minutes.

When he came out he was carrying a box of papers.

"It's done," he said.

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