My Husband's Brother Owns My Secret novel · Chapter 22 of 32
Chapter 22: Dressed
The door swung shut behind her.
Her Scotch sat on the bar, full, with a ring of condensation around it.
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
Then Fran finished putting on her coat.
"Hutchinson," she said.
"Don't."
"Hutchinson Winthrop. Like a law firm."
"Fran, I'm begging you."
"I'm gonna put it on a bowling shirt."
The purple satin captain took off his Santa hat and put it on Hutch's head.
Hutch let him.
The bartender picked up Beatrice's Scotch, looked at it, and drank it in one swallow.
"Waste not," she said.
On Tuesday Fran closed the salon early and did my nails.
I sat in her chair by the front window with my hands in a bowl of warm water.
She'd picked the color herself, and she wouldn't show me the bottle until it was on.
Dark blue.
The exact blue of the sheet.
"Too much?" she said.
"It's perfect."
"I know it's perfect. I'm asking if it's too much."
"It's both."
My dress came from the resale shop on Archer Avenue, the one where our mother bought our Easter clothes.
Forty dollars.
Dark blue silk, long, plain, with sleeves.
Hutch owned exactly one suit.
He'd bought it for his grandfather's funeral when he was twenty-four, and it had been hanging in a dry-cleaning bag behind his bathroom door ever since.
On Tuesday night the league found out.
By nine the suit was on the bar under the lights, with four retired mailmen standing around it.
"You don't iron a lapel," the notary said. "You steam a lapel."
"You've never steamed anything in your life."
"I steamed letters open for thirty years."
"That's a federal crime."
"Allegedly."
The pink-cardigan senior sewed a button back on the jacket cuff with thread from her purse.
Hutch stood off to the side in his flannel with his arms crossed, watching strangers fuss over his clothes.
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