My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Granite Street

Cormick's house has a lock on the inside of her door and a tray in the hall; Enid takes her in, and Bram arrives with coffee and suggests the room with the window.

The house on Granite Street was brick, three floors, black windows, with the Orphan Girl headframe standing over it like a gallows nobody had taken down.

Cormick Lanigan had not said a word in the truck.

He drove with both hands on the wheel and the heater off.

I sat with my back against the door and counted the turns.

Left at the church, right at the empty bank, four blocks up the steep hill.

He pulled into a gravel drive, cut the engine and got out without looking at me.

I counted the steps to the porch: nine.

The front door opened before he reached it.

A small woman stood in it, in a cardigan worn through at both elbows.

Her white hair was pinned in a bun, and she had glasses on a chain.

She was past seventy and stood as straight as a fence post.

"There you are," she said to me, as if I were late for supper. "I've got the kettle on."

She did not say hello to Cormick.

He walked past her and up the stairs and out of sight, and I heard a door close on the second floor.

"That's Cormick," the woman said, watching the ceiling. "He's been like that since he was nine. I'm Enid. Take your boots off in the hall."

I took my boots off in the hall.

She gave me tea in a kitchen so warm it hurt my face.

It was a big old kitchen with a coal-black stove and a long wooden table with a scrubbed top.

Somebody had set two places at the table, and while I watched, Enid quietly took one away.

"Is he always like that?" I asked.

"No," Enid said. "Sometimes he's worse."

She said it dryly, and it was almost kind.

She showed me the room at the top of the stairs, in the back.

It had a narrow bed, a rag rug, a small lamp and a window onto the yard.

It had a lock on the inside of the door, a brass bolt, newly oiled.

"That's yours to throw," Enid said. "From the inside. Nobody else has a key to it."

I turned the bolt and listened to it slide.

I turned it back.

I stood in the middle of the room and did what I do when I'm frightened.

I counted.

Two doors on this floor, one at each end of the hall.

Eleven stairs down to the kitchen.

One window with a latch, over a flat roof that a person could drop from.

When I opened the door again, a tray sat on the floor outside it.

There was a bowl of soup, a heel of bread and a cup of tea, and nobody in the hall.

I ate the soup sitting on the bed in my scrubs, with the bond folded in my parka on the chair.

I thought about my mother's key on the felt.

I did not sleep.

At seven in the morning I was standing at the kitchen window with my second cup of tea.

A car pulled into the drive.

It was a camel-colored sedan, and Bram Dacey got out of it with a thermos in one hand and a white paper bag in the other.

He came through the back door without knocking.

"Morning, kiddo!"

Enid, at the stove, did not turn around.

"Bram."

"Enid, you're a saint." He set the bag on the table. "Pastries from the Corner Bakery. I got her the cheese ones."

He poured me a cup of coffee from the thermos before I could say I had tea.

He did it as he had done a hundred times, at the back of the club, in the hospital parking lot, at my mother's funeral lunch.

"How'd you sleep?" he said.

"Fine."

"You're a liar, but I like you." He grinned. "You must be starving. Cor hasn't got the sense to feed a girl in his house, he's been alone too long."

Footsteps came on the stairs.

Cormick walked in with his coat on and his hat in his hand.

He stopped when he saw Bram, and he stopped when he saw me.

His eyes went over my shoulder, to the stove, to the wall.

"Bram," he said.

"Cor. I was just telling her she looks like she's been through a war."

"She's been through a night."

It was the first thing he had said in my hearing since the street, and he said it to the coffeepot.

Bram sat at the table and tore a pastry in half.

"That room at the back, though," he said to Cormick, easily. "I wouldn't put a guest in it. Cold as a well."

He turned to me.

"Put her on the second floor, front, the one with the big window. Enid airs it out every week."

I looked at Enid.

She was holding a wooden spoon very still.

"It's got the light," Bram said to me, warmly. "You'll like it, kiddo. And it's close to Cor's, if you need anything."

My hands went cold around the cup.

I had no reason to be afraid of Bram Dacey, who had never once raised his voice at me.

I couldn't have said what I was afraid of.

I only knew I had spent one night in the cold room at the back with the bolt on the inside, and I did not want to be moved.

"I'm fine where I am," I said.

"Sure you are." Bram's smile did not change. "I'm only saying."

Cormick stood very still in the doorway.

I waited for him to refuse.

I waited for him to look at me and say anything at all.

"Fine," he said.

He said it to the floor.

Then he put his hat on and walked out the back door.

Bram patted my hand across the table.

He said he'd bring a truck for my things, and I should leave the door unlocked so the boys could carry the bed.

I said I'd think about it.

He winked.

When he left a few minutes later, Enid put the pastry bag in the stove without a word and fed it to the fire.

I went up to the cold room and stood at the window.

The yard was white, and the drive ran down to the street.

Bram's sedan was parked at the foot of it, where a man sitting in it could see the front door, the back door and my window.

His engine was running.

He was not going anywhere.

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