My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Say It Anyway

We spread the whole of it across Enid's kitchen table on Monday night, the night before the Settling.

There was the pharmacist's box of refill scans, brought in a laundry basket from her garage.

There was the dead driver's black delivery book from the shoebox.

There was Enid's flat house ledger, out of its dish towel, with forty years of the crew's first-of-the-month pay-outs in a clerk's neat hand.

I laid them in three rows.

I counted them, because it is what I do.

"March, the year she died," I said. "Four hundred and one."

Enid ran her finger down the pay-out column and stopped.

"Four hundred and one," she said. "Paid out on the first, in the book, to a family in Centerville. I never knew the family."

"There isn't one," I said.

"No, love. I see that now."

I turned to the pharmacist's scans.

She had printed every refill sheet from that year in small gray type.

On the first of March the schedule-two count read four hundred and one.

I laid the two pages side by side and did not say anything for a while.

"It's the same number," Enid said, quietly.

"Every month for fourteen months," I said. "The driver's book says which bottles went out. Your book says what Bram wrote down to cover them. The scans say what came off the hospital's sheets."

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