Chapter 24: The Table

Abram read the name on the envelope upside down.

"Do you want me to open it?"

"No."

"Do you want to?"

"No."

I took it out of the slot.

It weighed almost nothing.

I carried it upstairs and stuck it to the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a paw print.

Biscuit sniffed it, sneezed, and went back to his bowl.

"What are you going to do?" Abram asked.

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"I have a rule," I said. "Ninety days. I don't say yes to a request from my family until I've slept on it."

"That's a request?"

"Everything she sends is a request."

He leaned on the counter and watched me with the half smile that had cost me five years of sleep.

"You're going to leave it there for ninety days."

"I'm going to leave it there until I don't care what it says."

On the fourteenth, the hospital waiting room had green chairs bolted to the floor.

We took up two whole rows.

Colt sat with his work boots tapping.

He had told the tire shop he needed a morning, and the owner had told him to take the whole week.

Shelby sat beside her mother, who had brought a bag of sandwiches nobody wanted.

Abram sat on my left, with his hand on my knee.

He had moved his surgeries again.

This time he had told me first.

The clock over the nurses' station said eleven.

At one o'clock, no one had spoken in twenty minutes.

At two, my aunt started to pray in a whisper.

Colt put his face in his hands.

I did not move.

I looked at the double doors at the end of the hall until the paint on them went soft.

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