Skipped by the Altar, Taken by His Uncle novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: Since the Funeral
I carried the program into the kitchen and put it on the table between the doughnuts and the coffee.
Connie looked at it, then at my face, and stopped chewing.
Reuben came back in a gray T-shirt, still smiling, and saw it.
The smile went out of him all at once.
"I was looking for a pen," I said.
"Rhea."
"Second drawer. Under the budgets." I opened it to the margin. "That's your writing."
"Yes."
"When?"
"Your father's funeral. I sat in the back pew." He kept his eyes on mine. "Two weeks later, Blaine ended a Rotary speech on a bell over a door. I printed the eulogy and read them side by side."
"And wrote that."
"And wrote that."
Connie took her coffee out onto the porch and shut the door, which for Connie is a hug.
"Three years," I said.
"Three years."
"You knew for three years that I wrote him."
"Yes."
"What else?"
"I've wanted you since that funeral," he said. "Since you stood up in that church and read the room something true."
My hands had gone cold on the table.
"You were with him," he said. "You looked happy. I wasn't going to be the uncle who..." He stopped. "So I read the Courier. Every obituary. Every wedding. That's all."
"And on the dock," I said, "you offered me a deal."
"I offered you a microphone."
"You let me think it was a deal. You let me sign a page that said 'neither may lie,' and you'd been lying for three years."
"I never lied to you."
"You let me sleep with you last night thinking I was the one who decided first."
"You did decide," he said quietly.
"I didn't have all of it. You had all of it. You always had all of it." I stood up. "Four years I let a man hold my words and not say whose they were. I'm not doing it with my own life."
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