Small Things You Promised novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Chair

The hotel was the big one downtown with the brass doors and the doorman in a vest.

Missy pulled her lime-green hatchback right up under the awning at five to two.

"We're expected," Missy told him, and handed him her keys.

The apprentice climbed out of the back seat with the file box against his chest.

I had my laptop bag and a pillow for my back.

Missy had her cousin's projector in the duffel, just in case.

The board chair was waiting in a small sitting room off the lobby.

She was eighty if she was a day.

She was tiny and straight-backed, in a lilac suit, with white hair set like a helmet.

She had a cane she didn't seem to need.

She didn't get up.

"Ms. Dunlap," she said. "Sit. You look like your back hurts."

"It does."

"Then sit."

I sat.

She looked at Missy and the apprentice.

"Who are they?"

"My best friend. And the man who kept the sheets."

"Good. Everybody sit. I don't like looming."

"You want to know who called me," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Ty Waddell's mother has sat in the pew behind me at church for thirty years."

She folded her hands on her cane.

"She came to my house on Friday and sat in my kitchen and cried. I've never seen her cry. Not at her husband's funeral."

I didn't say anything.

I thought about a sixty-three-year-old woman on her knees on my floor with a butter knife.

"She said her son had done something he couldn't take back," the chair said. "And that you had the paper on it."

She held out one small hand.

"Show me."

I opened the laptop on the coffee table.

I found Thursday, May 28, 8:52 p.m.

I turned the screen to her.

She put on a pair of reading glasses from a chain around her neck and read it.

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