Small Things You Promised novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Two Weeks

I stood on the courthouse steps and couldn't say anything.

Wiley waited.

"You didn't ask me," I said finally.

"No."

"Why not?"

He looked at me then.

"Because you'd have said it was no big deal."

I laughed, and then I was crying on the steps of the county courthouse in front of two bail bondsmen and a hot dog cart.

He didn't say anything.

He just stood a step below me so we were the same height, and let me do it.

On Tuesday, September fifteenth, at five in the morning, he drove me to the hospital.

Lula was asleep in the back seat in her frog pajamas, with a pillow and a juice box.

We'd drop her at school after.

"Is Carlie getting her back fixed?" she said, half asleep.

"Yes, Lu."

"Will they glue it?"

"Something like that."

She went back to sleep.

The surgery took an hour and forty minutes.

I remember waking up in a room full of beeping, and a big hand around mine.

He had his watch with the cracked face turned around on his wrist, so he could read it without letting go of me.

"Hi," he said.

"You say that a lot."

"I'm nervous a lot. Around you."

The surgeon came in and said the word "textbook" twice.

He brought me home that afternoon. He and Lula had already moved into my spare room.

Two duffel bags. A plastic bin of frog toys. Lula's light-up sneakers lined up in the hall next to Wiley's boots.

Ty's mama had sent a truck for his recliner and weights in August.

Now it had a blow-up mattress for Lula, and a cot for Wiley that his feet hung off.

"You could sleep with me," I said, that first night.

"You've got four stitches in your back and a pillow schedule."

"A what?"

He held up a sheet of paper.

He'd typed it up. Every two hours, a different pillow, a different side.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Small Things You Promised from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.