Taken While I Slept by My Stepbrother and His Friends novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: Sunday
My mother cooked for two days.
She made my dad's brisket, the one he smoked for nine hours every Labor Day.
She made it from a recipe card in his handwriting she'd found in the file cabinet.
She made her potato salad.
She made the lavender-honey lemonade, a whole pitcher, and set it in the middle of the table with nobody's hands near it but hers.
"Pour your own," she told everyone. "I'm told that's the rule in this house."
Kipp brought a cake.
It said CONGRATULATIONS ON NOT BEING ARRESTED in blue icing, and the last word slid down the side.
"The bakery lady asked who it was for," he said. "I said, it's complicated, ma'am."
Zane ran the smoker with my mother.
She kept slapping his hand away from the brisket.
He kept letting her.
Torin arrived last with a small cardboard box and a screwdriver in his back pocket.
"Every camera inside this house is gone," he told my mother. "I took them out myself on Thursday. The outside ones only look at the street."
"Not the hallway?"
"Especially not the hallway."
My mother looked at him a long time.
Then she hugged him, and he stood there with his arms out.
Gage carried the table out to the pool.
The pool was the real surprise.
They'd spent every weekend in September draining it, chipping out the old plaster and relining it.
The four of them did it in boots and goggles, with a crew Zane knew from his football days.
New white plaster.
Blue tile along the waterline, the same blue as the letters on my dad's old wall.
On the first step in the shallow end, set into the tile, was a tiny square of blue the size of a playing card.
A pebble sat at one end of it, glued down.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Taken While I Slept by My Stepbrother and His Friends are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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