Chapter 15: What Russ Paid

Russ's POV

My mother's house in Lake Oswego has a white door with a brass knocker.

I had not used the knocker since I was nineteen.

I used it that afternoon.

She opened the door in a lavender cardigan with her pearls on.

She looked at me from my boots up, as she always had.

"You've come to apologize."

"No."

"Then you can use the side door."

"I'll use this one."

I walked past her into the front hall.

Nolan was in the dining room with a stack of papers and a man in a grey suit.

He looked up with a smile that went all the way to his eyes.

That smile was the first thing he ever learned how to do.

"Big brother," he said. "Look at you. Out of the woods."

"Out of the lake."

"Mom said you'd turn up. Sit down. We were talking about money."

"I heard."

The man in the grey suit gathered his papers.

"I'll give you a minute," he said, and he left through the kitchen.

My mother sat at the head of the table, and I stood.

"Nolan's attorney needs a retainer," she said. "The petition will cost eighty thousand dollars before it is over."

"So?"

"So I have decided to sell this house."

"Mom," Nolan said, and he sounded very sorry about it.

"It is only a house. A mother does what she has to for her son."

I looked at the room.

The china cabinet was still there, and the mantel with the photos of Nolan at every age.

There was one of me, at nine, in the back row of a Little League team.

She had never moved it.

"You'd sell Dad's house for a lawyer," I said.

"For my son's wife."

"For the lawyer who is telling a judge that Ruby is crazy."

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