The Northern Wind Couldn't Keep Me novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Dryer Number Six

Tripp crossed the floor and reached for the phone.

Mamie got there first.

She snatched it off the table and held it behind her back, and her chair went over.

"Give it," Tripp said.

"No."

"Mame. Give me the phone."

"You told me you'd cleaned it," Mamie said. "Your words. You said the memo was nothing, that she'd never press play."

"I said she'd never find it. That's different."

"You said it was a joke for her birthday."

"I said a lot of things at one in the morning, and you wrote half of them down."

A man folding towels at the back of the room stopped folding.

I stood up, with the folder against my chest.

"It's in three places, Tripp," I said. "You can't take it from anyone."

He turned on me, and his face was not the face I knew.

It was blotched and shining, with his hair wet from the drive.

"You did this," he said. "You couldn't let one prize go."

"Mamie read my book to four hundred people while you filmed her."

"She was supposed to win it fair!"

"Fair," Mamie said, and her voice shot up. "You handed me your girlfriend's password in a coffee cup. You made me read the notebooks to you in January because you couldn't get through them yourself."

"You wanted to read them!"

"I wanted to be her! You wanted to be somebody who could!"

"Sit down," said a flat voice from the door.

The bell jingled behind it.

My mother stood in the entrance with her cane in one hand and an aluminum bat in the other, and the truck's headlights lit her from behind.

"I said I'd wait in the truck," she said. "I waited forty minutes. Somebody's shouting."

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