They Sold Me to the Crippled War God, So Why Was He Standing in My Father's Barn on Two Good Legs novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: The Waltz
I said it on a Tuesday at noon, in my work shirt, in the kitchen of the mill house with a tuning fork in my hand.
I had come in from the parlor, where I was setting the last of the felts on my mother's piano, and he was at the sink with his sleeves rolled.
"Seb," I said.
He turned.
"I love you," I said.
"It's noon, and it's a Tuesday, and I'm in my work shirt.
"Nobody made me."
He stood with the water running over his hands.
He did not move for a long moment.
Then he turned off the tap and dried his hands on the dish towel, one finger at a time, and set the towel down exactly square with the edge of the counter.
"Thank you," he said.
His voice was rough.
"That's all you've got?" I said.
"I'm composing myself, Odile."
I laughed so hard I had to sit down.
He crossed the kitchen in three strides and picked me up out of the chair, and kissed me against the refrigerator with the tuning fork still in my fist.
It was the best kiss of my life, and it did not once go anywhere else.
The Saturday before Mardi Gras came in cool and clear, with a sky the color of a robin's egg.
The dance hall on Route 82 was packed to the walls.
I counted two hundred and eighty people by the door and gave up.
They had come from three parishes.
The farmers were there in pressed shirts with their wives in sequins.
The priest in a purple sash sat at a table near the stage with the church clerk, eating boudin.
Tessie had come.
She sat at a table by the wall, in a plain green dress, with her hair tied back.
She had been working since Christmas at the feed store in Kaplan, keeping the books.
On a Sunday in January she had come up to the organ loft at St. Rose in the middle of the second hymn.
She sat on the bench beside me without a word.
When it ended she said, "I'm not running from anything."
I said, "I can see that," and we had not said much else.
It was not a year.
It was a start.
She lifted two fingers to me from across the floor, and I lifted two back.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of They Sold Me to the Crippled War God, So Why Was He Standing in My Father's Barn on Two Good Legs are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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