They Sold Me to the Crippled War God, So Why Was He Standing in My Father's Barn on Two Good Legs novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: The Locked Drawer
I asked my father about the dryer bin on Thursday, and he dropped his coffee.
I did not plan it that way.
I had gone to the co-op chapel at ten in the morning to work on the reed organ, with my tuning kit on my shoulder and a loose plan to look at things.
The chapel stood behind the co-op office, at the edge of the drying yard, and the key to it hung on a nail inside the office door.
My father sat at his desk with a mug in one hand and a ledger open in front of him.
He looked up, and for one moment his face was the face of a man who has been caught.
Then he smiled.
"Chère," he said.
"You came home."
"I came to fix the organ."
"Of course.
"Of course you did."
I took the key from its nail and did not go out.
"Daddy," I said.
"Where's the dryer bin?"
The mug went off the edge of the desk and broke on the floor.
Coffee spread across the planks, and my father looked at it as if it had come from somewhere else.
"What bin?" he said.
"The one on the sign.
"On the levee road.
"The new bin.
"It's been two years."
"It's in the budget," he said.
"It's coming after the audit."
"What audit?" I said.
"Odile, go fix your organ," he said.
His hands were on the ledger, flat, both of them.
They had gone white at the knuckles.
I thought of what Seb had said, and I watched his hands.
I said, "All right, Daddy," and I went out.
I did the organ.
It was a little reed organ, a hundred years old, with a cracked bellows and yellow keys, and the leather on it had rotted through.
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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