Two Days Before Our Divorce Was Final, He Wrecked His Car, and the Hospital Called His Wife and Not the Fiancée He Left Me For novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Chicken and Rice

I carried the casserole up Patty's front walk in both hands.

It was chicken and rice.

I'd made the same recipe every Thursday I'd been invited for nine years, and tonight I'd put in extra pepper.

Will had driven me and parked two blocks down, with the radio on and orders to stay put.

"If I hear a scream," he'd said, "I'm coming in."

"If you hear a scream, it's Patty."

The door was open.

Eight women sat in a ring of folding chairs in Patty's living room, with coffee on a card table and a plate of lemon bars.

They went silent when I came in.

I knew every one of them.

I'd been to their daughters' showers.

I'd made their grandsons' birthday cakes.

The oldest was eighty-three and deaf in one ear, and she looked at me over her glasses and said, loudly, "Is that Claire? Sit down, dear, you're letting in a draft."

I put the casserole on the table and sat.

Patty stood at the front of the room in her good cardigan.

"We'll start with our requests," she said. "Please pray for my son Dean, who's home from the hospital and who's had a very hard week."

A murmur went around the room.

"And for Claire," Patty said, "who is here with us tonight, and who has had a hard time understanding that a marriage is something a woman has to keep working at."

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