After I Fully Prepared for the Apocalypse, the Ungrateful Cried with Regret novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: What Beverly Signed

I made them wait for dark before I did it.

By then the yard held fifty-two people, and every one of them had eaten something warm.

We had pulled the crate tables out under the silo lights. The new arrivals sat on the ground in rows with blankets over their knees.

Some of them had stood in the line at the Columbus platform on the twenty-eighth. They had watched the doors close.

I brought my mother out of the warehouse myself, and I stood her in the middle of them.

She was barefoot, and her feet were wrapped in rags.

Chelsea walked beside her. She did not take her arm.

"Everyone here knows who I am," I said. "I'm the woman with the gate."

A few of them laughed, because it was a thing they had called me.

"This is Beverly Hartigan. She's my mother."

Nobody laughed at that.

"She's going to tell you what she signed," I said. "I'm not going to say it for her."

My mother's hands were knotted together under her chin.

"Robin. Not in front of them."

"In front of them. They were in the line."

She looked around at the faces.

I think it was the first time she had been looked at that way by people who did not need her to be kind.

"Twenty-three years ago," she said, "my husband gave our daughter something he shouldn't have."

Her voice was small, and the yard was so quiet that it carried.

"A man from his company came to our door three days later. He had a check. He said the company would pay it every month if I kept Robin at home and told her nothing."

"How much?" a man asked from the back.

"Nine hundred dollars."

"A month?"

"A month. For twenty-three years."

"And you took it."

"I took it," she said. "I paid the mortgage with it. I paid for Chelsea's school. I told myself it was for the girls."

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