Five of Us at Christmas, But They Only Got Four Cookies novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Boat He Drew

Emmett's POV

By Friday night the sloop was planked to the sheer line.

It was thirty inches long, cedar over a pine frame, with a keel twice as deep as the one in Milo's drawing.

I had built it in the evenings after Joanna drove the boy back to Parma, because my hands needed a job they knew.

On the workbench beside the hull lay four scraps of plywood, each with a sentence in pencil.

Milo, I'm your father.

Milo, your mother and I were once close.

Milo, there's something about your hair.

I had crossed out all four.

The first sounded like a threat.

The others sounded like a man reading from a card.

The shop door creaked and Joanna came down the inside stairs with two mugs.

She set one by my elbow and sat on the stool across the bench.

She had her cardigan pushed to the elbows, and she looked at the sloop for a while before she looked at me.

"It's beautiful," she said.

"It's a toy."

"It's the first thing you've made him."

I turned the hull over in my hands.

"I don't know how to say it to him," I said. "I've tried the words, and they come out like somebody else's."

"You won't say it like a speech." She reached across and put her thumb on the white scar over my knuckle, and rubbed it once. "You'll say it like you say the keel's too shallow. Plainly, and to his face."

I didn't answer.

I couldn't, with her thumb there.

Headlights came up the lane.

She took her mug and went up the stairs without being asked.

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