Five Years a Fool, A Lifetime Apart novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: Keys
Margo shifted the sleeping boy to her other shoulder.
She looked at the folder in Lorna's hand, and she did not take it.
"No," she said.
Lorna's mouth tightened.
"You haven't heard the terms."
"I heard them in the cafeteria. I heard them again just now. The answer is the same."
"Think of your sister's children."
"I am thinking of them."
Margo's voice carried to the back of the foyer.
"You want me to trade two kids for a house, in a church, at your sister's funeral. You've never loved anything you couldn't sell."
A hundred people made no sound at all.
"Keep the lake house," Margo said. "Sleep in it."
Lorna's hand shook, and the folder shook with it.
"You are an ungrateful girl."
"I'm thirty-four."
"After everything I did for you."
"You put my suitcase on the porch the week my father died."
She lifted her phone with her free hand.
"Do you want to hear what you said in the cafeteria? The whole room can listen."
"Don't you dare."
"Then withdraw the petition."
"I will not take orders from a nurse."
"Then I'll play it for the judge."
Lorna looked around the foyer.
Faces looked back at her from every side, cousins, old friends and the women she had played cards with for thirty years.
None of them lowered their eyes.
A man in a gray three-piece suit stepped out from the pillar.
I knew him from the shower, the president of the Lakeview Country Club.
"Lorna," he said. "A word, while we're all here."
"Not now."
"Now." He said it quietly. "The members met last night. Two hundred and eleven signed. You and Camille are no longer members of the club, effective this morning."
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