Forbidden Guest House novel · Chapter 20 of 32

Chapter 20: Paid

"Take it how?" I said.

But she was already walking up the lawn to her car, and she didn't turn around.

The porch was still cheering.

I went back into the kitchen and plated fifty shortcakes with my hands shaking.

At one in the morning, Leif and I counted the money on the kitchen table.

Supper club, three nights. June rooms, paid at checkout. The tip jar the man from Iowa refused to take.

Leif stacked the bills by twenties, perfectly square.

I wrote the total at the bottom of the legal pad.

$14,365.

I underlined it three times.

Then I put my head down on the table next to the money and laughed until I cried, and Leif rubbed my back and didn't say a word.

On Saturday at nine I walked into Moen Lakeland Bank with a canvas grocery bag.

The lobby was full, the way it always was on Saturday.

Fishermen at the counter. A family with a new puppy on a leash. The two church ladies at the coffee urn.

Leif held the door.

Behind him came the man from Iowa and his wife, the schoolteachers, and the old man in the plaid sport coat.

They had all asked to come.

I walked up to the first teller window.

The teller was a girl about twenty, with a nervous ponytail.

"I'd like to make a payment on the Solberg mortgage," I said. "Three months. Fourteen thousand one hundred dollars."

I set the grocery bag on the counter.

I took out the money in rubber-banded stacks and laid them in a row.

The lobby got very quiet.

"Cash?" the girl whispered.

"Cash. Count it, please. Out loud."

She counted.

She counted every stack, out loud, with a fisherman reading along over my shoulder.

At four thousand, the church ladies stopped stirring their coffee.

At ten thousand, Erik came out of his glass office.

At fourteen thousand one hundred, the girl stopped and looked up at me.

"That's it," she said. "That's all of it."

"Then I'd like a receipt."

She started typing.

"Signed by the bank president," I said.

The girl looked at Erik.

Erik looked at his mother's door.

Marlys came out of her office in a lilac cardigan.

She walked across the lobby with her soft little smile.

"Kari. Honey. How nice."

"I'm current," I said. "Three payments, cured, two days early. In front of everybody."

"That's wonderful. It changes nothing about the sale."

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