He Gave Me $18, So I Left Him with Nothing novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Left With Nothing

Constance took out a checkbook and a gold pen.

Her hand did not shake as she wrote.

The whole room watched her tear the check out and lay it on the cloth.

"Fifty thousand dollars," she said. "That is more than you have ever held in your life. Take it, and sign the new agreement, and we will all go on."

She pushed it across the table with one finger.

It stopped by my plate.

Fifty thousand dollars, in her small upright hand.

I looked at it for as long as it took to hear every guest in the room breathing.

Then I picked it up between two fingers and slid it back down the table, the whole length of the cloth.

It stopped against her water glass.

"No, thank you," I said. "I have my own money."

"Katherine."

"It's from the yard. It was mine already."

I heard a man by the wall laugh, short and low, and then try to stop.

Constance rose.

She stood with both hands on the table, and for the first time I saw her chin shake.

"I kept this family together," she said. "I kept this town fed. Your father could not tell a profit from a loss, and I carried that yard on my back for twenty years."

"You carried it to Michigan," someone said.

It was the old foreman, from the wall.

A few people laughed.

"Everything I did was for my children," Constance said.

Her voice had gone thin.

"For Dean. For Lydia. For the name."

"You gave Lydia nine dollars and ten cents," I said.

Constance's mouth opened.

She looked down the table for her daughter, and Lydia was standing in the kitchen doorway with her apron already off.

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