He Lost His Place Protecting Me, So I Took the Whole Family novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: The Sunday Table
The back kitchen of Kafe Gjoka was ninety degrees on the second Sunday in June.
A dozen women sat in it with their sleeves rolled and their fans going.
I had counted the week by half past ten.
Nine thousand, three hundred and twenty dollars, in ink, on a strip of ledger paper.
It was more than twice what the sack had held in March.
Nobody had said why.
Everybody knew.
When there is a pen on the table, the number stops shrinking.
I put the last stack in the paper sack and folded the top over.
Lule rose from the head of the table, slowly, with her hand on the steel.
She did not take the sack.
She looked down the long row of aunts.
"Who carries it?" she said.
Nobody answered.
The old woman who had folded napkins for thirty years laid her palm on the table.
"The driver carries it," someone said, from the far end. "He always has."
"He has," Lule said. "For six years we handed it to a boy in a leather coat."
She turned to me.
"Today we hand it to the old man's daughter-in-law," she said. "She carries it to Zef Gjoka herself, and she puts it in his hand."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Lost His Place Protecting Me, So I Took the Whole Family are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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