He Paid a Million for One Night, and the Contract Was Signed by My Mother novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Sewing Room

My mother's sewing room was the back half of a shotgun house on Iberville Street, and it smelled of steam and machine oil and chalk.

I let myself in through the kitchen at ten past nine, still in the black gown, with Soren's truck at the curb behind me.

I had told him to leave.

He had.

I'd watched his taillights go down the street and still felt where his hands had been.

Odalys Landry sat at the Brother typewriter by the window with pins in her mouth and a half-hemmed ball gown across her knees.

She was fifty-four, small, and gray at the part of her black hair, and she did not look up.

"Coffee's on," she said around the pins.

"Maman."

"Sit."

I sat on the cutting table the way I had since I was six.

The typewriter was an old beige Brother, older than I was, with a lowercase e that sank below the line every time she struck it.

It had typed my permission slips, my report cards' envelopes, my college forms.

I knew that dropped e the way I knew my mother's cough.

I looked at the paper rolled into the carriage.

It was a hem schedule for the Verlander ball, and every e in it dropped.

"Did he hurt you?" my mother said.

"No."

"Good," she said.

"He kept every line I wrote in the margin," I said.

She took the pins out of her mouth and put them in the cushion on her wrist, one at a time.

Her hands did not shake.

They never shook.

"Good," she said again.

I waited for something else.

I'd sold a night to a stranger for my mother's debt, and I had walked into her kitchen in the morning in last night's dress, and she looked at me the way she'd have looked at a customer who'd come to pick up a hem.

"You're not surprised," I said.

"At what?"

"At any of it," I said. "That he asked. That I said yes. That the hospital's paid."

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