Chapter 23: The Vacant Chair

Dean's POV

I stayed on her steps until the sky went gray.

She had gone in at three without a word, and the porch light had clicked off behind her, and I hadn't moved.

Where's Daddy.

I said it over in my head until the words stopped meaning anything, and then they meant something worse.

I had been kneeling on a bathroom floor on Pine Street.

I'd been holding her hair back while my son asked for me.

At six I stood up, and my knees nearly gave.

I wrote nothing on her door and left nothing on the mat.

There was nothing I could leave that she'd want.

I drove to Mill Road with the windows down, to feel the cold.

The lot was full at seven in the morning.

There were nearly thirty bikes and trucks, and I knew every one of them.

The long room was lit, and the chairs were stacked against the wall.

The table was bare except for my father's gavel and a yellow pad.

Connie's husband stood at the head of it with his cap in his hand.

He was reading from the pad.

"...twenty-two for," he said, "and seven against. The chair is declared vacant."

My father stood at the end of the table with his hands at his sides.

He had not taken his cut off.

Nobody had asked him to.

When I came in, all thirty heads turned.

"Dean," my father said.

"Pop."

"I did it for you."

I had heard that sentence all my life.

I looked at him across the bare wood, and something in my chest that had been holding for two years let go.

"He asked for me," I said.

"Dean."

"He asked for me. In the car, and in the ER, when they put the mask on."

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