Chapter 19: Gus's POV

Gus's POV

I packed a duffel bag at ten o'clock that night, and Hattie watched me do it from the bedroom door.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"The store. I'll take the cot in the stockroom."

"It's a Monday."

"Dot's moving in here for the week. She'll take Milo to school."

"That isn't an answer."

I zipped the bag.

"If I'm in the house, you write down every coffee I make," I said.

"I want you to have a week where there's nothing to write."

"That's the dumbest rule you've ever made."

"It's my second."

She didn't say anything. She had the green notebook in her hand and she kept tapping the spine against her thigh.

She sat down on the third stair with the notebook and didn't ask me again.

I kissed her forehead, because I couldn't help that, and went out to the truck.

The cot lived in the stockroom behind the paint, between a pallet of mulch and the shelf of drain traps.

It was a Brannigan Hardware Camp Cot, rated for 250 pounds and built for a man about five foot nine.

I am six three. I put my feet on a bag of cedar mulch and my head on a roll of insulation.

The stockroom smelled of paint and rubber and forty years of my father.

I took my own notebook out of my pocket, the small green one, and opened it to the first page.

Hattie: 0.

Page after page, eight years of it.

Every coffee, every oil change, every night with Milo, and every line ended the same way.

She had kept a ledger of every kindness I did. I had kept one that said she owed me nothing.

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