Kiss Me One Last Time novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Lester's Porch

Suzette's mother's old friend takes her in and tells her how her mother's house was signed away at her father's funeral. Her stepmother sold it last month, and the buyer was her husband.

The rideshare dropped me in front of a brick rowhouse on Fisk Street at noon.

The porch next door was swept clean, and a man in a gray cardigan was sitting on it with a thermos.

He stood when he saw the suitcase.

"Suzette," Lester said.

I had not seen him in seven years.

He was sixty-seven now, bald as an egg, with white eyebrows and reading glasses on a cord around his neck.

He had run the pharmacy on Butler Street for forty years, and he had known my mother since before I was born.

"I'm sorry to show up like this," I said.

"Don't you apologize to me."

He came down the steps and took the suitcase out of my hand.

His eyes went to my arm, to the gauze and the bruise spreading under it.

"Come inside," he said. "I've got soup."

He had a spare room made up with a quilt I recognized.

My mother had made it.

"She left it with me before the hospital," Lester said. "She said you'd come for it someday."

I sat on the edge of the bed and held the quilt in my hands and could not speak.

Over soup in his small kitchen, I told him everything.

I told him about the donations, and the cancer, and the letter, and the sugar bowl.

He did not interrupt once.

When I finished, he took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"I should have come for you years ago," he said.

"You wrote me every Christmas."

"I should have come."

"Lester." I put down my spoon. "Next door is my mother's house."

"Yes."

"I haven't seen it since the funeral."

He nodded slowly.

"Roberta had me sign it over," I said. "I was nineteen. My father was in the ground an hour. She put a paper in front of me in the church basement and said it was for the estate taxes."

"I know," Lester said.

I stared at him.

"I was in the basement," he said. "I stood at the coffee urn and watched you sign it. I thought it was a trust form. By the time I understood, Roberta had her lawyer, and a nineteen-year-old with no money couldn't fight her."

"You never told me."

"I told you in the letter every Christmas that the house was yours in your mother's heart." He grimaced. "A coward's sentence."

"I don't want it in my heart," I said. "I want it in my name."

He looked up.

"I have until Christmas, Lester. I want to spend it in my mother's kitchen. And I want Roberta to stand in front of people and say how she took it."

"That's a lot to want in three months."

"It's the only thing I want."

That wasn't true.

I wanted a kiss from a man who had laughed at me.

But I could only fight for one thing at a time.

Lester got up and went to a drawer.

He came back with a key on a loop of red yarn.

"Your mother gave me this the week before she died," he said. "For the day somebody needed it."

I closed my hand around it.

It was warm from the drawer, and it was heavier than a key should be.

"It won't open the front door," Lester said. "Roberta changed those locks the week after the funeral. She's rented it out twice, and left it empty ever since."

"Then why give it to me?"

"Because your mother asked me to."

Through the window, I could see the front steps of the house next door.

The paint on the door had peeled to gray.

A For Sale sign hung crooked from the porch rail, and across it someone had stuck a strip of paper that said SOLD.

"Lester," I said. "When was that put up?"

His face changed.

"Last month," he said. "I meant to tell you. I wasn't sure how."

"Who bought it?"

"I didn't see the paperwork."

"Lester."

"A man came to look at it," Lester said. "Tall. Navy suit. Roberta walked him through the rooms herself. I went out to the porch and told him it was a good house, and he gave me his card."

He pulled a small white rectangle from the cardigan pocket.

The card was thick and expensive.

I did not need to read the name.

I knew the font.

I had picked it out myself, for our wedding invitations.

Hollister Surgical Supply, it said, and under that, Finley Hollister, President.

Lester laid it on the table between our soup bowls.

"Your husband bought your mother's house," he said, "and he didn't tell you."

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