Lady Boss Takes on Vegas Bullies! novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Walter's Chin

"Don't," I said.

"Don't what?" Dot let go of my chin. "Say your grandfather's name? He's dead, honey. He's not listening."

She pushed Bessie into the supply closet at the end of the hall, and I followed.

It was a narrow room full of mop heads and toilet paper.

She shut the door and sat on an upturned bucket.

"I cleaned his floor for nineteen years," she said. "The private floor. The forty-first."

"I know," I said. "You used to leave cocoa outside my door."

I hadn't planned to say it.

It came out of me like a cough.

Dot's face crumpled and then fixed itself.

"You were nine," she said. "You didn't talk for three weeks after your mother. I'd put the mug down and knock twice and go. And one morning the mug was empty and there was a drawing next to it."

"A horse."

"A terrible horse. I kept it."

She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist.

"I knew Monday," she said. "You walk the way he walked. You hold your mop like it's a fishing rod, like you've never been told it's work. But when you said to Finnegan that he spilled it, with that chin up, I thought, well, there's Walter's girl."

I sat down on a case of paper towels.

"Does anyone else know?"

"Not from me."

"You won't tell?"

"Honey," Dot said. "I've kept worse secrets for better reasons."

I told her the rest.

I told her I had paid people to find the truth, and that it was a janitor with a bucket who had found it faster.

"Your grandfather would have laughed himself sick," she said.

"Would he have been angry?"

"Oh, furious. At Finnegan, at himself, at you for taking so long." She grinned. "Then he would have brought a mop down here himself and made a speech."

"Who else knows you're down here?" she asked.

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