Life after Goodbye novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: Life after Goodbye

In July my father drove us all out to the lake house, and he insisted on carrying the diaper bag himself.

The house stood at the end of a gravel road under tall pines.

It had a porch that wrapped the front and a view of the water from every room.

It had belonged to my mother's family before it belonged to my father.

Now, by a will rewritten in May, it belonged to a three-month-old.

She was asleep on Cormac's chest.

"First grandchild," my father said, setting the bag on the porch table with ceremony. "The lawyer asked if I wanted to put a condition on it."

"What did you say?"

"I said the only condition is that her mother gets the key until she's twenty-five."

He handed me a brass key on a blue ribbon.

I put it in my pocket, and my eyes stung, and I let them.

Ansel was at the grill in an apron that said Kiss the Cook, which the owner of the bakery had mailed him as a joke.

He had left Dorsey Supply for good in the spring.

Now he ran the small hardware store on Brady Street that my father had bought him.

He burned the first batch of burgers, and he made a face when I laughed.

"Don't," he said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

"Yes."

He laughed too, the first time in my hearing in nine years.

Cormac came and stood beside me at the porch rail with Flora asleep on his shoulder.

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