My Brother Left Me With the Man He Told Me to Stay Away From, and Then Didn't Come Back novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Sleeping Arrangements

"Nikos," Spiros said, fondly.

"My boy.

"Thin as a nail.

"Come and sit at my table on the fifteenth, and we will settle what is owed, as a family does."

"He sits at mine," Laz said.

"Does he?"

"Until the feast."

Spiros looked at his nephew for a long moment.

Then he smiled at me, and I saw the rose in his buttonhole tremble, and I understood he was enjoying this.

"The fifteenth," he said.

"I am a patient man."

He turned and walked back up the dock, and his men closed around him, and the cars pulled away from the boulevard in a line.

Nikos sat down on the boards as if his strings had been cut.

I did not help him up.

Laz put him in the shed behind Despina's house that night, with a cot and a lamp and the driver on a lawn chair outside the door.

I did not go to see him.

I drove to the cottage on Anclote Road with the window open.

I did not cry once, and when I reached the porch Laz was already there, holding the screen door.

He didn't ask me anything.

He fed me toast and eggs at the kitchen counter, and then he took me to bed and held me.

I lay with my cheek on his collarbone and felt my brother's slap still burning in my palm.

In the morning I woke before he did.

The light came slantwise through the window, thick and yellow, over the iron bed.

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