Chapter 13: The Morning Chat

I walked back up the drive with my heart going and nowhere to put my hands.

Every step took me further from the mailbox, and the lines of text above my head got thinner as I went.

【Pete: Cream Buick at Pine Point since 7:40. Brock's mother. In a church coat. On a Sunday that is not church.】

【Pete: Pool: what's in the envelope? Check, 3 to 1. Summons, 5 to 1. Cookies, 20 to 1.】

【Helen: It could be a casserole.】

【Pete: It's an envelope, Helen.】

Then the bars gave out, and the pines closed over the road, and the only voice left was my own.

Mrs. Dettmer rose from the porch step.

She was small and straight, with a navy church coat buttoned to the throat and a purse held in front of her with both hands.

"Britta," she said, as if she were taking attendance.

"Mrs. Dettmer."

She looked at the flannel, which came to my knees.

"That is a man's shirt."

"It's warm."

"I won't keep you." She held out the envelope. "I have a proposal."

I took it, because my mother raised me to take things handed to me, and opened the flap.

Inside was a cashier's check for forty thousand dollars, payable to me.

Behind it was a typed page with a signature line.

I read it standing up.

"'I regret my remarks at the Class of 2016 reunion,'" I read.

"'They were made in grief over my grandmother and are withdrawn.'"

"'I wish Brock and Shayla a long and happy marriage.'"

"It's for Channel 9," Mrs. Dettmer said. "One call, and you sign."

"Grief."

"It gives you a way out."

"It's a nice font," I said. "They spelled Pfeiffer right. That's more than I got at my own rehearsal dinner."

Her mouth went thin.

"There's a second condition," she said. "You leave the county by Friday, and you leave my other son alone."

"Whose idea was this?"

She hesitated for exactly one breath.

"Shayla brought it to me," she said. "I said yes before I read it."

That was the first honest thing a Dettmer woman had ever said to me, and it didn't make me like her.

The screen door creaked behind me.

Emmett stood in the doorway in jeans and nothing else, with a mug of coffee in each hand and his hair pointing in four directions.

He had put on pants.

That was the full extent of the effort.

"Mom," he said.

She looked at the scar up his ribs, and the other scars, and then at me in his shirt.

Something in her face closed.

"You stood up in front of two hundred people," she said, "and called your brother a liar."

"I answered a question."

"Your father watched it on his phone four times last night."