My Ex-Husband's New Wife Asked Me to Take Him Back novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Recliner

Wim admits the whole town has known for years that Gabe spent Saturdays in his store, and Adele texts an invitation to lunch.

My father's recliner sits in the front room of the house on Orchard Street, facing a television he never turns on.

By six that evening he was in it, with the footrest up and a bag of frozen peas on his new hip.

I stood in the doorway with a casserole dish of Bernie's goulash.

I hadn't taken my coat off.

"Say it again," I said. "From the beginning."

"You heard me the first time."

"I heard you say Adele came to see you in September, and I was too busy to be angry in front of Bernie."

"I wasn't going to say it in front of Bernie." He shifted the peas. "It was the eighth. A Tuesday. She brought a pie."

"What kind?"

"Does that matter?"

"I want the whole thing, Dad."

"Rhubarb." He took off his glasses. "She sat right there on the ottoman and told me she was leaving Gabe. She said it was the hardest thing she'd ever done and she'd done it with her eyes open."

"What did she want from you?"

"She wanted me to call you home."

I put the casserole on the TV tray, because my hands needed something to do.

"You didn't," I said.

"I did not."

"Why not?"

"Because it wasn't mine to do." He wiped the lenses on his apron, slowly. "I told her, honey, I love my daughter, but nobody tells her where to stand. You tell her you want a thing and she goes the other way out of spite."

"That's not true."

"You moved to Chicago because Gabe said 'go if you have to.'"

I opened my mouth and shut it again.

He put his glasses back on.

"I told Adele to ask you herself," he said. "If you were going to be handed to a man, you'd rather hand yourself."

I sat on the arm of the couch.

My knees weren't quite working.

"You could have warned me," I said.

"I broke my hip on the first of October. You came home on the seventh. I didn't know she'd turn up in the store before I could say a word."

"You knew she was going to turn up at some point."

"I know that now."

He looked tired.

He looked, for the first time since I got home, like a man of sixty-six with a stranger's bone in his leg.

I felt my anger slide a little sideways.

"Dad," I said. "Does the whole town know?"

"Know what?"

"About Gabe."

He didn't answer right away.

"Know about the separation?" he said. "No. Adele and Gabe were quiet. He wouldn't say a word, and she wouldn't say a word against him."

"I meant the other thing."

My father looked at the dead television.

"Susie," he said. "Gabe Lundeen has come into my store every Saturday morning for five years."

"He's your electrician."

"He's my electrician when I need one. The rest of the time, he fixes my gutters."

"Dad."

"He rebuilt the paint counter in the spring. He rewired the sign in the window. He put a new compressor in the walk-in cooler I don't even sell cold drinks out of."

"You never told me."

"You never asked about him."

"Because I couldn't."

"I know it." He said it gently. "I never took your side or his, honey. I took the store's. He's the only person in this town who'll fix the store for free and not pretend it's a favor."

My eyes stung, and I looked at the peas.

"Did he ever ask about me?"

"Not once," my father said. "Not in five years."

I laughed, a short wet sound.

"He'd sit on that stool by the key machine," Wim said, "and I'd say your name, in a sentence, on purpose. About Chicago. About your promotion. And he'd just go still."

"Like a deer."

"Like a man waiting to be told it's safe to look."

I turned that over.

It hurt, in a way I didn't want to name.

"Bernie knew," I said.

"Bernie knows what color socks the pastor has on."

"Everybody knew."

"I wouldn't say everybody."

"Dad."

"The prayer list at church had a line on it one winter," my father admitted. "For the Haverkamp and Lundeen situation. Nobody wrote our names."

I put my face in my hands.

When I came out of them, he was smiling, and then he stopped.

"I'm not trying to push you," he said.

"I know."

"If you want him gone from my building, he's gone."

"I don't want him gone."

It was out before I could stop it.

We both looked at the dead television.

"All right," my father said, mildly. "Then he stays."

"For the panel."

"I'm not going to be handed to anybody, Dad."

"Good," Wim said. "I'd think less of you."

I got up and put the goulash in the oven.

I stood at his stove, in the kitchen where my mother had picked out the blue tile, and stared at the burners until they came on.

My phone buzzed against my hip.

It was a number I didn't know.

Hi, it's Adele. Bernie gave me your cell, don't be mad at her. I'd like to take you to lunch on Saturday, or really I'd like to make you soup. My sister's place in Holland. No agenda, I promise.

A second text came right behind it.

Okay, one agenda. I'd like you to hear the whole thing from me instead of the town.

I read it twice.

From the front room, my father called, "Who is it?"

"Nobody," I said.

He started laughing, and the footrest rattled.

"That's what I told my mother the first time a girl called the house," he said. "Eat something."

I typed with one thumb.

What time?

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