My Father Bet My Year at the Boucherie, So I Signed It Myself and Named the Terms novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: Porch Light
I stood at the front window of my mother's house in her old flannel nightgown and watched a man not get out of a truck.
The porch light was off.
The moon was thin over the oaks, and there was frost on the hood of the Silverado beside him.
He sat very still with his forehead almost against the glass.
He had come.
He had said he would not, and he had driven the whole levee road in the dark and parked at the end of my drive, and then he had stopped.
He was keeping the paper.
I knew it all at once.
I had written it in pencil in a pasture, nobody touches anybody unless I say.
He was sitting in the cold with the engine off rather than put one foot on my steps without my word.
I thought of my father with a key to a house he did not own, and of Andrei in my mother's chair.
I put on my coat over the nightgown and my boots with no socks.
I went out the kitchen door and around the side of the house, across the frozen grass.
He saw me when I was halfway across the yard.
His hand came off the wheel and went to the door handle, and stopped.
I walked up to the driver's window and rapped on it with one knuckle.
He rolled it down.
"I told you not to come," I said.
"I know," Seb said.
"You said you wouldn't."
"I know I did," he said.
"Then why are you here?" I asked.
"I wanted to see the light in the window," he said.
"I wasn't going to come in.
"I only wanted to sit where I could tell you were all right."
"I was in the window, Seb.
"I've been standing there five minutes."
"I saw," he said.
"I couldn't get out."
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because it's yours to say," Seb said.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Father Bet My Year at the Boucherie, So I Signed It Myself and Named the Terms are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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