Chapter 23: The Second Toast

Hannah's POV

My mother decided that my father's seventieth birthday should happen twice.

"The first one doesn't count," she said on the phone. "Come up the second weekend in January. Bring the young man with the truck."

Drew drove us to Binghamton in the cab, with the reel in its brown paper wedged between us.

He had packed a bag for three days.

I noticed that he had packed it himself and had not asked if it was too much.

My mother met us at the door and hugged me for a long time.

Then she hugged Drew, who stood stiff with surprise and finally put an arm around her.

"You carry boxes," she said, patting his back. "Good. We have a lot of boxes."

The house smelled of roast chicken and the wood stove.

Joy had driven up ahead of us with a cake in a cooler.

The long table in the dining room was set for five, with the good plates.

At the head of it was a small wicker basket.

"What's that?" Drew asked.

"For the phones," my father said. He had come in behind us, tall and stooped, in his good cardigan. "Nobody leaves this room with one."

Drew took his phone out of his pocket and put it in the basket without a word.

Joy put hers in, and then my mother, and then I did.

My father looked at it for a moment.

"Well," he said. "That's better."

We ate for three hours.

My father told the story of the time he was stuck on a ferry for a day with a cage of geese.

Drew laughed in the right places, and asked a question about the geese, and my father leaned forward and told him all of it.

Near the end, my father stood with a glass of the rye.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Husband Timed Our Marriage, So I Ran Out the Clock from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.