My Mother Married Into Four Brothers, and Each One Says I Saved Him novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: Bertha's Kitchen
Kasper cleared the dike in one sentence.
"Everybody to your gates," he said, in a voice I had never heard from him, "and nobody says a word about this to anyone."
The crew went.
Soren stood with his hands open, and Kasper looked at him for a long, flat moment, and then Kasper looked at Ansel's arm.
"Take her somewhere," he said to his youngest brother. "Not the house."
Ansel drove me two miles up the dike road in his truck without speaking.
He stopped in front of a small gray house with a sagging porch and a dead hydrangea by the steps.
It was my grandmother's.
I had a key on my ring, because my mother had asked me to look in on it.
I had not been able to make myself go.
The door stuck.
Inside it smelled of cold and dust and lemon oil.
The furniture wore white sheets, and the old calendar still hung on the kitchen wall, turned to a month three years gone.
Ansel stood in the middle of the linoleum with his sleeve still rolled and his hands hanging.
"Tell me," I said.
"You know."
"I know the arm. I want the rest."
He sat on the kitchen chair that nobody had covered, and I sat on the table across from him, close enough to touch.
"My mother died the winter before," he said. "February. I was ten. My father didn't speak for a month."
"I'm sorry."
"The harvest flood that fall was the first one without her," he said. "We were all out on the dike."
He looked at his hands.
"Kasper was sixteen, with the crew. Eero was in the pump house. Soren and I were on the reservoir end."
"In a yellow slicker," I said.
His head came up.
"I saw a boy in a yellow slicker, with his hood up. I never saw his face."
"That was Soren."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Mother Married Into Four Brothers, and Each One Says I Saved Him are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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