My Stepfather Lost Me in a Poker Game, Then I Cleaned Him Out novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Laurent

"Russ pushed you," I said.

My mother's finger went to YES.

"The night you fell. He pushed you down the stairs."

YES.

She pressed it twice, hard, and then her hand dropped into her lap, shaking.

Spelling took everything she had.

I asked her why, and she tried, but her finger only wandered across the board and stopped on nothing.

She was crying again, silently.

"Okay," I told her. "Okay, Mama. I believe you. Sleep."

I was halfway to the door with Andre's truck keys before he caught my arm.

"Where are you going?"

"East Beach."

"To do what? Push him down the stairs?"

"Yes."

He took the keys out of my hand and put them in his pocket.

"Not tonight," he said. "Tonight you stay where she can see you when she wakes up."

So I sat on the floor next to the recliner until the sun came up through the red blinds.

Brandi came at noon on Sunday with a pot of shrimp gumbo and her little boy on her hip.

She took one look at my lip and said a word her son repeated for an hour.

Then she sat down beside my mother and painted her fingernails pink, one by one.

She told her every piece of gossip from the Sandpiper break room while she did it.

My mother laughed.

It was a crooked laugh out of one side of her mouth, but it was a laugh.

I hadn't heard it in fourteen months.

At nine that night Laurent called.

"Are you all right?"

"No," I said. "I need to ask you about the night my mother fell."

He was quiet for a second.

"Come up," he said.

The nineteenth floor was dark when I got there, except for the city light coming off the water.

He opened the door in his shirtsleeves with no jacket and no tie, and he looked at my mouth and said nothing about it.

I walked past him to the glass wall.

"You were at the table that night," I said. "Fourteen months ago."

"Yes."

"Andre says he didn't hear anything."

"Andre was drunk, and losing."

I turned around.

"Tell me what you saw. That's today's true thing."

He stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets.

"At ten past one, Russ said he was going up to check on her," he said. "He was gone twenty minutes."

"And?"

"When he sat back down there were three red scratches on the inside of his left wrist. Fresh."

"He said she was asleep. He dealt the next hand."

My stomach turned over.

"What time did you leave?"

"Three."

"She was found at six," I said. "At the bottom of the stairs. The doctors said she'd been there for hours."

"I know."

"You watched him come down with her fingernail marks on his arm, and you sat there and played cards."

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