Perfect Husband Act: Now My Wife's Sorry novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: Six Chairs
The east branch library had a meeting room with a broken clock and twelve folding chairs, and five strangers sat in it with their coats on.
Susie had found them in two days.
The receptionist had given Susie the envelopes she opened every month, the ones with checks inside and a first name on the front.
Each stranger had come with the same look.
They were afraid of us.
"I only came because the note had my wife's name in it," said an old man in a Marine cap. "I never told anybody her name."
"Thank you for coming," Audrey said.
She stood at the front, with her hands loose at her sides, and I stood beside her.
"I'm Audrey. This is my husband, Ethan. He's the first name in Travis Bannon's book."
A woman near the back drew in her breath.
"Every month I pay him to keep Ethan in the world," Audrey said. "I think you pay him for someone too."
Nobody answered.
A heavyset man in a work jacket got up and buttoned his coat.
"My father is eighty-one," he said. "He lives with me. If I miss a payment, the lady in the office tells me he'll be gone by morning, and I won't remember why my house is so quiet."
"That's what he told me," I said.
"I don't know who you people are."
"We're the ones who stopped paying him," Audrey said.
The man stared at her.
"You stopped?"
"Two weeks ago. He's standing right there."
Every head turned to me.
I held out my hands, palm up, solid in the light.
"He took thirty days for it," I said. "Not forever. But I'm here."
The man in the work jacket sat down slowly.
The old man in the cap said, "And on the thirtieth?"
I looked at him.
"I don't know yet."
It was the first honest thing anyone in that room had heard in years, and I watched it land.
The receptionist stood up from the last row.
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