Small Things You Promised novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Plan

I texted Wiley back with one hand, lying on the couch with my legs up.

Let her.

I sent him a photo of the LU page on my fridge.

Under one and two, crossed out, I'd written a new line.

4. Small Comforts. Aug 15.

He called me.

"Carlie."

"She wants three hundred people," I said. "She can have them."

He was quiet a long time. I heard the station TV, and somebody laughing in the next room.

"Okay," he said. "Tomorrow's Wednesday. I'll bring dinner."

On Wednesday, Lula came up my steps at five o'clock.

She'd been back with her daddy for barely forty minutes.

She hadn't stopped talking for any of them.

"Daddy says there's a party and old people are going and you're the boss of it."

"I'm not the boss of it. Missy is."

Wiley came up behind her with two pizza boxes and a bag of corn.

He kissed me on the mouth, quick, in front of the whole street.

I looked at the man two doors down.

He had his phone up.

"Let him," Wiley said.

The old man next door had come over with a platter of tomatoes and a pound of bacon.

Wiley was at my grill.

The apprentice and the big installer and the quiet one had come for the pizza.

They were eating corn on my steps, all three in a row.

Missy's evil cat was in her carrier under the table, judging everyone.

Lula was sitting on the old man's knee.

"No," she was saying. "It's not ribbit. Real frogs don't say ribbit."

"What do they say?"

"It depends on the frog."

"What does a bullfrog say?"

She dropped her voice as low as it would go.

"Jug-o-rum."

The old man laughed so hard he had to take off his glasses.

"Do it again," he said.

"You do it."

He tried.

He sounded like a truck going over a bridge.

Lula shook her head at him, deeply disappointed, the way she'd looked at me the day I said I didn't have a frog.

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