Small Things You Promised novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: The Fourth

I put my coffee down very carefully.

"You can call me anything you want," I said. "As long as it's true."

Lula thought about that.

She thought about it with her whole face.

"Mommy's Mommy," she said. "You're not Mommy."

"No."

"And everybody calls you Carlie. Missy calls you Carlie. The mail lady calls you Carlie."

"That's true."

"So I want one that's just mine."

She took another bite of doughnut and talked through it.

"Daddy has Lu for me. Nobody else gets to say Lu."

Wiley was standing very still by the coffeepot.

"So I'm going to call you my Carlie," Lula said.

Missy made a sound.

"That's still Carlie, baby," she said.

"No," Lula said, with great patience. "It's my Carlie. It's different."

She went back to her doughnut.

It was.

On the Fourth of July, a year to the night after Ty proposed, we had the party again.

My little house was full to the porch rail.

The old man next door was eighty-five and still growing tomatoes out of spite.

He sat in the best chair on the porch with a plate of them on his knee, telling the apprentice how to grill.

The apprentice had his own truck now, with a magnet sign on the door.

The two men who'd laid their caps down beside his worked for him.

The quiet one was singing at my grill in his beautiful bass.

Nineteen of the thirty-one had come, in church vans driven by church ladies in flag scarves.

The widow from Dodds Avenue sat under my kitchen mini-split with her oxygen cart and a slice of pie.

The board chair had come, too, in a red, white and blue suit, with her cane, which she didn't need.

Ty's mama brought her pound cake and sat with her.

They'd been in the same pew for thirty-one years now.

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