Taken in My Sleep by My Stepfather David and His Friends novel · Chapter 17 of 24
Chapter 17: The Lumber Yard
On Monday morning I stood inside the door of David's lumber yard and waited for the town to look at me.
It was seven forty-five, and the sky over the stacks was hard and clear.
The yard was a long tin shed with a counter, a coffee urn and a cork board of business cards.
David had unlocked it at six, the way he did every morning of his life.
"You don't have to be here," he said.
"I know."
"Bernard's cooking at the house."
"I know that too. I want to be here."
The first customers came in at eight.
There were three of them, men in work jackets, who had bought nails from David for twenty years.
They stopped just inside the door.
One of them took off his cap.
I held the edge of the counter and kept my chin up.
"Morning, Zelda," said the oldest, a carpenter with white eyebrows and a bad hip. "Morning, David."
"Morning," David said.
"I got a call Saturday night from my niece in Connecticut."
My mouth went dry.
"Did you listen to it?" I asked.
"Didn't have to. She told me what it was." He looked at the floor, and then at me. "I'm seventy-one years old. I've said worse than that into a pillow."
"That's not the same."
"No," he agreed. "Yours was braver. I wanted a pound of two-inch deck screws."
I laughed, and it came out wet.
David was already weighing the screws.
By nine the yard had had eleven visitors.
Nobody was cruel.
A man I'd never seen bought a single sawhorse and left forty dollars on the counter.
A woman I'd known since I was twenty-two came in with a plate of shortbread, and said nothing at all, and hugged me for a long time.
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