Chapter 9: Casserole

I showed Nolan the text before I could change my mind.

He read it in the dark, with the sheet around his waist and his jaw like stone.

"Don't tell the rich fella," he said. "That's the whole message."

"That's my father."

"Do you want to answer?"

I thought about a trash bag on a porch in November.

I thought about forty-nine deposits.

"Yes," I typed. "Come Sunday at noon."

They came at noon sharp, in a pickup truck I had never seen.

It was a brand-new, blue, four-door pickup with a chrome grill, and my father parked it right on the circle drive.

My stepmother climbed out in a church dress and a fur-trimmed coat.

Stan Maslowski came around the hood with a foil-covered casserole and a red, wet face.

He was fifty-four, thick through the middle, in the same flannel he had worn the night he threw me out.

"Bridgie," he said. "Oh, baby girl."

He opened his arms.

I stood on the top step with my own arms folded, and I did not go down.

"Dad."

"I've been sick with it. Sick. I saw you on the news and I said to the wife, that's my kid, that's my little girl on the television."

"He said it," my stepmother said, dabbing her eyes. "He was up all night."

I looked at the casserole.

"Come in," I said.

In the dining room, my father put the dish on the polished table and stared at the chandelier.

"Would you look at this place," he whispered.

My stepmother ran a finger along a sideboard and glanced at the silver.

Nolan stood behind my chair with his hands resting on the back of it, and said nothing.

Benji peered from the stairway, one eye around the banister.

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