The Seventh Time novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Forty Paychecks

The farmer next door bought my grandmother's house on Monday morning, in her kitchen, without sitting down.

His name had been on the mailbox across the road for forty years, and he had wanted her ninety acres for thirty of them.

He stood on her linoleum in rubber boots with his cap in his hands and said a number.

It was a fair number, and it was one million, five hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and it would close on the twenty-eighth.

"Your grandmother would have sold me the back field for a pie," he said. "You don't owe me anything. But I'll keep the peonies."

I shook his hand.

It was dry and warm and as rough as bark.

"She'd like that," I said, and that was the end of it.

I drove back into the city with the window down so I wouldn't cry on the highway.

Pete called while I was parked outside the music shop on Detroit Avenue.

"You need to come to the warehouse."

"Is it the client?"

"It's worse. Or better. I don't know. Just come."

At the Flats, Pete stood in the middle of the dock with an envelope in his fist.

The old forklift driver stood beside him holding a coffee she hadn't touched.

"Midwest Fresh took their pallets," Pete said. "That's a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a month we don't have."

"I had a plan for November's payroll," he added. "It was a bad plan, and it involved selling my truck."

"Pete."

"He came at seven," he said. "Killian. In a suit, on foot. He put a cashier's check on my desk for two hundred and twelve thousand dollars."

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