The Unsent Appeal novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Appeal

The clerk at the registry slid my license across the counter at eight-fifteen on Monday.

Eight years of never asking had cost forty dollars and one photograph.

I looked at the picture. My hair was flat, and I looked tired, and I looked like a person who was going somewhere.

"Congratulations," the clerk said, without looking up.

I walked out into the parking lot and stopped beside Elliott's truck.

He held out the keys.

"Your seat," he said.

I took them.

My hands shook a little, but not the way they had in the empty lot.

I adjusted the mirror, found the brake, and turned the key.

The engine caught.

I pulled out onto the road, and I drove.

The streets of Quincy came up one by one, the ones I'd ridden in the back seat of other people's cars for eight years.

The pharmacy. The bakery with the green awning. The long hill down to the water.

At the third light Elliott said, quietly, "This is Hancock Street."

"I know."

"We don't have to take it."

"Yes," I said. "We do."

I turned onto it.

It was an ordinary road in the daytime, with parked cars and a bus shelter and a man selling flowers from a bucket.

I slowed to twenty without being told.

Up ahead, a man stepped off the curb at the crosswalk, walking a bicycle.

He was perhaps sixty, in a yellow jacket, and he glanced both ways with great care.

I put my foot on the brake early and stopped well back from the white lines.

The man lifted a hand to me in thanks, and he crossed the whole street, slowly, with the bike ticking beside him.

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