Chapter 23: Second Housewarming

Natalie's POV

On Saturday at seven, sixty-one of the eighty guests came up my front walk.

I had expected fewer.

Hattie stood at the door in her green coat with a roll of red stickers and a pen.

A glass jar sat on the hall table beside her.

A paper label on the jar read: The Brennan Kitchen.

The first guest through the door was the woman in sequins from the first party.

She wore a plain black dress now, and she held a book against her chest.

"Lot twelve," she said. "Middlemarch. I took it home and I haven't been able to open it."

"Thank you," I said, and I took it.

"I'm so sorry. I thought it was a game."

"I know you did."

Hattie peeled a sticker off the roll and pressed it to her dress.

It said: $500.

"What's this?" the woman asked.

"What you were paid to carry my things," Hattie said. "Jar's on the left."

The woman looked at the sticker.

Then she opened her purse and put five hundred dollars into the jar.

One by one the rest came in.

A man in a loud tie brought back my reading chair's footstool and apologized for the scuff on the leg.

A couple I had never met returned a box of paperbacks they had taken for the weekend.

Everyone got a red sticker with their amount written in Hattie's loud, round hand.

Everyone looked at it, and most of them paid.

Nobody argued, and the jar filled.

By eight I had sixty-one guests in my living room, standing with their red stickers on their coats.

They looked just as they had a week and a half ago, except that none of them were laughing.

Rhys stood against the wall near the stairs with his arms crossed.

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