After He Gave Her My Kitchen, I Left Him with Nothing novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Bench

Dorothy picked a bench at the edge of a playground, under a maple tree that was just starting to turn.

Ricky's red scooter leaned against the armrest between us.

He was thirty feet away, hanging upside down from a bar, shouting at the sky.

I sat down with my bag in my lap and a rolled paper tube across my knees.

"You brought something," Dorothy said.

"I promised him a treehouse."

She looked at the tube for a long time.

"You still did it," she said. "After all this."

"He didn't do any of it."

She nodded and pressed her lips together. Her cardigan sleeves were pulled down over both wrists.

"Ask me," she said.

"Whose son is he?"

"Dean's."

She said it to the maple, not to me.

"His brother was working pipeline in Wyoming that whole year. Dean was supposed to look in on me. We were both lonely, and then it wasn't looking in."

"You were married."

"And Dean had a girlfriend who was good at everything and never needed him," Dorothy said. "That was you, Roz. You worked all hours, and you told him you were fine on your own."

I almost answered, and then I let it go.

"Ricky was born, and his father cried on the phone because he'd gotten a boy. Dean sat in the waiting room. He cried too."

"And then Dean married me," I said.

"Joan decided that." Her voice went flat. "His brother was alive. A scandal would have killed him. Joan said Dean needed a wife with a real career, a nice family and no questions. She looked at you and saw the quietest woman she'd ever met."

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