Back to the 80s novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: What He Signed

We didn't speak in the car.

We didn't speak through lunch, or through Posy's nap, or through an hour of Ricky's bedroom door staying closed.

At nine that night, with both children in bed, I found Russell in the kitchen.

He was sitting at the long butcher-block island with a glass of whiskey he hadn't touched.

"Tell me what you signed," I said.

He looked up.

"Sit."

"I'd rather stand."

"Then stand." He turned the glass around once. "In the spring of 1983, my wife died."

"I know."

"By June, I'd missed two payrolls."

"I had three hundred men and no cash. Every bank in Fairfield County said no."

"Your father said yes."

"He lent me two million dollars," Russell said.

"He took the yard, the trucks and this house as collateral, and he had me sign personally for every dollar."

"If the yard fails, I lose the house my children sleep in."

The refrigerator hummed.

"And the marriage?"

"His idea, last winter." He met my eyes.

"He said the note was a formality between family."

"He said the day I married his daughter, he'd tear it up."

"Is that in writing?"

"It was a handshake."

"Russell."

"I know."

"You shook on it?"

"I'm not a lawyer, Lorna. I'm a man who drives a truck. Where I come from, a handshake is a handshake."

I put both hands on the island and shut my eyes.

I'd seen men like him in a hundred exams, people who lost everything to a man in a good suit with a smile.

"I told you in the garden," he said. "A bank that stops circling my yard."

"You didn't tell me you'd signed away your children's beds."

"No."

"You let me walk into that church thinking you were a rich man buying a wife."

"I never said I was rich."

"You said you had a yard."

"I do."

"My father holds the paper on it!"

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