Backstabbing Friend's Self-Inflicted Shame novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: Not for Sale
We reached Muskegon at twenty to six, in the dark, with frost on the showroom windows.
The store was a long low building with a neon sign that said BEDS in my father's own lettering.
He had painted that sign himself, in 1991, for a man who had just lost a warehouse to a fire.
"Stay in the car," I said.
"Greer."
"I'm asking, not telling." I put my hand on his knee. "If you walk in, they see the man from Valeria's video. If I walk in alone, they see a Haldane."
He looked at the lit window at the back of the building.
"Twenty minutes," he said. "Then I come in."
"Fine."
I went around to the loading door, which was open.
An old man sat in a wheelchair in the stockroom with an oxygen tube under his nose and a blanket over his knees.
He was ninety if he was a day, and he was awake and watching the door.
"I wondered who'd come," he said.
"Good morning, sir."
"You have his chin."
"I've been told."
He studied me for a long moment, and I let him.
"My sons say you went out of your mind at a party," he said. "They say your husband has you in a hospital."
"Go on."
"They say I'm to sign with the chain from Ohio, so there's still a business when I'm gone."
"They told you I was in a hospital."
"Tate told them. Your husband has a wonderful telephone voice."
"I'm standing in your stockroom," I said. "Do I look unwell?"
"You look tired."
"I am tired. I'm not mad."
He laughed, and it turned into a cough, and I waited it out with my hands in my lap.
"Your father put me on my feet in 1991," he said when he could.
"After the fire."
"He sent six trucks of stock and said, pay me when you can. I paid him in 1996. He kept the check a month before he cashed it, because he said it was nice to look at."
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