Daddy's First Lesson novel · Chapter 21 of 24
Chapter 21: Appetite
"I'm not calling him," she said.
She put the phone in her bag and pulled the zipper shut.
"I don't know what you're going to do tonight," she said. "But I'll be at the front table. Is that what you want?"
"Yes," I said. "Listen to the toast."
"I always do."
"Listen to what he reads out loud."
She nodded, once, and took her garment bag into the back.
By eight o'clock the Deverill Gallery was full, two hundred people in black and silver, glasses in their hands, laughing in the warm bright noise of money.
I stood just inside the door in burgundy velvet with Abram at my side.
My three drawings hung on the long wall by the bar, in plain black frames, side by side.
Abram had lent them back from his office that afternoon, and Lise had hung them herself.
Two hands, one holding a wrist.
A hand around a coil of rope.
A palm held open, asking for nothing.
The card was on the wall beside them.
Lise was behind the bar in her black vest, with her pencil behind her ear, pouring a glass of white wine for a man in a bow tie.
She saw me and didn't smile, but she tucked her chin down once, and I breathed.
"Ready?" Abram said into my hair.
"No."
"Good. Neither am I."
He took my hand and kept it, and we walked into the room.
People looked at us.
I felt the whispers moving ahead of us, and the heads turning.
That's her.
The photo.
The club.
I lifted my chin and kept walking.
At the front table, the young woman in the pale blue dress met my eyes over her mother's shoulder.
Next to her sat a woman in her forties in a dark green dress, alone, with her hands folded very tightly in her lap, by the aisle.
She looked at me, and I knew who she was without being told.
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