Done in Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Six Days
Raylene finds the divorce papers timed to beat her prenup's fifteen-year clause, walks off the Kilgore's stage in front of the town with her daughter and a coffee can of cash, and a man with an envelope pulls up at her window.
Six days before my fifteenth wedding anniversary, I found my divorce papers under a box of pink butcher paper.
It was 4:40 in the morning.
I'd only gone into Darrell's office because the pit room was out of paper and the briskets wouldn't wait.
The box was on his desk.
Under it was a blue folder with my name typed on the tab.
PETITION FOR DIVORCE. Darrell Kilgore versus Raylene Shuford Kilgore.
There was a yellow sticky note on the front in my mother-in-law's round, pretty handwriting.
"Serve her before the 12th. After 15 years she gets half. Mama."
I read it twice.
Then I opened the folder.
Behind the petition was a copy of the prenup I'd signed the week of my wedding, at Doreen's kitchen table, with a cake in the oven.
I'd never read past page two.
Doreen had read all of it.
She'd highlighted one paragraph on page nine in pink.
If the marriage reached its fifteenth anniversary and no divorce papers had been served on me, I owned half of the family's share of Kilgore's.
Half.
Of the seven restaurants I'd built one brisket at a time.
My anniversary was Friday.
I put the folder back exactly where it was.
I put the box of butcher paper back on top of it.
Then I went out to the pit room, because forty briskets were going on at five, and nobody else here knew how to build that fire.
I'd been building it six days a week for fifteen years.
At noon the whole town was on the courthouse square.
Kilgore's had hung a banner across the front of the flagship. DOREEN'S ORIGINAL RUB. NOW IN STORES.
It was my rub.
I'd mixed the first batch in a mop bucket when I was twenty-four.
Three people from Lone Pine Restaurant Group sat in the front row in matching blue polos. They were buying Kilgore's in September for forty million dollars.
A TV camera from San Antonio was set up by the fountain.
My daughter Macey was at the t-shirt table in a Kilgore's shirt three sizes too big, making change and rolling her eyes at me.
I was still in my apron.
There was brisket fat on my forearms.
Darrell stepped up to the microphone in a pressed pearl-snap shirt and his good straw hat.
He looked like the billboards.
He was the billboards.
"Folks, everything we are started with one woman," he said. "My mama."
Doreen rose from her folding chair in her white visor and held up a jar of my rub.
The square clapped.
"Mama built Kilgore's," Darrell said. "She kept the fire lit when nobody else would."
Doreen had never lit a fire in her life.
She didn't like the smell in her hair.
Darrell looked out over the crowd, and his eyes found me at the edge of the stage.
He grinned.
"And there's my Raylene," he said. "Y'all know Raylene. The help that married up."
The square laughed.
The Lone Pine people laughed.
The camera swung over to me.
Doreen leaned toward the microphone.
"Smile, honey," she said. "You're on TV."
I looked at the jar in her hand.
I looked at the gold trophy from Kansas City on the table beside the stage.
Darrell had carried it up there himself last June.
I'd been standing in the back in this same apron, with a burn on my wrist from the turn-in.
I reached behind my waist and untied my apron.
I walked up the three steps onto the stage.
Darrell kept smiling for the camera, but his eyes went hard.
"Raylene," he said through his teeth. "What are you doing?"
I folded the apron once and hung it over the trophy.
Then I leaned down to the microphone.
"The rub's mine," I said. "So was the brisket in Kansas City. Fifteen years is long enough. Y'all can light your own fire."
Nobody laughed this time.
A Lone Pine man in the front row stopped chewing.
Doreen's coral lipstick went thin.
I walked down the steps and straight to the t-shirt table.
"Get your bag," I told Macey.
She stared at me.
"Like, leaving? Or leaving leaving?"
"Leaving leaving."
She grabbed her backpack and the cash box.
"The cash box stays, baby."
She dropped it like it was hot and came with me.
Behind us the microphone squealed as somebody bumped it.
My truck was in the back lot, parked crooked like always.
Under the driver's seat was an old coffee can with three hundred and twelve dollars in it.
Tip money, birthday money, money I'd found in the dryer.
It was the only money in the world that was mine.
I was reaching for the door when Darrell caught up with us.
He didn't yell.
Darrell never yelled where people could hear.
He stood close, smiling, his hand on the truck like he was just saying goodbye to his wife.
"You walk off," he said quietly, "you walk off with what you came with."
"And what's that?"
"Nothing, Raylene. You came with nothing."
He looked at Macey.
"Get out of the truck, Mace."
Macey buckled her seatbelt.
"I'm good, Dad."
Darrell's jaw worked.
He pulled his phone out and typed something fast with his thumb, not looking at me anymore.
I got in, started the engine and pulled out of the lot.
At the stop sign on Main, a gray pickup rolled up beside my window and stopped.
The man driving it was lean and sunburned, with a short gray-shot beard.
There was a manila envelope in his hand.
He leaned across his passenger seat and held it up to my glass.
"Raylene Kilgore?" he said.
Macey grabbed my arm.
I floored it.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend