He Thought I'd Forget novel · Chapter 9 of 32

Chapter 9: Butler Street

Clark's shop was a brick garage on Butler Street with a rolling door and a hand-painted sign over it.

You could barely read it.

TASK R WOO WORK, it said, in flaking green.

"It came with the building," Clark said. "I keep meaning to fix it."

"For how long?"

"Six years."

I stood on the sidewalk with Davey on my hip and looked up at it.

My attorney had told me to stay somewhere quiet until Monday.

She had filed for an emergency hearing that morning with the lab report stapled on top.

She'd said, "Don't call him, don't text him, don't post anything, and don't go near that woman."

Jeanine had said, "Go somewhere that isn't my couch before you start reorganizing my spices again."

So Clark had brought me here.

Inside, it smelled like sawdust and coffee and something sweet.

His shop hand, a quiet guy with headphones, nodded at me and went back to sanding a table leg.

Clark set up a playpen in the corner made of clamped-together crib rails.

Davey stood up in it immediately and yelled at the table saw.

"Not that," Clark told him. "Ever."

Davey sat down.

"How did you do that?"

"Practice," Clark said. "I tell my shop hand the same thing."

He had old cans of sign enamel on a back shelf.

Green, cream, black.

He had brushes too, still in their paper sleeves.

"I bought those three years ago," he said, not looking at me. "When you told me you used to paint signs."

"I told you that?"

"About once a month."

He set up the ladder.

I went up it with a brush in my teeth and a can hooked on the rung.

I hadn't held a lettering brush in seven years.

My hand closed around it anyway.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Thought I'd Forget from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.