He Took My Prison Sentence, So Now My Secretary Is Mine novel · Chapter 14 of 24
Chapter 14: Twenty-One Letters
Ira slept in the guest room with the door open and his cane at the bedside.
The house was dark except for the study.
Yancey stood on the wool rug where Jud had once knelt for him.
He read the twentieth letter again, and again, while the rain slowed against the window.
He had written them all.
He had forgotten what some of them said.
The fourth one was about a man on his tier who kept a sparrow in a coffee can.
The ninth was about his mother's last good week.
The seventeenth was only a list, the names of the bayous they had fished as boys, written out one after another on a page.
Behind him the door opened.
Jud came in with a folded sheet of paper in one hand.
His face was grey, and his eyes were red-rimmed, and he moved like someone who had not decided whether to speak.
"You should sit," he said.
"I don't want to sit."
"Then stand. But read this."
He held out the sheet.
It was old paper, creased soft at the folds, and gone yellow along the edges where a thumb had worn it.
Yancey took it and unfolded it.
The handwriting was his.
It was his in every loop and slant, in the blunt capital Y and the cramped small e.
He stared at it, and his stomach turned over.
Jud,
Don't write. Don't come. Your family can go to hell.
Ira will limp for the rest of his life and I would drive it again. Don't ever say my name to me.
Y. Crenshaw
He read it twice.
"I didn't write this," he said.
"It's your hand," Jud said.
"It's my hand. I didn't write it."
"It came to Rice in the second year. In an envelope with a Huntsville stamp."
Jud's voice was flat.
"I read it standing in the mail room. I read it every night for nine years."
"You kept it," Yancey said.
"I kept it."
"In a drawer by your bed."
"Yes," Jud said.
"You slept six inches from this."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Took My Prison Sentence, So Now My Secretary Is Mine are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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