His Favorite Shirt novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: His Favorite Shirt

At sunset the picnic was folded into the cooler and the staff had gone back to work.

I walked into the lodge office.

Nolan's mother was behind the desk with her reading glasses on.

She did not ask what I wanted.

She turned the dial on the safe, took out a small brown envelope with my name on it, and set it on the blotter.

"It's lighter than it was," she said.

"It's the same ring."

"Then you've gotten lighter." She slid it across. "That's what I meant."

I tore the flap open and tipped the ring into my palm.

It was a plain one-carat band, a little scratched from the lake.

I had paid for it myself, out of the only savings I had ever had, and I had let a man hand it to me as a gift.

I turned it over in my fingers for a long time.

Then I put it on my right hand, on the third finger, where nobody had ever put anything.

"There," I said. "Now it's honest."

His mother nodded and took off her glasses and looked at me directly.

"My son is not a patient man about this kind of thing," she said. "But he is about you."

"I know."

"Don't make him wait longer than he has to."

I smiled and went out.

Behind the laundry, on a line strung between two posts, a pale blue linen shirt hung in the last of the light.

It was dry now, and stiff, and faintly marked with lake silt.

The collar had turned up in the wind.

I could see the white stitches inside it, H.P., from where I stood.

Nobody had come to take it down.

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