I Heard Dad's Friends Through the Wall, Now They Hear Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Paper Walls
Diana hears her father's three friends confess through the den wall, then walks in on them. Dad's step sounds on the stairs.
Through the wall, I could hear every word.
It was a Friday, past midnight, and my father had three men in his den drinking the whiskey he thought I didn't know about.
The den backs onto my old bedroom, and the wall between them is plywood and wallpaper.
I was twenty-seven, lying in a twin bed under my high school swim ribbons.
Three months earlier my fiancé had ended our engagement over takeout, and I had packed my car and driven home to Erie.
Dad's boots went up the stairs first.
"Lock the door when you go," he called down. "Don't wake Diana."
"We'll be quiet, Gil," said Boone.
Boone Bledsoe has built half the porches on our street.
He is forty-nine, and he has never used more words than he needed.
For a while I heard only ice in glasses.
Then my mattress creaked when I rolled over, and every voice in the den dropped to a murmur.
That happened every Friday.
Dex waited a long moment before he spoke.
"Okay. Is she asleep?"
"Her light's off," said Emmett. "I checked the door on my way in."
Emmett is the vet, forty-one, and the one who says the least.
"Good," Dex said. "Because I'm going to say something, and none of you gets to hit me."
"Don't," said Boone.
"She came into the store today in that grey sweatshirt with the neck cut out."
Dex owns the bar on Peach Street, and he is forty-five and the loudest of them.
"She bent over to pick up a box of screws and I forgot my own name."
"Dex."
"Tell me you didn't look, Boone."
Boone said nothing at all.
My face went hot.
I should have been furious.
I should have banged on the wall and called all three of them pigs.
"I looked," Emmett said quietly.
Nobody spoke.
"I've slept at the clinic four nights this week," Emmett said. "I can't lie in my own bed without thinking about her."
"She's Gil's daughter," said Boone. His voice had gone rough.
"She's twenty-seven," Dex said. "And I think about putting her up on the bar after close and finding out what she sounds like."
My hand had slid down under my shirt without my permission.
Boone said, low, "If I thought she'd let me, I'd have her against that door in a minute."
I stopped breathing.
"She won't," said Emmett. "And Gil would bury us."
"He'd bury Boone first," said Dex. "He's the oldest."
I lay in the dark with my heart pounding and my skin burning.
All my life those men had been furniture in my father's house.
Dex had taught me to drive stick in the hardware store lot.
Boone had carried my mother's casket and then fixed our front steps without being asked.
Emmett had stitched the dog.
And not one of them had ever looked at me, not that I'd noticed.
I got up.
I did it in one motion, before I could talk myself out of it.
I pulled my father's old hardware store T-shirt down over my thighs, crossed the room barefoot and opened my door.
There was a glass of water on the hall shelf outside it, the way there was every Friday.
I had always assumed Dad left it.
I left the glass where it was, and I walked to the den and pushed the door open.
Three heads turned.
Boone was standing by the window with his whiskey half-raised.
Dex had gone pale under his freckles.
Emmett looked at me, and then he looked at the glass behind me in the hall.
"Your den shares a wall with my bedroom," I said.
Nobody moved.
"It always has," I said.
"Diana," Boone said. He put the glass down very carefully. "How much did you hear?"
"I heard Dex bent me over a bar."
"I said put you up on it," said Dex weakly.
"I heard all of it."
I shut the door behind me and leaned on it, and my knees were not steady, and I stayed where I was.
"So say it again," I said. "To my face, one at a time."
Upstairs a floorboard cracked.
Then another one, closer, at the top of the stairs.
"Diana?" my father called down. "Is that you down there?"
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