Chapter 22: Sunday Dinner, Again

"You could have stopped it," I said.

"I could have."

"You didn't."

"No."

I looked at my father's bent head, the grey in his beard, the thermos in his big hands.

I wasn't sure whether to be furious or to laugh.

I did a little of both, and he let me.

"Sunday," he said at last, when I was done. "Come to dinner. Bring them."

"All three?"

"I'd like to look at them all at once. It saves time."

"Dad."

"Pot roast." He stood up and brushed off his knees. "Tell Dex he can bring the bread. Tell Boone to wear a collar."

On Sunday we pulled up to the house in three vehicles.

Nobody got out.

Boone sat in his pickup with both hands on the wheel, and the stitches in his lip had gone from purple to pink.

Dex tapped on my window.

"I have been in that kitchen a hundred times," he said. "I am scared of the kitchen."

"It's a kitchen."

"There's a man in it with a rolling pin."

"He doesn't own a rolling pin."

"He'll find one."

Emmett walked up the front steps first.

They were Boone's new steps, solid and square and unpainted.

He knocked, which he had never once done before.

My father opened the door in an apron.

It was my mother's apron, blue with a faded lemon on the pocket, and none of us had seen it in nine years.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Heard Dad's Friends Through the Wall, Now They Hear Me from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.