I Walked Into My Son's Father's Engagement Party With Our Four-Year-Old, and His Mother Wasn't Surprised novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Gravel

Kent reads the receipt, learns his mother lied about Ohio, and meets his son in the parking lot; Eli reveals the cookie lady promised him a bunk bed.

"Kent," Joyce said, "sit down. We are not doing this in front of Tom Nolte's guests."

She said it in the voice she used for the church flower schedule.

Kent didn't sit.

He picked the receipt up off her plate with two fingers.

He read it.

I watched him find the signature, and the date, and the box where the sender's name was printed in my handwriting.

"Mom," he said. "What is this?"

"I sign for a great deal of mail," Joyce said. "Your father never could be bothered."

"It's a certified letter."

"Then I'm sure it was a bill."

"It was not a bill," I said.

A hundred and thirty people were holding their forks and pretending to eat.

Eli leaned against my leg and watched the head table.

I should have been shaking.

Mostly I was tired.

"I called your house twice, Kent," I said. "The second time, a woman answered."

I looked at Joyce.

"She said, 'He got your letter. He's made his choice.' Then she hung up."

Kent turned his head slowly toward his mother.

"You told me Carrie moved to Ohio," he said. "You said she'd met someone and didn't want me calling."

"I told you what I thought best."

"For who?"

Joyce touched the corsage. "For everyone at this table."

Becca Nolte put her glass down without a sound.

She was twenty-eight, with a face too honest for a party, and she had not taken her eyes off my son.

When I turned to leave, she leaned over the table.

"I love your shoes," she told Eli. Her voice shook. "They're very shiny."

"Thank you," Eli said. "They pinch."

I took his hand and walked back up the aisle.

Nobody stopped me.

A hundred and thirty people made a path, and every one of them turned their chair to watch me go.

The parking lot smelled like cut grass and somebody's barbecue grill.

I got Eli to the Corolla and had my hand on the door when I heard the Lodge doors bang open.

"Carrie."

Kent came across the gravel in his good shoes, still holding the green card.

He stopped six feet from me.

He looked at Eli.

Eli looked at him.

They had the same cowlick and the same crooked left eyebrow, and for a second neither of them moved.

Kent got down on one knee in the gravel.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Kent."

"I know," Eli said. "You're on our fridge."

Kent made a sound I'd never heard from a grown man.

He put the back of his wrist against his mouth.

"What's your name?" he asked, when he could.

"Eli Nash. I collect bottle caps. I have two hundred and eleven."

"That's a lot of caps."

"It's a medium amount," Eli said. "Do you have any?"

Kent looked up at me.

His eyes were wet.

"I need to ask you something, and I'm sorry for it," he said. "Is he mine?"

"Look at him, Kent."

"I know. I did. I just needed someone to say it."

"He's yours."

He nodded for a long time.

"I didn't know," he said. "I swear to God. I would have been on a bus the same night."

"I believe you."

It surprised me how much I meant it.

I had spent five years sure that he'd read my letter and thrown it away.

That was easier to hate than what was true.

"Where do we go from here?" he asked.

"Nowhere tonight. You have a hundred and thirty guests and a fiancée."

"Carrie..."

"Tomorrow, the Delafield Park playground, ten o'clock," I said. "I'll be there. You'll see him with me standing right next to you."

"I'll be there at nine."

"Then you'll wait an hour."

He almost smiled.

I buckled Eli into his booster and shut the door.

Kent stood in the gravel under the one working light.

He was still on one knee when I pulled out.

We were nearly home when Eli spoke up from the back seat.

"Mama? The cookie lady was in there."

My hands tightened on the wheel.

"What cookie lady, baby?"

"From story hour at the library. She wears a big flower. She sits in the chair by the window and gives me a cookie."

"She gives you a cookie?"

"A sugar one, in a napkin. She said not to tell you, because cookies before supper make mamas mad."

I pulled into the shoulder of Scottsville Road and put the car in park.

My heart was going so hard that I could hear it in my ears.

"What else did she say?" I asked.

Eli thought about it, three fingers in his mouth.

"She said when I'm big enough for kindergarten, she will pick me up every day," he said. "And I get a bunk bed at her house."

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend