My Dad's Best Friend Moved Into My Spare Room After His Divorce, and the Promise He Made My Father Lasted Four Days novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Put It Down
Brad turns up on Lori's lawn with a box of her sweaters and a filming phone, her father's best friend Ed Atherton tells him to put it down, and Ed moves into her spare room on a promise to Lenny that he will never touch her.
My ex-boyfriend was on my front lawn holding a box of my sweaters when my father's best friend pulled up and told him to put it down.
It was a quarter to nine on a Saturday in late August.
Every porch on Pierce Street had someone on it with a coffee mug.
Brad had been out there for ten minutes, and he had drawn the whole block.
He held the box against his chest.
On the lid, in black Sharpie, he'd written LORI'S THINGS (FOR WHEN SHE'S READY TO TALK).
His phone was propped on my mailbox, aimed at him, red light on.
"I just want her to know the door's open," Brad told it, in the voice he used on waiters. "I'm not angry. I'm just done being the only adult in this relationship."
I stood on my top step in socks and a T-shirt that said OMAHA CLAIMS ADJUSTERS SOFTBALL.
I had lived with this man for fourteen months.
He had left in June, by text, from another woman's kitchen.
Now he was back with my own sweaters and a ring light for the sun.
"Brad," I said. "You wore half of those."
"That's not the point, Lor."
"You stretched the green one at the shoulders."
"Because I was carrying you through your mother's anniversary!"
Next door, Dawn lifted her mug at me from her porch rail.
A truck turned onto the block.
It was a white F-250 with a ladder rack and a dented tailgate, and a yellow dog's head hanging out of the passenger window.
I knew the truck before I saw the man.
The truck stopped across my driveway, and Ed Atherton got out.
He was six-foot-two, forty-four years old and built to hold up a roof.
He had a short beard going gray at the corners and a Carhartt jacket on in eighty degrees.
He looked at Brad.
He looked at the box.
"Put it down," he said.
He didn't say it loud.
Brad turned and gave him the grin that had once made me think he was harmless.
"Sorry, man, this is a private conversation."
"On a lawn," Ed said.
"Who are you?"
Ed's eyes came up to me on the step.
I felt that look all the way down.
"I'm a friend of her father's," he said.
"Oh." Brad laughed, delighted. "You're the divorce. Lenny told me about you. Lenny told everybody about you."
"Put the box down, son," Ed said.
"Son?" said Brad. "You're what, forty-five?"
"Forty-four," said Ed. "And you're on her grass."
Then I saw Brad's thumbs go white around the lid.
He was going to hold that box until someone begged him for it.
The camera would show a woman who couldn't handle her own ex.
So I walked down my steps in my socks and took the box out of his arms.
He was so surprised he let me.
"Thank you for the sweaters," I said, loud enough for the mailbox. "The green one's ruined. Venmo me forty dollars."
"Lor, don't be like this."
"Your key is under the geranium. You can leave it there. Or I can change the locks, which I did on the fourth of July."
Brad looked at the phone, at the porches, at Ed.
He unplugged it from the mailbox, stuffed it in his back pocket and walked to his Civic.
He rolled the window down at the curb.
"Ask him what he promised Lenny," he called to me. "Your dad can't keep it to himself."
Then he drove off with his blinker on.
"You okay?" Ed asked.
"I'm great," I said. "Do you want a sweater?"
The corner of his mouth moved.
It was the first time I'd seen it do that since the funeral.
The dog had let himself out of the truck and was leaning his whole gray-muzzled weight against my shin.
"That's Walter," Ed said. "He's good with people and bad with cats. Don't take it personally."
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He looked at the screen, and then he held it out toward me, because it was my father.
"Lori!" Dad's voice came out of the speaker like he was calling from a ship. "Did he get there? Is he there? Put him on! Eddie, you hear me?"
"I'm here, Len," said Ed.
"Good. Good. She'll feed you. Don't let her feed you cereal. Hey, remember what we talked about."
Ed went still.
"I remember."
"Say it."
"Len."
"Say it back, you stubborn son of a bitch. She's my kid."
Ed breathed out through his nose.
"I look after her," he said. "And I don't touch her."
"That's my guy," Dad said. "That's the only man I'd say it to."
He hung up.
I looked at Ed.
Ed looked at the sky over my roof.
"I hadn't heard that part," I said.
"He hadn't wanted me to say it in front of you."
"And yet."
"And yet."
He reached into the truck bed and took out a green duffel and a canvas bag with a hammer handle sticking out of it.
I had made up the spare room on Thursday.
I'd put the good towels on the bed and a lamp from the attic on the dresser, and the lamp was on.
On the bottom step his hand came flat against the small of my back, to steer me up ahead of him.
It was only a second.
It was warm through the cotton, and it covered more of me than a hand had any right to.
My father had asked him to look after me and never touch me, and I watched Ed Atherton carry his duffel up my steps like a man who knew exactly what he'd promised and wasn't sure it would last the week.
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