My Father Gave Me a New Big Brother, and the Only Man I Could Run To Was the One Who Put Him There novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: Christmas Eve
Rali's POV
On Christmas Eve my father cooked for twelve.
The Ostatua was closed, the shutters were drawn, and snow lay a foot deep on the pelota court.
He had been in the kitchen since dawn.
By six the long table in the front room was laid with my mother's good cloth.
The cook, who had come in on her day off, was lighting candles down the middle of it.
Mateo's mother came first, in a black wool coat, with a covered dish.
She kissed me on both cheeks and handed my father the dish without a word.
"Lamb," she said.
"Lamb," said my father, and the two of them looked at each other.
It was the first time they had spoken since 1994, and I watched them decide to let the foot go.
Mateo came in after her with his arms full of firewood.
He had shaved, and he wore a green sweater that I had never seen.
When he looked at me across the room I felt it in my stomach.
Then the others came: the cook's husband, two cousins and my father's friends from the Block.
Last came an old priest who ate more than the rest of us together.
Gorka's chair was gone from the table.
Nobody mentioned it.
My father had taken it out himself, in the afternoon, and put it in the cellar.
We ate for three hours.
There was salt cod in pil-pil sauce, and peppers, and the lamb.
There was the cake my mother had baked every year, which my father had made from her recipe card with his hands shaking.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Father Gave Me a New Big Brother, and the Only Man I Could Run To Was the One Who Put Him There are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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