My Husband's Brother Owns My Secret novel · Chapter 25 of 32

Chapter 25: Christmas Eve

Hutch didn't take it at first.

He looked at the envelope, then at his mother.

"What is it?"

"Open it and see. I've been told I explain too much."

He opened it in the middle of the lobby with the quartet playing.

One sheet of bank letterhead.

Beatrice's small upright handwriting, in fountain pen.

I read it over his arm.

The call on the Moonlite Lanes note was withdrawn as an improper use of the bank's authority.

The loan returned to its original terms.

Signed, B. Winthrop, Chairwoman.

Hutch read it twice.

His jaw worked.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't," Beatrice said. "It isn't a gift. It's the bank correcting a misuse of itself. I'd have done it for any borrower."

"You wouldn't have."

She considered that.

"No," she said. "Perhaps not."

She looked at me.

Then up at the painting, for the first time all night.

She looked at it for a long moment.

"The painting goes back to storage in the morning," she said. "I'll write to the court myself."

She walked away to her board before either of us could answer.

We didn't stay for dinner.

Christmas Eve, Moonlite was supposed to close at six.

Nobody went home.

The mailmen brought a ham.

The Wednesday seniors brought cookies shaped like bowling pins again, because the first batch had been a hit.

The purple satin team brought a karaoke machine nobody asked for.

Snow came down past the neon moon in big slow flakes.

The bartender stood a tiny plastic tree on the bar and hung the 1981 nacho machine with tinsel.

"She's family," she said.

The pickle jar still sat at the end of the bar.

Thirty-one thousand, two hundred and forty dollars.

Hutch stood in front of it and cleared his throat.

The whole alley went quiet.

"The note's off," he said. "You all know. So this goes back to whoever put it in."

"No," the notary said.

"It's your money."

"It's the alley's money now. I stamped the napkin."

"That's not how notaries work."

"It is tonight."

They took a vote.

Hutch said there couldn't be a vote.

They voted on that too.

The pickle jar stayed.

It would fix the ball return on lane nine, finally.

The rest would wait in the jar for the next one of them who needed it.

"Rent, a funeral, a bad month," the notary said. "Whatever it is."

Hutch turned around and went into the back hall for a while.

Nobody followed him.

Nobody needed to.

When he came back his eyes were red, and the purple satin captain handed him a beer without a word.

Fran made us do presents.

She gave Hutch a bowling shirt, black, with gold letters across the back.

HUTCHINSON.

He held it up and stared at it.

"I told you I'd put it on a shirt," Fran said.

"I begged you."

"And I heard you."

He put it on over his T-shirt right there, and the whole league cheered.

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