My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Second Place

I came up the hill to Granite Street at nine in the morning with the bottle in my coat pocket and my hand around it.

I did not knock.

Enid was at the kitchen table with her glasses on, shelling nothing into a bowl.

She looked up at me.

She looked at my pocket.

"You've found it," she said.

I took out the bottle and set it on the scrubbed wood between us, with the silver sticker turned up.

"A bear in a circle," I said. "It's on every crate in the pawn yard."

"It's the stamp of the supplier the crew's used for forty years."

"It's on my mother's last prescription."

Enid took off her glasses and let them hang.

She got up, slowly, and went to the dresser.

She took down a white plate and a knife and a fork, and a folded napkin, and set them at the second place at the table, the one she had taken away the first night.

Then she sat back down in front of it.

"That place is for him," she said. "He'll come when he hears you. I've set it every night for a week and taken it away every night, because he wouldn't sit."

"Enid."

"Let me say it, love. I've kept it nine years, and I'm seventy-two, and I'll not die with it in my mouth."

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