My Stepmother Sold the Farm, So I Married the Man Who Left novel · Chapter 12 of 32

Chapter 12: Sixty-One Letters

We drove home from the Grange in separate trucks, and I had never been so glad of a dark road.

At midnight I gave up on sleep and went downstairs for water.

The kitchen light was on.

Nels sat at the table in his undershirt with a mug he hadn't drunk from, and his bandaged hand lay flat in front of him.

Delores's door was shut, with no light under it.

"I'm sorry about the hired man," I said.

"You were right."

"I wasn't."

"You were," Nels said, and looked up. "That's what the arrangement is. A year, and I go. I'm a hired man who signed a paper at a courthouse."

He said it without heat, which was worse.

He was agreeing with me, I realized, because he agreed to everything.

All right, he had said in the church lot, all right, all right, to every term I set.

I had written him sixty-one letters, and he had not answered one, and still he said all right.

"Don't," I said.

"Don't what?"

"Don't be reasonable. I can't stand it," I said.

"Sol, it's midnight."

"It was midnight six years ago," I said.

My voice shook, and I let it.

"I sat on that bench four hours. And I could have stood it if you'd come and said goodbye. Or if you'd said you were leaving, or told me to go to hell."

"Keep your voice down," Nels said.

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