Ruin Me, Daddy novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: The Cottage

"Fifteen thousand," I said.

"That's what he said. Cash, in an envelope. He thought it was funny." She opened the door. "I have to go. My mom thinks I'm already on the road."

"Drive safe."

"You too." She looked back once. "Your ghost is really good."

Then she was gone, and the bell over the shop door rang behind her.

I sat in the office with the space heater ticking and did the math on my fingers.

Brady owed thirty-eight.

Lyman paid him fifteen.

Bills paid. Thanks, Honey.

Twenty-three thousand dollars didn't come from anywhere I could see.

Maybe the bookie took what he could get. Maybe Brady sold the watch. Maybe he won a bet for once in his life.

I told myself all three, and none of them sat right.

I finished the shift. I sold six ghost T-shirts and a candle that smelled like a barrel.

At dark I drove the Subaru down to the cottage, because I could, and lit the woodstove.

At eight there were boots on the gravel.

Forrest stopped at the bottom step, the way he always did. No tray this time. Just his hands in his jacket pockets.

"Lettie says you had a visitor."

"Lettie's a snitch."

"We've established that." He looked at my face. "You all right?"

"Come up," I said. "It's cold."

He came up the steps. He'd never been inside the cottage. He had to duck under the door frame.

The room was one room. The iron bed, the stove, the table with my laptop and Marlee's spare headphones, the kettle on the burner.

He stood in the middle of it like he didn't know where to put himself.

I told him about the model.

The mirror. The coach. The dead mic. The streaming woman who thought a girl from a pharmacy ad was me.

His jaw got tighter with every sentence.

"Ten years," he said.

"Ten years."

"And she's going to help you."

"She's going to stop moving her mouth."

He gave a low, quiet laugh.

I didn't tell him the last part yet. I didn't know how to say it.

"Forrest. Did Brady ever come back to you? About the money?"

Something moved in his face.

It was quick. It went through his eyes and was gone.

"He didn't ask me again," he said.

I thought it was grief. His son, his only one, selling my grandmother for an envelope of cash.

So I didn't push.

The kettle started its slow climb toward a whistle. Nine minutes.

He sat down on the end of the iron bed, and it groaned under him.

"She used to hum," he said, out of nowhere. "My wife. Doing dishes, driving, paying bills. Same three songs. She never knew she was doing it."

I sat down next to him.

"After she died, the house was so quiet I could hear the clock in the kitchen from upstairs. I took the battery out. Then I could hear the refrigerator."

"So you stopped sleeping."

"So I stopped sleeping." He looked at his hands. "Six years of lying there listening to a house. And then one night I hit the wrong thing in an app."

I put my hand on his knee.

"Mamaw talked to the TV," I said. "Every show. She'd tell the weatherman he was wrong. She'd tell the people on the game shows to buy a vowel."

He smiled a little.

"The night she died, I sat in my closet and talked to her out loud." I swallowed. "That's the breath they used."

He turned his hand over under mine and held on.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"You're allowed to say it this time."

The kettle whistled. Neither of us got up.

He reached over and turned off the burner without letting go of my hand.

"I didn't come down here for this," he said quietly.

"I know."

"If you want me to go back up the hill, say so. I'll go."

I looked at him in the stove light. The gray at his temples. The reading glasses in his shirt pocket, like always.

"I don't want you to go back up the hill," I said. "I want you in this bed. Slow, this time. I want to hear you."

He closed his eyes for a second.

"Okay," he said.

He stood and his shadow covered me in the stove light.

The bed was higher than it looked.

I sat on the edge and my boots still touched the floor.

He took his reading glasses from his shirt pocket and set them on the windowsill, folded, with both hands.

Deliberate, the way he did everything.

"What were you about to say out there?" I asked.

"I was going to tell you the first thing I noticed about your voice."

"Not my face?"

"Your voice was first. I was in the dark with it for a year before I saw you."

"Tell me now."

He sat down next to me.

The bed dipped and I slid into him, and he caught me with an arm around my back.

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