Ruin Me, Daddy novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Her First Episode

I didn't say anything for a long time.

I ran my thumb along the scroll in the corner. Ninety years of coal smoke, gone.

"You cleaned it," I said.

"Took me two nights."

"You could've thrown it in the creek."

"I thought about it." He looked at the grate, not at me. "But it's yours. It's the worst night of your life, and the night you walked out. You decide what happens to it."

I picked it up. It was heavier than it looked.

I carried it to the back of the room and held it up against the wall over the vault door.

"Here," I said.

"Over the booth?"

"Over the booth. Where everybody listening is invited."

He found a drill in Marlee's toolbox and four masonry screws, and he hung it at midnight while I held the flashlight.

It looked like it had always been there.

Sunday I carried my own boxes up the hill.

Seven of them. Clothes, books, the good microphone in its case, my coffee maker.

He held the door every single time and didn't touch a box.

On the fourth trip I caught him with his hands in his back pockets so they'd behave.

The last thing I carried up was Mamaw's clock.

I stood in the front hall holding it and didn't know where it went.

"Kitchen," Forrest said.

He took me in and showed me. The shelf over the sink, where his wife's recipe cards were. He'd cleared a space.

There was a battery in his hand.

"I took the one out of the kitchen clock six years ago," he said. "So I wouldn't hear it. I thought we could hear yours."

I set Mamaw's clock on the shelf.

It ticked.

He stood there in his kitchen with his eyes closed and listened to it.

Monday night, the twenty-first, my first romance went up at midnight.

Angel's Share. Episode one.

A night DJ in a river town who reads the weather at three in the morning.

A barge captain who calls in every night to argue with her about it.

My name on the cover. Nobody else's.

Marlee had mastered it Sunday, crying, then driven to Louisville to clear out the last of the duplex.

"Don't wait up," she'd said. "Don't do anything in my vault I'd have to mop."

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