Seven Men Called Me Her Stand-In, So I Made Them Pay novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Blue Cottage

June shows her mother the cottage she bought; six of the seven transfers freeze overnight, and a man knocks on the porch.

My mother was waiting on the stairs above the bait shop when I got to Pell Harbor at six in the morning.

She was in her nightgown and her good cardigan, holding the rail with both hands.

"You're late," Janet said. "You said five."

"I had to drive past three exits twice. I thought I was being followed."

"Were you?"

"No. I think I was being dramatic."

"That's my girl," she said, and let me hold her elbow down the porch steps.

She was breathing hard just from the stairs.

I did not say anything about it, and neither did she.

The cottage on Gull Street was blue, with a white porch and a gutter hanging loose at one corner.

The agent had given me a key for a look before Monday's closing.

I stood my mother in front of the door and put it in her hand.

"What's this?" she said.

"Open it."

She did, and stood on the mat for a long time.

Inside there was a kitchen with a window over the sink and a bedroom on the ground floor, so she would never need the stairs again.

Janet walked the whole house with her hand on the wall.

When she got back to the kitchen she sat down at the empty table and folded her hands.

"Whose money?" she said.

"Mine."

"June."

"It's money I earned."

"Doing what?"

I took my notebook from my bag and put it in front of her.

It had seven pages, one for each man, with the dates, the cities, the gifts and the numbers.

My mother put on her reading glasses and read the first page, then the second.

She didn't ask me who they were.

She knew every one of those boys by their mothers' maiden names.

"I raised you better than this," she said at last.

"You raised me to pay what I owe and collect what I'm owed."

"I did not say that."

"You said it every payday for twenty-two years."

"I said it about the electric company." She took her glasses off. "Those boys are not the electric company."

"No," I said. "They're worse. They owed me for all of it, and they didn't even know."

"Then let them keep their money," Janet said. "I don't want a house built on it. I want you home and safe."

"You want a valve that works."

"I want," my mother said, "to not owe that family one more thing."

"You don't owe them anything. They owe us. I just collected."

She was silent, which was how she lost arguments.

Then she coughed, and had to hold the table until it passed.

I filled a glass of water at the new sink and watched her drink it.

The surgery deposit was due Friday. The hospital in Portland had said one hundred and ninety thousand dollars, and no valve without it.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I looked down, expecting a bank alert about the cottage.

"Transfer recalled," the screen said. "Claim of fraud received."

Then it said the same thing again.

Then four more times.

I stood in my mother's new kitchen and watched six deposits disappear one after another, until the balance sat at seven hundred thousand.

"What is it?" Janet said.

"One of them has a lawyer," I said. "He froze everyone's transfer. All except one."

"Which one?"

"Anthony. The quiet one, who didn't say a word at dinner."

"Ah," she said. "The quiet one."

"What does that mean?"

"Quiet ones are the dangerous kind. They're the ones who've already decided."

"Mom, it's just the money. Six hundred thousand pays for this house and your surgery."

"Then we don't use it."

"We have no other money."

"Then," Janet said, "I'll die in the bed I've got."

I looked at her.

She looked back, white-faced and stubborn, in the kitchen of a house she had not yet agreed to.

I thought about the bank balance, and the Friday deadline, and the man who had stood in a hotel lobby and told me not to come here.

Somebody knocked on the front door.

Not the harbor knock, which was two raps and a shout.

This was three slow knocks, and a pause.

I went down the hall and opened it.

The surgeon stood on the porch, still in last night's shirt, holding a medical bag.

"June," he said. "Your mother's cough carried over the phone last week. I'd like to listen to her chest."

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