Small Things You Promised novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Dining Room

The first client called on Thursday.

A lawyer from a little firm on Market Street.

"I saw you on the sidewalk," she said. "In the video. Reading that man the date you fainted."

The man two doors down had posted it. It had gone farther than Lacy's.

"I need a reporter for a deposition Monday," she said. "Someone who writes down exactly what people say. Are you available?"

"I'm available."

"Who do you work for?"

I looked around my dining room.

My mother's table. A box fan. A cat hair on the chair from Missy's evil cat.

"Myself," I said.

By Friday I had a second client, a lawyer who'd gone to law school with the first one.

By Saturday, Missy had made me a sign for the dining room door on her label maker.

DUNLAP REPORTING. KNOCK FIRST.

Then she started a fundraiser online.

She called it Small Things.

She put up a photo of the legal pad on my fridge, with thirty-one lines, and five of them crossed out.

Her caption said, Ty Waddell wouldn't put an air conditioner in his fiancée's kitchen. Help us put one in theirs.

"You can't say that," I said.

"I can say anything that's true. You taught me that."

She raised nine thousand nine hundred dollars in four days.

Nine units.

The firehouse on Wiley's shift took up a collection and bought six units outright.

A church in Alton Park bought eight.

Three of my own neighbors chipped in for three more.

Every evening, the three men from the Waddell yard went out with their own tools and their own trucks.

The apprentice ran the crew now. He was twenty-two and had never run anything.

He ran it.

The heat dome sat on the city.

A hundred and three. A hundred and five. A hundred and four.

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