Small Things You Promised novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Board

The last unit went in on Sunday, August second, at four in the afternoon.

East Lake.

The eighty-one-year-old man with the box fan, the one whose pink sheet I'd held up in Ty's yard.

The apprentice set it in the window.

The big gray-haired installer ran the cord.

The old man sat in his kitchen chair in his undershirt and watched us.

When it kicked on, he didn't say anything.

He just leaned forward until the cold air hit his face, and closed his eyes, and stayed there.

I took the legal pad out of my bag.

I crossed out the last line.

Thirty-one of thirty-one.

Missy screamed so loud the man's dog went under the porch.

That night, the heat dome broke.

A storm rolled up the river around ten, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees in an hour.

I stood on my porch in the rain in my Lookouts T-shirt and let it soak me to the skin.

Next door, the old man stood on his porch and did the same.

He raised his coffee cup to me.

I raised my glass of ice.

On Tuesday, I went before the board's investigator.

It was a small conference room downtown with bad coffee.

The investigator was a gray-haired woman with half-glasses and no patience at all.

Lacy was already there.

She sat in the back row in a navy dress, with her hands folded.

Her daddy's lawyer sat next to her with a binder.

"Ms. Dunlap," the investigator said. "The complaint says you've been secretly recording conversations in your home for three years."

"No, ma'am."

"Then what are these files?"

I opened my steno writer on the table.

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