They Called My Death a Tantrum, So I Stayed Dead novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Empty Baskets

Nobody answered Pierce.

Fifty people stood under the pavilion with their phones up, and not one of them said a word to him.

"Please," Pierce said again. "I'm at forty-one. Look at it. Somebody say something."

The freight coworker turned his back.

The landlady turned next, still holding her pie.

Then the boy's father, then the women near the front, then the whole second row, one after another, until Pierce stood in the gravel facing fifty backs.

I watched the number on his wrist.

Forty.

Thirty-eight.

"Pierce, honey," Lorna said, and started toward him.

Cadence did not move to stop her.

She kept her eyes on my photo and said nothing, and that was worse for my mother than if she had shouted.

Lorna reached him and took his arm.

Alden stood a moment longer, holding his folded paper, with nobody left in the crowd who would look at him.

Then he went after them.

The black sedan pulled out of the lot with Pierce in the back seat and both my parents in the front, and it did not hurry.

Ada had stayed with me at the edge of the water.

"He shouldn't be out of the house," I said.

"The voice locked the doors for one night," Ada said. "It said he stays in this world until the seventh night. It never said he stays in that house."

"So it just lets him walk around."

"It's a ledger, not a jailer."

I looked at the backs of fifty people who had come to say goodbye to a man his own family had forgotten.

On Sunday morning my father opened Fairbank Hardware at nine, as he had every Sunday for thirty years.

I followed him in through the glass door.

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