They Made Me Run On a Broken Leg. Don Had My Back novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Bus

"No, thank you," I said.

Bernadette smiled and did not raise her voice.

"You're soaked, and you're upset, and you're standing in front of a man who hurt you."

"Who told you that?"

"Nobody had to." She tilted her head. "He pays for things, Moira. That's what men like him do instead of apologizing. They write a check and wait for you to be grateful."

"You cashed his check."

"I did what was best for you."

"You kept three hundred thousand dollars and let me think I owed a hospital."

The rain ran down the back of my neck.

"Come home," she said, gently. "Eamon will marry you Saturday. I'll have the police withdraw the report, and the twenty thousand is still on the table. Nobody has to hear any more about trucks."

I looked at her pearls, wet from the open window.

"You put me out of your car in a hundred and four degrees," I said. "I'm not getting back into it."

Her smile stayed exactly where it was.

"Then you'll walk," she said. "Good luck with that leg."

She rolled up the window and the Buick pulled away from the curb.

I stood there until the taillights turned the corner.

Then I walked to the bus stop at the end of the block, with my father's lunch pail held against my chest.

I rode two buses and a train, and I didn't cry until Queens.

The gray-haired driver lived in Woodside in a narrow house with a plastic Mary in the front garden.

I had been to his daughter's wedding, and I did not know his last name.

I knew only that my father had called him by the first one, in a voice he used for nobody else.

His wife opened the door in an apron and took one look at me.

"Get in here," she said, and called over her shoulder, "It's Tommy's girl!"

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