They Never Picked Up My Calls, So I Made Dolls That Answer novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Ashes

I called him back.

It rang out.

"Where would she take him?" Fletcher said.

"Wherever she's staying."

The front desk wouldn't give me a room number.

They didn't have to. The elevator had a button at the very top with a brass plate beside it.

PENTHOUSE SUITES.

Of course.

Fletcher pressed it.

"You don't have to come," I said.

"I'm not coming in. I'm standing in the hall. Like at your mom's dinner, but with worse carpet."

The doors opened on a hallway with two doors and a vase of white lilies.

Lemon polish and lilies. She'd made a hotel smell like home.

I knocked.

Mom opened it herself.

She was in a silk robe the color of oatmeal, with her pearls still on and her hair still done.

"Elsie," she said. "I wondered how long you'd take."

She stepped back and let me in.

The suite was bigger than my loft and the whole shop under it.

Gold lamps.

A white sofa.

A fireplace with real logs, the kind you only see in very old hotels and very expensive ones.

The fire was going.

Drew sat at the end of the white sofa with his elbows on his knees.

He didn't look up.

Dad wasn't there.

"Your father is at dinner with Brightwater's people," Mom said. "Would you like a drink?"

"Where's the box?"

She walked to the fireplace.

She took the brass poker off its stand and moved a log, not hurrying.

Underneath it was a gray drift of paper ash, thick as a folded blanket.

The edge of a manila folder curled black at the corner.

I could still read half a word on it in her neat print. JUNI.

"Housekeeping let me into your brother's room," she said. "It's the firm's room. The firm pays for it. Your father pays for the firm."

"You burned them."

"Every page. An hour ago." She set the poker back. "Invoices from a tutor who no longer works in Arizona. A letter from a school that dropped the matter. They were nobody's business. Now they're nobody's anything."

I looked at Drew.

"Drew."

He stared at the carpet between his shoes.

The way he'd stared at the carpet when I was eighteen and Dad told me to go.

"He's going to sit there tomorrow and support his sister," Mom said. "Like a brother. Aren't you, Drew?"

He said nothing.

Mom smiled at me.

"Saturday you'll stand up in front of that board with your little doll and your little video, and Gracie will stand up with a bestseller and forty thousand stores. And then you'll go home."

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