Chapter 8: The Cottage

He took me to lunch, which turned out to be a drive.

We didn't talk much.

He drove a plain gray truck with a dent in the tailgate, the kind of vehicle a groundskeeper would own, and I told him so.

"It was your father's," he said.

I turned to stare at him.

"He sold it to a man in Marion for four hundred dollars.

"I bought it back from that man for six thousand. I just knew it shouldn't leave."

"Ramsay."

"Don't. Please, not yet."

He turned the truck onto a gravel road behind the maintenance barn, where the club's trees grew thick and the fairways dropped out of sight.

At the end of the road stood a small white cottage with a green door and a rocking chair on the porch.

My heart stopped.

I'd seen that porch.

I'd seen it in a photograph on my father's dresser, a six-year-old girl on that exact step with a popsicle running down her arm.

"He lived here," I whispered.

"Twenty-two years. You slept in the back bedroom until you were six."

He cut the engine.

"After he left, the club wanted to bulldoze it.

"I bought the land under it quietly and put it in a trust. I've paid someone to keep it dusted."

I got out of the truck without remembering how.

The green door was unlocked.

Inside, the cottage smelled like pine and old coffee.

A flannel shirt hung on a peg.

A radio sat on the kitchen sill, and in the sink two blue mugs stood upside down.

On the table a pair of reading glasses lay folded on a newspaper dated eighteen years ago.

"You kept everything," I said.

"I couldn't throw anything out."

I touched the flannel shirt.

It was soft and smelled like him, my father.

I didn't realize I was crying until Ramsay's arms closed around me from behind.

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