Dating Daddy's Best Friend novel · Chapter 7 of 32

Chapter 7: Laminate

On Tuesday we drove to Traverse City in the yard truck.

I had planned to go alone, in my car.

"Your car's a hatchback," Cullen said. "Where are you putting a broken rocker? On your head?"

"I could tie it to the roof."

"Then it'd be a broken rocker in two places."

It was three hours north, through the orchards and the cherry country, all the trees still bare.

Cullen drove with one wrist on the wheel and the radio on a station that played nothing but fiddles.

"This is terrible," I said.

"This is culture."

"This is a man stepping on a cat."

He turned it up.

The store was on Front Street, a big old brick building with rocking chairs on the porch.

The owner was a soft-spoken man in a cardigan who shook my hand.

The broken rocker was on a dolly under a moving blanket.

He pulled the blanket off.

I knew before I touched it.

The runner had split at the crown, right where the bend is tightest.

But it hadn't split along the grain the way oak does.

It had come apart in layers.

Thin, flat sheets of wood, glued together and pressed into my curve.

"That's laminate," Cullen said.

"That's garbage." My voice came out shaking. "My runner is one piece. One strip of white oak, steamed and bent. That's the whole point. It flexes. It can't snap."

"This one snapped," the owner said quietly.

I turned it over.

The brass tag was on the underside of the seat, where I'd put it on the first two hundred myself.

ACKERLY HOME FURNISHINGS. LAKESHORE ROCKER. A serial number.

The tag was real.

The chair wasn't.

"How many of these have you sold?" I asked.

"Since last spring? Forty. Fifty, maybe. Ackerly's been shipping them faster than ever. Cheaper too. They cut our wholesale price."

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