Day Seven I Signed It novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The First of the Month

Nobody in Reese's living room spoke for a long time after Gavin said it.

Then the man in the quilted vest said, "So the whole thing was yours."

"The rules," Gavin said. "The day-seven bet. The week. Reese took the money, and I made the game."

He did not look at me.

He looked at each of them, one at a time, and let them look back.

Then he said to me, across the room, "The first. Nine in the morning. I'll be there either way."

I didn't answer.

Ivy took my sleeve and walked me out to the car.

The first of the month fell on a Thursday.

It was cold and clear, and the cemetery grass had a skin of frost on it that crunched.

I parked at the gate and walked the long path to my father's stone.

Gavin was already there, on his knees, with a bunch of white roses wrapped in brown paper.

He was cutting the stems with a pocketknife and laying them against the granite one at a time.

Last month's roses lay beside the stone, brown and bent.

He had cleared the dead ones from every month before them and put them in a coffee can.

He stood when he heard me.

"I didn't think you'd come."

"I'm not here for him," I said.

"All right."

"I'm here because I want to tell you something, and I want to say it in front of him."

He nodded and put the knife away.

I took a breath of cold air.

"My mother sat at the kitchen table on the first of every month for thirty years," I said. "I didn't know that until last week."

Gavin stood very still.

"She told me yesterday. He paid your mother on the first. The statement came in the mail on the second, and my mother opened it, every month, and read the line, and put it back in the drawer."

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