He Defended Her, He Said I Deserved It novel · Chapter 31 of 32
Chapter 31: Smith Mountain Lake
The divorce was final on the fifteenth of April.
Nobody called to tell me. The decree came in the mail, in a plain envelope, with the bond office's bills.
I opened it standing at the counter while Ike sorted the rest.
Lainie Shore. Brantley Treadway. Final.
No clause.
"That it?" Ike asked.
"That's it."
He looked at me over his reading glasses for a long moment.
Then he went to the coffee machine, the terrible one, and poured two cups and handed me one.
"Congratulations," he said.
"Thank you."
We clinked paper cups over a pile of utility bills.
The bar heard by noon. It's a short block.
The studio on Grace Street had two tall windows facing north, a radiator that knocked, and a floor that sloped toward the street.
"You could roll a marble to the door," Nettie said.
"Don't," said Ike.
She'd already done it.
I put my tackle box of chalk on the windowsill in the light.
I taped the eight drawings along one wall, the second ones, the way the women wanted to be seen.
On the opposite wall I taped the first drawing I ever made of Ike. Reading a western on the fire escape at two in the morning.
The nurse came by on her lunch hour and inspected it all.
"Needs a couch," she said.
The next day there was a couch. Nobody would say where it came from. The tow truck driver had a look about him.
Nettie turned ten on the seventeenth.
She wanted a party in the bond office with the neon on, and she got it.
There was a cake shaped like a cloud, which Ike had made himself and which looked like a potato.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of He Defended Her, He Said I Deserved It are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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