He Lost His Place Protecting Me, So I Took the Whole Family novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Easter Bread
On Easter Saturday I kneaded the bread in Lule's kitchen on Stillwell Avenue with flour to my elbows and three young wives watching my hands.
The red eggs rolled in their rust-colored water on the stove.
Lule sat in the chair by the window with her feet up, and she did not lift a finger.
"Harder," she said. "You're not afraid of it."
"I'm not."
"Then show them."
I showed them.
I pushed the dough away with the heels of my hands and folded it back, and the youngest wife laughed with pleasure.
When the loaves were rising under their towels, Lule reached into her cardigan pocket and took out a black ledger, thick and soft at the corners.
Forty years of Sunday counts, in six hands.
She laid it in my lap.
"My eyes are bad this year," she said.
"They are always bad this year."
"They will be bad next year, too. You hold the pen."
I held the book against my chest and could not speak.
Luan was waiting in the yard by the Virgin in his good jacket, with his hat in his hand.
He looked at the flour on my sleeves and my cheek.
He said nothing at all, and he drove me home.
The house on Hone Avenue was ours now, the whole of it, bought in January with the cash of a man who ran two card rooms honestly and a woman who wrote the Sunday count in ink.
He had not turned on a light.
He stood in the upstairs hall with the streetlight in the window, and I saw him look at the floorboards in front of the bedroom door.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Lost His Place Protecting Me, So I Took the Whole Family are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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