He Priced Me at a Penny, So I Married Another novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The West Gate

Giles walks through the crowd and takes Dean's hand off her bruise, Dean calls it a joke, and the truck unloads her grandmother's eight quilts onto a clothesline marked one cent each.

I walked toward the west gate, and the whole crowd walked with me.

Nobody wanted to miss the next part.

Dean caught up in three steps and took hold of my wrist.

"Where do you think you're going? Dinner's at seven, Tillie. Your mother's cooking."

"I'm going to meet my ride."

"Your ride?"

He laughed, loud enough for the people filming.

Then he saw who was standing by the gate.

Giles Archbold had left his rental car running with the door open.

He was taller than I remembered, in a plain gray jacket, and he was already looking at me.

His eyes went to my arm first, to the welt, and then to the hand wrapped around it.

He crossed the grass without hurrying.

"Tillie," he said. "Are you hurt?"

"Only my arm."

"Take your hand off her," he said to Dean.

He didn't raise his voice.

Dean didn't let go.

"Archbold, right? The one she turned down." He grinned at the crowd. "Man, you show up when she snaps her fingers? Have some pride."

"I'm here because she called."

Giles put two fingers on Dean's thumb and bent it back until Dean's hand opened.

It took no effort at all.

Dean shook out his hand and stared at him.

Shelby came up on his other side with the megaphone hanging from her wrist.

"Look at this. She dials the first man who ever liked her, and he comes running. Tillie, honey, this is sad even for you."

"Shelby," I said. "Hold the megaphone up again."

"What?"

"Hold it up. I have a few words for the market."

She didn't know what I was going to say, so she did it.

I took the megaphone out of her hand.

"This morning my fiance listed me for one cent."

My voice shook, and I let it.

"His friend wrote the price card. They took bets on how long I'd cry. If any of you filmed it, keep filming. I want a copy."

The woman who had grabbed my arm looked at her shoes.

Dean took a step toward me, smiling, with his palms out.

"Tillie, come on. It was a joke. You'd really throw away five years over a joke?"

"You put a price on it," I said. "I'm only agreeing with your number."

Somebody in the back laughed, and this time it wasn't at me.

Dean's smile slipped.

"Over one little thing?"

"One cent," I said. "That's the thing."

Shelby reached for the megaphone.

I handed it back to her, because I was done with it.

Giles hadn't moved from my side.

He didn't touch me.

I noticed that he hadn't, and I noticed that I wanted him to, and I put it away for later.

A white box truck rolled up to the gate and stopped with its hazards blinking.

Two movers jumped down.

"Kittredge?" the first one called. "Quilts?"

"Right here," Dean said. He turned to me. "Last chance, Tillie. Walk back with me and I'll send them to the townhouse where they belong."

"They belong to my grandmother."

"Your grandmother's dead."

The crowd went very quiet.

Giles's jaw moved once.

I looked at the truck.

My grandmother had made those quilts one winter at a time, the last eight winters she was alive, in the chair by her window with a lamp and her glasses on a string.

She was dead, and I still couldn't hear it said out loud.

The movers opened the back of the truck.

Eight quilts, each folded in clear plastic, sat on top of my labeled boxes.

Shelby had a roll of tape and a marker in her bag already.

She had planned this part too.

She pulled the first quilt out of its plastic, the double wedding ring, the one my grandmother finished the week she got sick, and clipped it to a clothesline strung between two poles at the gate.

She wrote on a card and pinned it to the corner.

One cent.

"Don't touch that," I said.

"Why? It's free." She smiled and pulled out the second. "Everybody take a look. Hand-stitched. Smells like mothballs, but the price is right."

The third went up, then the fourth.

A line of strangers started to drift toward the clothesline, curious.

My hands were shaking now, and nothing was going to make them stop.

Giles stepped between me and the line.

"Ma'am," he said, to a woman reaching for the corner of the fourth quilt. "These aren't for sale."

"The sign says one cent."

"The sign is wrong."

"Then who's selling them?"

"Nobody is."

Dean spread his arms.

"I'm selling them. Everything in those boxes is the dowry she brought into our household. In a marriage, that makes it mine."

"We aren't married," I said.

"We will be by dinner."

"We were done an hour ago."

"Tillie." Dean lowered his voice, and his face went soft, the way it did when he wanted something. "Think about what you're doing. You have no job lined up, no place to go, and your savings are in my account. Come home, and I'll forget this happened."

He thought he was doing me a favor.

Then a voice I knew cut through the crowd from behind me.

"Tillie!"

It was my mother.

She pushed through the strangers with her purse clutched against her chest and her church coat buttoned wrong.

"What did you do to that poor boy?"

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