Chapter 17: The Club

The Larkspur Club held its members' dinner on the first Thursday of the month.

Bram carried me in himself, through the glass doors and past the coat check, in both arms.

My mother had given me to him in the car.

"Take him," she had said. "He should be there when you say it."

The dining room was long and warm and full of white tablecloths.

Sixty men sat at round tables with their wives.

A man at the door stepped out to stop us.

"Mr. Marden, I'm afraid there's a function..."

"I know," Bram said. "I'm a member."

He walked past him.

The room noticed him by degrees.

A fork stopped. A woman put her glass down.

By the time he reached the center of the floor, the quiet had reached the back wall.

He set me on the head table, between a candle and a bread basket.

Then he took the cream envelope from his jacket and held it up so everyone could see it.

"This is a letter from a lawyer," he said. "It says that if I say your names in this room, you will sue me."

Nobody answered.

"I'm going to say them anyway."

A man rose from a table near the front. He had a red face and a soft belly.

"Bram. Sit down. You're upset about your brother."

"I'm not sitting."

Bram pointed at him.

"You paid forty thousand dollars last spring to watch my brother wash your car with his shirt off in the rain."

A woman gasped.

"You paid thirty thousand to hear him sing. He sang in the kitchen. You called it a talent show."

The red-faced man stood very still.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Died Afraid My Broken Arm Burdened Them from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.