I Left Pregnant and Swore She Wasn't His, Now He Wants the Truth novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: Sunday Groceries

Five years later, my grandmother was in a hospital bed in Lafayette, telling a nurse she'd had worse falls off better steps.

I had driven in from Mobile the night before with a five-year-old asleep in the back seat and a phone in my pocket that said it would stop working on Friday.

[Task: Take Lou to Breaux Bridge. Deadline: Friday.]

It had paid for our rent and our groceries and one set of tires for five years.

It had never told me to come home.

I hadn't argued.

My grandmother had broken a hip, and she was eighty.

She was the only person on the earth who had mailed me a card every month with no return address on it.

"It's a clean break," Mémère told the nurse. "You can put a bolt in it, but you can't put a bolt in me."

"We're putting a plate in, Mrs. Thibodeaux."

"Same difference."

The nurse smiled at me over the chart and went out.

Lou sat on the foot of the bed with her knees up and a sheet of hospital paper on her lap, drawing.

She was five and eleven days.

She had a gap between her front teeth that was mine, and she had a voice that could carry across a parking lot.

"Mémère," she said. "Your leg is bionic now."

"It is not, chère. It is a hip."

"It's a bionic hip. I'm going to draw it."

"Draw it with a cape," Mémère said.

"It doesn't have a cape. It has a bolt."

Mémère looked at her and then at me, and her face did a thing I hadn't seen since I was fifteen.

It softened all the way down.

"You brought her," she said.

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