Married to My Ex's Uncle novel · Chapter 21 of 32

Chapter 21: Fish Boil

Greta stood very still in the fairground lot, with the sun coming off a hundred windshields.

"Did you sign anything?" she said.

"No."

"Did you say no?"

"I said I'd think about it." Nils's voice dropped further. "He gave me the letter, Gret. It's typed. It's already got my name on it. All it needs is me. And he says there's five hundred in my commissary account by Wednesday, for good faith."

"Don't touch the money."

"I'm not an idiot."

"Put the letter in an envelope to the clinic. Legal mail. They can't open legal mail."

"I know how prison works. I've done nine years of it."

"I know." Her eyes stung. "I know you have."

There was a pause on the line.

"Fifty thousand," Nils said. "I used to think about what I'd do with fifty bucks."

"Nils."

"I'm not taking it. I just wanted to say it out loud once. Somebody thinks I'm worth fifty grand to shut up." He laughed, short. "That's the most anybody's ever paid for me."

The recorded voice said he had one minute.

"Tell Luke the transom drawing's wrong," Nils said. "I put the knee in backward. He'll know."

The line went dead.

The five hundred showed up in his account on Wednesday, from a money order bought with cash at a gas station in Green Bay.

The letter went to Madison in legal mail.

On Saturday Greta threw a fish boil.

It was for every customer who'd prepaid storage to save the yard.

Not one of them would take the money back.

Seventy people came.

The old mechanic was the boil master.

He'd run every Lindahl fish boil for thirty years, in the same stained apron.

He built the fire under the big iron kettle on the concrete apron between the two bays.

Red potatoes went in first, with a coffee can of salt.

"That much salt?" the apprentice said.

"Salt's what makes the fish oil rise," the old mechanic said. "Your grandfather didn't know that either."

"You knew my grandfather?"

"I knew everybody's grandfather. Get the onions."

Then the whitefish, in a steel basket.

The dentist from Egg Harbor brought his wife, who hugged Greta and said she'd watched the wedding video six times now.

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