My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: A Year and a Day
In the middle of March I asked him to supper in my own house, on my own lease.
I wrote the lease myself, at my mother's kitchen table, on a sheet of lined paper.
It said that Cormick Lanigan was a guest of Maeve Tierney in the house on Dublin Gulch, at her will, for one evening.
It said he was to bring bread.
I signed it and pinned it to the front door with a thumbtack, where he would see it.
He saw it.
I watched through the glass panel as he stood on the porch in his black coat, with the snow gone to slush at his boots, reading it with his head bent.
He read it twice.
Then he took a pen from his pocket, the black one with the gold nib, and signed it under my name.
I opened the door.
"You signed it," I said.
"It's a good lease."
"It's got no term."
"Aye." His mouth moved. "That's why I signed."
He held out the loaf.
I took it, and he took off his boots in the hall.
The kitchen smelled of onions and my mother's green pot, which I had put on the stove for the first time in nine years.
Enid sat at the table in her cardigan with a cup of tea.
She had been invited.
She had arrived at four and told me three times that she would not stay long.
"I'll go when I've eaten," she said now. "I'm seventy-two. I've no business at a supper for young people."
"You're staying for pie," I said.
"I'll stay for pie."
We ate the soup and the bread, and a shepherd's pie that I had made badly and Cormick ate two helpings of without a word.
Enid told us about the winter of the big strike.
She told it dryly, with her spoon in the air, and Cormick laughed twice, a deep rusty laugh that had not been used much and was getting better.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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