Now I Watch Her Love Him novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Drawer

My father had set two places at the kitchen table and put nothing on either plate.

He sat at the head, and I sat on his left, where I had sat since I was twelve.

My mother's recipe box was still on the shelf above the stove, eight years after the funeral, and neither of us had ever moved it.

"You did a hard thing in that lot today," he said.

"Hannah did the hard thing. I only repeated it."

"You said it to forty strangers with your name on the building."

He turned his coffee cup on its saucer.

"I couldn't have, at your age."

"Dad, you said you owed me something."

"I do." He did not look up. "It's been on my mind since the night you came into my office."

I waited.

"The Monday after your mother's funeral, you were gone from the lot," he said.

"I came in at eight and your desk was empty, so I called you at home."

I remembered it.

I had been sitting on my own garage floor with a mug of cold coffee, and I hadn't been able to stand up.

"I said, 'Dylan, the lot opens at nine, and grief doesn't sell cars,'" my father said.

"And you came in. Twenty-six years old, in the same suit you wore to the cemetery."

"I remember."

"I was proud of you. That's the worst part. I thought, there's my boy, he knows how it's done."

He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

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