Small Things You Promised novel · Chapter 5 of 24
Chapter 5: Ninety-Seven
I didn't go down the steps.
My back wouldn't have let me, and I didn't need to.
"Ty," I said. "April eighteenth."
"Not this again."
"You remember what happened in that kitchen."
The man two doors down kept his phone up.
The woman across the street turned off her hose.
"This man carried me out." I nodded at Wiley. "And left you a note."
Ty opened his mouth.
"You threw it away in May. I watched you do it. You said it was no big deal."
"Carlie, come on."
"I met him twice. Once on my floor. Once on Sunday, carrying the old man next door out of his own house."
I pointed at the window unit humming in the old man's kitchen.
"He put that in today. You've had the yard sign up since May."
Ty looked at the window.
He looked at the street full of people watching him.
"This is crazy," he said, to nobody.
He got in his truck and drove off without his boxes.
Lula came out on the porch with a frog video still playing on my phone.
"Was that man yelling?"
"A little," Wiley said.
"Was he wrong?"
"Yes."
"Okay." She went back inside.
Missy turned on the TV for the weather.
The weatherman stood in front of a map of Tennessee that was red from edge to edge.
"Folks, there's a heat dome building," he said. "We could see highs over a hundred and three by about the twentieth, and it could sit on us for two weeks."
Nobody said anything.
Wiley looked at the old man's house.
"Thirty-one," he said.
"Thirty-one what?"
"You said it to Ty. At the shop. Thirty-one people." He looked at me. "The apprentice told a buddy of mine at the station."
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