Stepdad and His Friends Bred Me During the Birthday Blackout novel · Chapter 4 of 48

Chapter 4: The Bond

I didn't ask her what she'd watched.

I didn't have to.

The front door shut behind her, and I stood in the great room and looked up at the corner of the hall.

A white dome the size of a doorknob. A tiny green light.

Abram followed my eyes and went gray.

"I didn't know it had a battery," he said.

"I know you didn't."

Rand set his coffee down. "She has it. The question is what she does with it."

I went home to Tempe and slept for four hours with the window unit rattling over my head.

Then I went back to work.

Monday I pulled wire in a parking garage. Tuesday I terminated a panel in a dentist's office.

Nobody looked at me funny.

I started to think maybe she'd keep it to herself.

Friday afternoon I was loading spools at the yard in Tempe when the surety agent's sedan pulled in.

He wrote all of my company's bonds. He'd also written mine, I thought.

A $15,000 license bond. My contractor's license. My own truck.

Renner Electric, in white letters on the door. I'd drawn it on a napkin when I was nineteen.

He didn't get out of the car. He rolled the window down.

My foreman was ten feet away, coiling an extension cord very slowly.

"Codi, I'm sorry," the agent said. "Underwriting kicked it back."

"Kicked it back why?"

"Your credit." He looked at his clipboard like it might change its mind. "Six cards in default. A car loan, ninety days late. Thirty-eight thousand four hundred dollars."

I laughed. It came out wrong.

"I have one card. It's got a two-thousand-dollar limit. I pay it off every month."

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