They Gave Me a Monthly Allowance, So I Took Back My Building novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Olive Tree

The letter was a page and a half, in blue ink pressed hard into the paper.

My father wrote the way he talked, in short flat sentences with no ornament.

He told me he had bought the hill house at a bank sale, and that he had been proud of it that day.

He told me the old owner had stood in the road outside the gate and asked him for a year to find the money.

He wrote: I gave him a month. The bank would only give me a month, and I told myself that settled it. It didn't.

I read that line three times on the bench.

He wrote that the old man had died two years after, and that he had gone to the funeral and stood at the back.

He wrote: The tree is the only thing in that house I never felt I owned. If a Ferri ever comes to your gate, Caterina, give them the knoll and the tree. They were never mine to keep. I'm sorry to leave you this to do.

At the bottom was one more line.

Be kinder to yourself than I was to him.

I folded the page and sat looking at the new bronze plate with my father's name hidden somewhere beneath mine.

Then I drove to the hill house and walked up to the olive tree.

Ottavio was already there.

He was standing under the branches with his hands in his pockets and his truck parked crooked in the yard.

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