Three Breakdowns A Year Was All I Was Allowed novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: Nine Wives
The young wife texted at ten on Sunday morning: Nine of us are coming. Don't be nervous.
I was nervous.
Shanna had hung the last upper cabinets on Saturday, and the kitchen smelled of sawdust and the soup Luther had left on the stove.
He had also lined up chairs on the plywood floor, borrowed from the church down the block, and then he had picked up his toolbox and gone out the back door.
"I'll be in the truck," he said. "If anyone wants a man out of the building, I'm happy to be one."
By eleven, nine women were standing in my sister's kitchen holding their coats.
They were not what I had expected.
One was seventy, in a church cardigan.
One had a toddler on her hip and a husband's name on her phone lock screen.
One wore scrubs, and one a tailored suit, and the young wife from the parking lot stood in the middle of them, twisting a laminated card between her fingers.
"I told them it's safe," she said. "I said you wouldn't make us say anything."
"I won't make anyone say anything," I said. "There's soup. Nobody has to tell me a thing, and nobody is counting how long you stay."
The woman in the cardigan sat first.
She put her purse on her knees and looked around the room.
"Is that a rule?" she said.
"It's the only one."
"I have not been told that in eleven years," she said, and she laughed, and the laugh turned into something else halfway out.
Shanna went to the sink and ran water so no one would watch her face.
I put Volume One on the counter.
I did not say what it was.
The woman in scrubs picked it up and read the first page.
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