Three Days in Town, and the Barista Already Knew My Order novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Same Order
The mail carrier told nobody what he had seen in the Stovepipe lot, which is how I knew the whole town had it by lunch on Saturday.
The library women sent a casserole.
The old man at the corner stool looked at Etienne on Monday and said, "Wet weather," and nothing more.
Yvonne, handing me my change that morning, said only, "Your Subaru will need the seats cleaned, ma belle," and did not smile.
It was three weeks before I stopped blushing at the post office.
On Friday the twenty-third of April, at my kitchen table on Lamphere Hill, my landlord signed the deed over to me.
He had wanted to sell for years, and I had the money I'd saved to leave Massachusetts and never spent.
I paid for a drafty farmhouse with a stove that drew badly and a hole in the pantry floor.
It was the best money I have ever spent.
On Saturday morning the last of the snow was going off the roof in long wet slides, and the whole hill dripped.
Etienne's truck came up the road in second gear with two cardboard boxes roped in the bed.
That was everything he owned that wasn't already in my house: his bread tins, his grandfather's carpenter's level, a shoebox of notes, a shelf of cookbooks with the spines gone soft.
He parked in my yard.
He got out and stood looking at the house with his hands in his pockets, as he'd done in October.
"It's a good house," he said.
"It's my house."
"It's got good bones."
"It's got a hole in the pantry floor," I said.
"I brought a board," he said, and I laughed until I had to hold the porch rail.
He carried the boxes up the stairs one at a time.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Three Days in Town, and the Barista Already Knew My Order are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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