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Two Days Before Our Divorce Was Final, He Wrecked His Car, and the Hospital Called His Wife and Not the Fiancée He Left Me For novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: What Can I Bring

On Monday evening Patty was standing on my front walk holding a Pyrex dish with a lid.

She looked at the green door.

"That was brown," she said.

"It was."

"It's nice. It's a good green."

"It's a very good green. Can I help you?"

She held out the dish.

It was my casserole dish, the blue-flowered one, which had gone missing from my cabinet in the spring and turned up, I now understood, at Patty's.

"This is yours," she said. "It's been in my cupboard since April. I washed it."

"Thank you."

I took it.

It was lighter than I remembered.

She stood there, in her good wool coat, with her pocketbook in both hands.

I've seen Patty at funerals and weddings and the worst Christmas of my marriage.

I had never seen her not know what to do with her face.

"Thanksgiving is Thursday," she said. "You've hosted it for nine years. Dean won't be at a table this year. And I don't know what I'm allowed to bring." She stopped. "What can I bring?"

I looked at her for a long moment.

She had come up my walk on her bad knee, and she'd asked.

It cost her something to ask.

"Lemon bars," I said. "A double batch. Eleven o'clock Thursday, at the duplex. You, alone."

"Of course. Alone."

"Peeling potatoes is not optional."

"I've peeled a potato or two."

"Dean?"

"Leaving Friday," Patty said. "He says you told him not to say goodbye. He asked me to tell you there won't be a card with a bird on it."

I laughed before I could help it.

So did she, and then she looked horrified, and covered her mouth with her glove.

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