When Love Runs Dry novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: Bail

The county lockup was forty minutes away, in a brick building behind a Dunkin'.

They took my fingerprints, my shoelaces and my picture.

I held up the little board with my name on it and didn't smile.

My cellmate was a woman about Opal's age who'd been picked up for driving her riding mower to the liquor store.

"What are you in for?" she asked.

"Standing on a curb box."

"Good for you," she said.

The bench was steel and the blanket was paper.

I lay awake listening to the pipes in the walls.

Somebody's toilet ran all night. I diagnosed a bad flapper valve in my head and fixed it six different ways.

At nine in the morning a guard unlocked the door.

"Brainard. You're out. Your grandmother's here." He paused. "She brought cookies for the desk."

Opal was in the lobby in her church coat, holding her pocketbook.

Nolan stood behind her.

He hadn't shaved. His flannel was buttoned wrong.

Opal hugged me first.

Then Nolan stepped forward, stopped, and didn't seem to know what to do with his hands.

"You okay?" he said.

"I'm fine. Your buttons are wrong."

He looked down at his shirt.

He didn't fix them. He just put one big hand on the back of my head for a second, very lightly, and took it away.

"Bail was five hundred," Opal said. "We split it."

"You owe him two-fifty and me nothing, because I'm your grandmother and I'll hold it over you forever instead."

A man in a gray suit stood up from a bench by the door.

Expensive shoes, a leather folio, a Greenwich tan in November.

I knew him. He'd been at our wedding.

"Meredith. Tobias asked me to come."

"Of course he did."

"He's very upset about how yesterday went."

"So was I. I was the one in the handcuffs."

"He can make this disappear." He opened the folio. "The obstruction charge goes away this morning. No record."

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