Back to Bayou Sabine: A Novella

by Lauren Faulkenberry

  Chapter 2

  Kate met me at our favorite dive bar at nine. She was the exact opposite of me in a lot of ways but most obviously in her appreciation of fashion. Today she wore a short dress with a bright blue pattern that made her eyes look turquoise. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail that played up the angles in her cheekbones. Kate had legs like a ballerina and had likely never been lonely in her whole life. A man in a tan suit held the door for her as she entered and waved to me.

  “Hey, Enza,” she said, sliding into the booth. “What’s wrong? You look like something the cat threw up.”

  Kate never had time for delicacy.

  I took a sip of my bourbon as she flagged down the waiter and ordered a martini.

  “And why are you wearing that?” she asked. “I told you to wear something cute.”

  I glanced down at my blouse—only a little wrinkled—and my jeans with a hole in the thigh.

  “I changed from my work clothes,” I said. “It could have been worse.”

  She frowned.

  “What? I’m wearing heels.”

  “Beat-up cowboy boots don’t count as ‘heels.’” She reached over and fluffed my hair.

  “What is wrong with you?” I said, pulling away.

  “Ah. You forgot.”

  “Forgot what?”

  “I told a friend of mine to meet us here,” she said.

  “Oh come on, Kate. I’ve had the worst day. I don’t feel like being set up tonight.”

  “Too bad,” she said. “He’s already on his way.” The waiter set a martini in front of her and smiled. “Thanks,” she said to him. Turning to me, she said, “You’ll like him. He’s funny.”

  I shook my head. “Can you call him and tell him I got sick or something?”

  “Nope.”

  “Kate, I can’t do this tonight.”

  “Yes you can. You need to get back on the horse. With a man who has a job and pays his own rent. You’re not allowed to date fixer-uppers any more.”

  I didn’t have a great track record with dating. My taste in men was too often like my taste in houses: They were well-designed, but had serious structural damage that required too much maintenance and repair.

  Kate, however, overcompensated by finding the most boring men in the Triangle area. The last man she’d forced me to have dinner with was a tax accountant who didn’t move his lips when he kissed me.

  “My grandmother died,” I said. “Cut me a break.”

  She stared at me for a minute, as if deciding whether I was joking. At last she said, “Shit, Enza. I’m sorry.”

  I took another sip of bourbon. “I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years. Not since Mom left us.”

  “Oh,” she said, twirling the martini glass.

  “We were close when I was little. I used to spend every summer with her.”

  “God,” she said, her eyebrows scrunching together. “I’m really sorry.”

  “The funeral’s Friday,” I said. “Down in Louisiana. I thought I’d go.”

  “You want some company?”

  “You want to be my date to a funeral?”

  She shrugged. “It sucks going to those things alone. We could both stand to get out of here for a couple of days. You can take that time to explain what’s wrong with the men I set you up with so I can be more efficient with my hunting.”

  “Right,” I said.

  She sipped her drink. “Come on, these things don’t have to be miserable.”

  “I think that’s the tagline of the local funeral home.”

  She shrugged. “I’m coming with you. It’s settled. You’re too tired to make smart decisions. I can tell.”

  “Fine,” I said, rolling my eyes. I hated the idea of being a stranger there, knowing no one. Why had I not tried to get in touch with Vergie for all those years? Why had I let my father make me think she didn’t care about me any more? She couldn’t possibly have felt that way, could she?

  “Hey,” Kate said. “Why don’t we stay a couple extra days and just relax? Take a girls’ trip like we used to?”

  “A funeral is a terrible excuse for a vacation.”

  “It’s not a vacation,” she said. “It’s a mandatory decompression session. You’ve been working way too hard and way too much. When’s the last time you took time off?”

  I frowned, counting back one month at a time.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Let’s just stay a couple extra days and get you back on the spectrum of normal.”

  “I don’t feel right doing that.”

  “Make it a tribute to your grandmother,” she said. “Let’s go to some of her favorite places.”

  “My dad will have a fit if I take so much time off work.”

  “So let him!” She gestured with her martini, sloshing some onto the table. “Your dad is what you become when you never take a vacation. Do you really want to be him in twenty years?”

  My eye twitched at the thought.

  “Oh, hey,” she said. “There’s David.”

  Before I could bolt, David was standing by the table and reaching for my hand. He wore a salmon-colored shirt with a hideous striped tie, and he shook my hand way too hard. His blond hair was cropped short, and his khakis were much too baggy for his lean frame.

  “What’s up?” David said. He pulled up a chair, and I shot Kate my most baleful look.

  She glanced at her phone and said, “Oh my gosh, I have to take this call. I’m so sorry.”

  I glared at her, but she only winked at me and strode up to the bar, where I knew she would order another drink and chat with the bartender. After thirty minutes, she’d check up on us, and when I gave her my S.O.S. look, she’d tell me she wasn’t feeling well, and I’d insist on taking her home, despite her protests.

  I humored her, meeting these men she found, because she genuinely thought I’d like them. And I usually did like them—just not enough to see them again. For all of her time spent predicting patterns in microorganisms, she had zero ability to predict human chemistry.

  Chapter 3

  We flew into New Orleans and rented a compact car with a hatchback. It looked like a June bug, but it was zippy and easy to park—a fact we both appreciated after taking a full five minutes to find a place to parallel park by the first coffee shop we saw. Kate sat in the passenger seat with a notebook and a road atlas, her bare feet propped on the dash. I didn’t mind driving, and we were safer that way. Kate drove like she was on a race track and yelled at other drivers who shared her bad behavior. The last time I let her drive, she nearly ran over a pedestrian while passing a dump truck and flipping off the driver. Kate weighed about a hundred pounds soaking wet, but she wasn’t intimidated by anything. Especially when driving.

  “Don’t you want to go to her house?” Kate asked. She scanned the list I’d made in my notebook of possible places to visit. I’d spent the whole flight thinking about places Vergie and I had gone together when I was a kid, but they all seemed too touristy now. We’d had coffee every Sunday at the Café du Monde; we’d done tours at the famous cemeteries, ridden the trolley, gone to the jazz museum. We’d wandered through Jackson Square and the riverside market, and done all of the things people do when they visit the city. I’d written all those places down but going to them now didn’t feel like anything special.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  She turned and stared at me. “Why not?”

  I took the next exit off the Interstate, onto a two-lane highway north of the city. “There’ll be tons of people there, for the wake.”

  “So?”

  “So, I can’t handle seeing all those people who knew her so well. I don’t want to have to explain who I am and what happened.”

  “Just say you’re a friend, and leave it at that. You don’t have to explain anything.”

  “When has anybody in the South ever settled for a short answer like that?”

  “We can be the mysterious strangers. They’ll leave us alone.”

 
I laughed. “Not even.”

  She shrugged. “Your call.”

  The highway carried us parallel to a canal where egrets dotted the trees. The tops of the cypresses were bright green but looked almost black in the shadows. I rolled the window down just enough to smell the salty air. Kate searched the radio stations until she found classic rock, then turned it up and started singing along, badly, to Whole Lotta Love.

  After a while, we came to a state park that was situated on a bend in the river. As soon as I saw the historic two-story white house, I knew it was the right place.

  “What’s this?” Kate asked.

  “Vergie used to bring me here. There’s a beach.”

  “It looks like alligator heaven.”

  “Probably.”

  We got out of the car and walked past the house, onto a trail that led to the beach. The buzzing of katydids made my skin tingle as we walked through the cypress grove, curtains of moss hanging from the massive limbs of the trees. We wound through the grove until we came to a clearing where half a dozen people were scattered on the shore. The bright blue of the lake made the sand look white. I pulled off my boots and socks, and walked toward the water.

  “Hey,” Kate called out, “wait up.”

  I stopped at the shore and let the waves wash over my feet. As I stared out into the blue-green of the lake, I was struck by an image of Vergie and me in a canoe. I’d borrowed one of her big floppy sun hats, and she was teaching me to paddle. I was about twelve. She’d handed me an oar and said, “If you ever go out in a boat with a boy, you make sure you know how to swim and paddle. They’ll try hard to impress you, but you better know how to row yourself out of there.”

  Vergie had been alone as far back as I could remember. My grandfather died a few years after he and Vergie had married, and I’d never known her to have another man in her life. I hadn’t thought much about that when I was a girl, but now I wondered why she’d made that choice. I knew it was she who’d made a choice, because Vergie was beautiful and smart and fearless. She’d no doubt been pursued by half the men in the parish. I remembered men bringing her gifts, doing work around the house as favors. When I was young, I just thought they were being neighborly, but thinking about it now, I realized they were all likely chasing after her. Had she chosen to stay single because she couldn’t love anyone the way she’d loved my grandfather? Could she just not imagine herself with anyone else? I didn’t think of Vergie as being that much of a romantic, but maybe she was.

  If it hadn’t been for my father, I never would have imagined her not wanting to see me any more, either.

  And now, the more I thought about the situation, the more I was beginning to doubt my father. It had been easy for my sixteen-year-old brain to assume Vergie didn’t want to see me because of what had happened with my parents. I was sure she hated my father, and by extension, I figured she hated me. I thought back to the moment he said I would no longer be visiting Vergie. She doesn’t want you to visit any more, he’d said. Could I really picture my grandmother saying such a thing? No.

  I’d been a fool.

  ~~~~

  Kate trotted over to me and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. It looked nearly platinum in the sunlight.

  “How about we stay here a while?” I suggested.

  She stared out over the water, then at me.

  “You OK?” she asked.

  “I just want to spend the day somewhere quiet. No tourists.”

  Kate smiled and then sat down on the sand. “Let’s see if we can get some tan lines, then,” she said, and hitched her skirt up high on her thighs.

  Chapter 4

  We’d booked a room in a bed and breakfast in Algiers, just across the lake from New Orleans. Vergie’s funeral was being held in a little church in Bayou Sabine, but there were no places to stay there. Bayou Sabine was really more of a community than a town; it had a fire department, a post office and a couple of restaurants. With three stoplights and one gas station, it was a far cry from what I was accustomed to in Raleigh. But it had charm that sucked you in and made you want to stay a while. People did everything more slowly down here, and at this particular moment, that was exactly what I wanted. My life was generally crammed with deadlines. Every day was a constant rearranging of orders and repairs, and every person I dealt with wanted his or her problem solved yesterday.

  On the porch of the Dauphine Inn, Kate and I sat at a table for two, halfway through a bottle of wine.

  “I’m glad you invited yourself along on this trip,” I said.

  She clinked her glass against mine. “You’re welcome.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be there alone tomorrow.”

  She nodded slowly. “I know.”

  All around us, the night birds were beginning to call to each other in the trees. The inn had tiny lights strung across the porch beams and in the branches of the oak tree in the yard. A moth fluttered against the string above us.

  “I think I’m going to quit my job,” I said.

  “What?”

  “He’s driving me crazy. I’ve been there ten years, and he still treats me like I’m a teenager.”

  “But you love doing houses,” she said as she topped off our glasses.

  “I’d love it better if I was working for myself.”

  “Can you do that right now?”

  I had burned through most of my savings when I bought my own house. My father paid me well, which was the one reason it was so hard to leave. I’d been considering it for a while, but I had no real financial cushion to last me while my business hatched.

  “No. That’s the kicker. I’m stuck with him, unless I want to go work for someone else.”

  “That’s a serious bridge to burn,” she said.

  I nodded. “I’m tempted to leave him and work for another company while I save some money, but I’d never hear the end of it. He obviously considers me weak and barely trustworthy. Quitting would just make him think all his doubting was justified, and then he’d be really insufferable.”

  She frowned as I sipped my wine.

  “Damn,” she said.

  “Stupidly poetic, isn’t it?” I said. “How the biggest fixer-upper around here is me.”

  Kate smirked. “Oh, please. You’re no fixer-upper. You’re just going through a rough patch. We all have them, and in the end we’re better because of them.”

  I clinked my glass against hers. “You, Kate, are my favorite person in the whole world.”

  “I know,” she said with a shrug.

  ~~~~

  The funeral was at ten in the morning, before the day turned to sweltering. With a breeze it was bearable, but my clothes were sticking to me anyway. North Carolina had hot summers, but Louisiana was a special brand of sultry. Since we’d arrived, I’d felt like I was on the inside of a wood stove. Heavy with humidity, the air seemed thick and hard to breathe. The best part of the day was taking a cold shower at the inn.

  The church in Bayou Sabine was on the historical register as one of the oldest ones left in the parish. The white one-room building had burned four times, once during the Civil War. It had carved wooden doors with small round stained glass windows that looked almost like the portholes of a ship. When the bells rang, a flock of pigeons burst from the steeple.

  I slipped my sunglasses back on and hoped no one would recognize me. It had been fifteen years, but old southerners had the uncanny ability to pick you out of a lineup long after you’d seen them last. For the first time in my adult life, I was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a black one I’d borrowed from Kate. With her hair pulled back and her huge sunglasses on, she looked like Jackie Kennedy. I imagined I looked more like one of the British royals, mocked in the tabloids for fashion faux pas.

  At the door, a gray-haired man in a suit handed us a folded paper with Vergie’s picture on it. I held it tight as we stepped inside. The chapel was full. With only a dozen small pews, it would comfortably seat around seventy people. Some folding chairs had been set up as e
xtra seating, and people were standing all along the aisles, fanning themselves with their booklets.

  Kate and I stepped just inside the doorway and stood against the wall. After getting several disapproving looks, we both removed our glasses, and I tugged the brim of my hat down over my eyes.

  Two gray-haired ladies walked in behind us and shuffled up one of the rows. A young man stood as they passed him, then took one of them by the elbow to steer them toward the pew where he’d been sitting. They beamed at him as they eased into the pew, and the man walked to the back corner near us.

  He was tall, over six feet, with dark hair that came just past his ears. He wore a pale gray suit that was tight across his broad shoulders. He looked at us, and I quickly glanced away. Kate nudged me with her elbow, and when I looked at her, she had a hint of a smile, her eyes fixed on him.

  “Maybe we need to expand your search into a different state,” she whispered.

  “Stop.”

  “He looks compassionate, financially stable and not entirely vanilla.”

  “You got that from one gesture?”

  She spoke close to my ear as the organist began to play. “Extrapolating data. It’s what I do best.”

  “Researching for the big guns has given you a big head.”

  She shrugged. “I stand by my findings.”

  I glanced back at the dark-haired man. He had a hint of stubble on his cheek, and I sighed, thinking of the last time I’d felt that pleasant scratch against my shoulder, my neck. He turned toward me, and I was struck by the deep blue of his eyes. I quickly looked away, dropping the pamphlet on the floor.

  When I picked it up, Kate whispered, “Sweet Jesus, they didn’t make men like that where I grew up.”

  “Shhh,” I whispered.

  “I’m just saying, he’s no fixer-upper.”

  Staring at Vergie’s picture brought me back to the present. Her warm smile made me think again of how foolish I’d been to believe she didn’t want me around. I felt tears forming as the writing on the page began to blur. Everyone stood to sing a hymn. I glanced at Kate and started mouthing the words, though I hadn’t sung in a church since I was three feet tall. I was glad we were stuffed in the back so we could slip out as soon as it was over and dodge all the chatter that was bound to follow. Two days ago, I figured I’d come down here, pay my respects and close off this part of my history. But so far, being back in Bayou Sabine was just making all of my fragmented memories more vivid. It was awakening a part of me I’d forgotten, a part I hadn’t known I wanted to remember.