Isabeau’s gaze bounced from my face to Ox’s a few times but she didn’t say anything. Sparkle linked her black-tipped fingers together and rested her chin on them.
Ox leaned forward in his chair. “This is a mistake, Rita. You should have talked to me first.”
Talk to him first? Oh, now he’d done it. I was so angry, blood rushed into my face. I didn’t want to make a scene, however, so I tried to keep my voice level. “First of all, I didn’t talk to Evangeline Delahunt. Miss Frankie did. And second, where do you get off saying that we’re making a mistake? I happen to know that Philippe tried to get this gig but never could. Now we have a chance to do what he always wanted to.”
Ox shook his head but kept his eyes locked on mine. “Philippe never wanted that job. He knew Evangeline Delahunt too well. His mother tried to push him into it, but he wouldn’t do it.”
His words hit me like a fist to the stomach. I wanted to argue with him, but I knew Miss Frankie well enough to know that Ox was probably telling the truth. But it was too late now. The only thing I could say was, “Even so, she and I are the partners at Zydeco. It’s our decision, not yours.”
Ox’s expression turned to stone, but I was too furious to care.
Edie came back from the restroom and sank into her chair. “What’s going on?”
I waved away the question, intending to fill her in later. Estelle bounced up out of her seat and scurried over to Ox. “Now, let’s not ruin Dwight’s birthday by arguing over something that’s already done,” she said soothingly.
Apparently, Ox wasn’t in the mood to listen to her. He lurched to his feet and leaned across the table to get right in my face. “I hope you’re happy. The two of you probably just signed Zydeco’s death warrant.” He shoved his chair out of the way and growled at Isabeau, “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
His reaction left me almost speechless. And by almost, I mean that the only words I could think of were ones I didn’t want to shout in public as he walked away. He made me furious, but I needed him at Zydeco, and even though he was pigheaded and nearly as competitive as Philippe had been, he was still a friend . . . I hoped.
“Hey!” Edie said, a bit louder. “Somebody tell me what you’re all so upset about.”
“Just wait,” I told her. “This isn’t the time.”
Ox put a couple of tables between us and finally Isabeau hopped up from her seat. She gave Dwight a quick hug and mouthed, “I’ll talk to him,” at me before skipping after him.
Convinced that our argument had ruined Dwight’s night, I started to apologize, but at that moment Edie let out a yowl that sounded like a feral cat. It was so loud even Ox turned back to see what was wrong.
“Edie?” I said, the argument forgotten for the moment. “What’s wrong?”
She closed her eyes and slumped down in her chair, both hands on her belly. “I think my water just broke!”
Four
“Where’s River?” Edie shouted from the backseat of my Mercedes a few minutes later. “Has anybody been able to reach him yet?” She was supposed to be lying down on Sparkle’s lap, but I could see half of her face in the rearview mirror.
I maneuvered around a couple of slow-moving cars and prayed that I’d get Edie and her baby to the hospital safely. The possibility of delivering the baby on my own, with only Sparkle to help, did not fill me with confidence. Traffic was a bit heavier than it had been early in the evening, and it was taking all my concentration just to keep myself from panicking and causing a wreck.
Sparkle said something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. It must have made Edie feel better, though, because she stopped screeching for a second.
Edie’s relationship with her baby’s daddy was new, complicated, and fragile. They’d met at the Dizzy Duke on the night Edie’s younger sister announced her engagement—a piece of news that had sent Edie into an emotional tailspin and right into the arms of a handsome stranger. A contractor for a company doing business in the Middle East, he’d flown to Afghanistan the following day. She’d been five months pregnant when he came back to New Orleans to visit his little sister, who—surprise!—turned out to be Sparkle. Until that day, Edie hadn’t even known his name.
Over the past three months, they’d been trying to figure out how they felt and what each of them wanted. Or maybe I should say that Edie had been trying to figure out what she wanted. River had thrown himself into the idea of fatherhood with gusto, even changing jobs to ensure he wouldn’t have to leave the country again. Still, Edie kept him at arm’s length and regarded him with suspicion. Which wasn’t surprising. Edie doesn’t trust easily.
River’s willingness to step up and take responsibility made me like him, but it was freaking Edie out. She still hadn’t decided whether she wanted River to be a major part of her life or not, and her indecision was driving Sparkle nuts. The only thing Sparkle wanted more than another tattoo or piercing was a family.
The two women were getting along for the moment, though, and right now that was all that mattered. I glanced at my cell phone to make sure I hadn’t missed a call and tried to reassure Edie. “I’ve left two messages. River must be busy.”
Edie locked eyes with me in the mirror. “Busy? He said he wanted to be there when the baby was born.”
“I’m sure he’ll meet us at the hospital,” I assured her. “Like I said, I’ve left a couple of messages.”
“And so have I,” Sparkle said. She looked out the back window and frowned. “I don’t see Ox’s truck. Have we lost them?”
“I’m not all that concerned with creating a caravan,” I said as I shot through an intersection on a yellow light. “They know where the hospital is. My main concern is getting Edie there before the baby arrives.”
Sparkle shifted so that she was facing front again, which caused Edie to let out a low moan. “If River doesn’t call me back, I’m going to kill him,” Sparkle muttered. “He knows how important this is.”
The last thing River needed was both women turning against him, so I tried to stick up for him. “Hey, give the guy a break. It’s not as if he knew the baby was going to come tonight.”
“No, but he should keep his cell phone on,” Sparkle said. “I told him at least a hundred times not to go anywhere without it.”
Edie shifted around in the backseat, trying to get comfortable. “It’s fine,” she said in a tone that clearly said it wasn’t fine at all. “If he doesn’t make it, I’ll know exactly how he feels.”
I said a silent prayer for River to check his phone before Edie got the wrong idea. I didn’t know him well, but what I did know convinced me that he was a genuinely good guy who just wanted to be a part of his child’s life. He’d even gone along with Edie’s refusal to find out the baby’s sex before it was born, which I thought was pretty cool of him.
I tried again to reason with Edie, but she cut me off after just a few words. “Obviously, I can’t count on River,” she whined. “And the baby can’t either. It needs a godmother. Somebody it can turn to and rely on. Somebody steady.”
“River’s steady,” Sparkle said, apparently forgetting that she’d been threatening to kill him only a few minutes earlier. “He’s real steady.”
“Yeah. Until he takes off again for who knows where.”
“He’s not going to do that,” Sparkle insisted. “Just give him a chance.”
“I have given him a chance,” Edie assured us. “I’m telling you, if he doesn’t show up tonight, it’s game over.”
Sparkle was getting nowhere, so I gave it a try. “First of all,” I said in my most reasonable tone, “this isn’t a game. Second, you’re in pain and you’re nervous about going through labor and becoming a mother. I don’t blame you. I’d be freaking out myself if I were in your shoes. Which makes this a really bad time to make big decisions. I think you should wait until the baby’s here and the dust settles.�
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“But I don’t want the baby born with just me there for it. I don’t. I thought I could handle it, but I was wrong. Please, Rita. Say you’ll do it.”
I was so startled I swerved and almost hit the car in the next lane. I got the Mercedes under control and met Edie’s plaintive gaze in the mirror. “Do what, exactly?”
“Be the baby’s godmother, of course. What have we just been talking about?”
Had she forgotten that I had baby issues? That I knew nothing about kids? “You want me to be the baby’s godmother?”
“Well, that figures,” Sparkle grumbled. “I should have known you wouldn’t ask me.”
“You’re the baby’s aunt,” Edie said impatiently. “Of course you’ll be there for it, but you’re part of River’s family. The baby needs someone who doesn’t come into the relationship with loyalties to one side or the other. Please, Rita? I need you to do this for me. I can’t ask anyone in my family. We’re speaking again, but I don’t want one of them to do the whole guilt thing on the baby like my mother does with me.”
She had a point about her mother. Lin Bryce had been determined to get her daughter respectably married, which had created a rift that only Miss Frankie’s intervention had resolved. Like Edie said, they were speaking again but that didn’t mean Lin had stopped pushing her agenda on her daughter. I was worried about the way Edie had already divided the two families into opposing sides, which did make me want to say yes, for the baby’s sake. But being a godmother meant a whole lot more than buying birthday and Christmas presents every year. At least, it meant more to me, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for it. Aunt Yolanda was my godmother, which was partially how I’d landed on her doorstep when my parents died. And even though I’d been seriously pissed at God for taking my parents, Aunt Yolanda had dragged me to church until I was old enough to make my own choices. So I knew all the religious requirements for being a suitable godparent. If I said yes, I’d be agreeing to make sure the baby had the “proper” spiritual training, whatever that was. It was a huge responsibility, one I wasn’t sure I wanted.
And then there were my own baby issues on top of it; specifically, that I’d always wanted kids but had never even come close to having one of my own. Envy was another factor to consider. Could I give myself wholeheartedly to this baby, or would my feelings get in the way? It wouldn’t be fair to say yes if I couldn’t do the job right.
“Wow,” I said over my shoulder. “Thank you, but that’s huge. Can I think about it for a day or two?”
“Think about it?” Edie reared up so far, I could only see her eyes in the mirror. “Are you kidding me? This baby will be here any time. It needs a godmother now!”
Personally, I couldn’t see any harm in waiting a day or two, but I’d heard that labor makes some women crazy and apparently Edie was one of them. Every instinct I had urged me to be cautious, but the wild-looking woman howling in my backseat convinced me to take a risk.
“Okay. Okay. I’ll do it. Just lie down, all right? Don’t get any more worked up. I’ll be the godmother. But I draw the line at delivering the baby on the side of the road.”
Edie grumbled under her breath, but she did disappear from the mirror so I figured she’d taken my advice. We were less than two blocks from the hospital by then, so I let myself relax a bit. If the baby hadn’t made an appearance by now and if Edie stopped wigging out, we just might make it in time.
A few minutes later, I pulled into a parking lot and scanned the signs for directions to the emergency room. Half a dozen buildings were scattered about the medical complex, but I couldn’t see an emergency room anywhere. “Where is it? Where is it?” I mumbled.
Edie popped up into the mirror again. “It’s over there,” she said and shoved her arm under my nose so she could point the way. “And just so you know, it’s quicker to come in off the service street. Next time, you should go that way.”
Her cell phone rang and she sat up in the seat to answer. “Finally! Where the hell have you been? If I was really in labor, I probably would have been bearing down by now.”
Usually I’m not the kind of person who interrupts someone else’s phone call, but six little words had set my ears ringing. I slammed on the brakes, threw the car into park, and scooted around to look at Edie. “What do you mean, ‘if you were really in labor’?”
Edie waved me off, still talking on the phone. “Seriously, River, this is unacceptable.”
I glanced at Sparkle, whose face registered as much shock as I felt. “She’s not in labor?” I asked.
Sparkle cut a sharp look at Edie. “Apparently not.”
I heard the screech of tires as Ox’s truck barreled into the parking lot going much too fast. He pulled to a stop behind me and jumped out of the truck’s cab, speed-walking to my window. “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”
The passenger’s side door of his truck opened and Isabeau and Estelle spilled out to join us. I didn’t see Dwight, and figured he’d opted to stay behind at the Dizzy Duke.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said as the two women reached my window. “That’s the problem. Apparently, this was a trial run.”
Ox’s expression went from concern to outrage in a heartbeat. “What do you mean, ‘a trial run’?”
“A test,” I said, my words clipped. “A trial run. And apparently, we all failed.”
Everyone started talking at once, which meant that I couldn’t really understand anyone. I picked up a word or two here or there from each of them, and it was enough to let me know how they felt.
Sparkle: “. . . absolutely unbelievable . . .”
Estelle: “I was scared to death . . .”
Edie: “Will you please be quiet?”
Ox: “. . . ought to wring her neck . . .”
Isabeau: “Are you sure she’s not . . .”
In the face of their outrage, I thought surely Edie would apologize, but she just flapped her hand again. “Hey! I’m on the phone here. Keep it down, okay? Sheesh!”
Estelle’s mouth fell open and Ox’s thinned to nothing but a line in his face. And now even Isabeau looked angry, which almost never happened.
Oops. Yeah, I was angry but I didn’t want to turn the whole staff against Edie. I tried to diffuse the situation. “I’m sure it was just a false alarm. She probably thought she really was in labor. Let’s let her finish her call and she’ll clear up all the confusion.”
Estelle leaned down to look in the car. Apparently she felt the need to give Edie the stink eye. “She said that her water broke. Was that a lie?”
“I don’t—”
Ox tried to jerk open the back door. Luckily for Edie, the safety locks had triggered as I drove. The car rocked a little but the door didn’t open. I knew Ox would never have hurt her. He just isn’t that kind of man. But he would’ve gotten right in her face and nobody needs to experience that.
He glared at me as if he suspected me of aiding and abetting. “Open the door, Rita.”
“Not while you’re this angry,” I said. “Let’s all calm down and talk this out.”
Not surprisingly, Isabeau backed him. “That was a dirty trick and you know it.”
I held up both hands. “You’ll get no argument from me, but let’s not do something we’ll regret, okay?”
Estelle looked torn, but she took Ox’s side. “She owes us an apology. Every one of us would have agreed to make a trial run if she’d asked us.”
I knew she was right, but I didn’t get a chance to say so. Edie broke away from her conversation with River to dig the hole a little deeper. “If I’d asked,” she snipped, “you’d all have known it was a trial run. The results would have been skewed.”
I sent her an exasperated look. “You’re not making this better, you know.”
Ox experienced an abrupt change of mind about talking to Edie. He shouted a few choice words at her an
d stormed back to his truck. I thought he’d been in a bad mood before, but that was nothing compared to this. I had a feeling it would take a while for him to cool down.
The weight of the world landed squarely on my shoulders. Ox wasn’t the only one on my staff who looked ready to commit murder. The last thing I needed right now, with the biggest contract of my career on the line, was a civil war. I needed them all to pull together and get along. But if the stone-cold expressions on all their faces were any indication, the hostilities had already begun.
Five
I was frustrated and exhausted when I pulled back onto Miss Frankie’s street an hour later. I’d done my best to negotiate peace with the staff, but I’d failed. Ox had continued to give Edie another very loud, very angry piece of his mind, and Isabeau had done the same. Neither of them had seemed to care that Edie wasn’t really listening.
Estelle had sympathized with Edie one moment, then joined the outrage brigade the next. Sparkle had glowered at Edie while alternately chewing her fingernails to nubs and defending her brother.
River had shown up a few minutes after the others left, and that was when things got really hairy. Edie had read him the riot act for failing to show up for her phony labor. River had done his best to explain that he’d been in a meeting, but Edie hadn’t stopped talking long enough for him to get out a whole sentence.
I wondered what kind of meeting River had been in late on a Friday night. I liked him, but he was still a mystery. The middle of the hospital parking lot didn’t seem like the right place to satisfy my curiosity, though.
Eventually, River had convinced Edie to go with him to talk things out, and Sparkle had tagged along, leaving me on my own to think about what had just happened. I wasn’t looking forward to going to work tomorrow morning. My staff members are all eccentric and mulish, and I had no idea how to get them to move forward as a team after Edie’s ill-advised trial run. I just knew that the bad feelings from tonight would spill over into the workplace—just in time for Evangeline Delahunt to pick up on them.
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