by Julie Smith
"That's none of your business."
Skip sighed. "I guess you're right."
She got out of the front seat, let Tricia out, and took the handcuffs off. Immediately, Tricia started to kick her. "Fuck you! Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! How dare you handcuff me? Fuck you!"
Skip had her turned around and under control before Jim even managed to get out of the car. She pushed her up against it and cuffed her again, aware they were putting on a show for Maya and her pals.
When all three were again in the car, she said, "Okay, Jim, let's go to Charity."
"Don't want to go to Charity! Goddammit, you can't take me to Charity!"
"You listen to me, Tricia Lattimore. You just assaulted a police officer. I could take you to jail if I want to. Do you understand what you did?"
The jagged sobs started again. ''Oh, goddamrnit. Oh, goddammit. I need Darryl. Oh, please, goddammit; take me to Darryl. Please, please, Skippy."
Darryl Boucree was Tricia's best friend, the bartender at the place where they both worked. Skip knew him well.
"What's his address? He's Uptown, isn't he? Jim, I'll take her."
"He's moved." Tricia gave them an address on Mandeville, in the Faubourg Marigny.
Jim didn't say a word, just started driving.
The house was an unusual one for the neighborhood, a raised cottage with a front porch, larger than most. Skip saw it was a double. She rang the bell on the left, and in a moment Darryl answered. He was a light-skinned black man, handsome, but that wasn't the main thing—he had a whippety kind of energy, a fast, easy charm that Skip found close to irresistible. She could see a glow in the living room, probably from candlelight. He must have a date.
"Skip. This isn't a good time."
"I've got Tricia. It's a long story, but she's way under the weather. I almost had to arrest her."
He looked as if she'd slapped him.
"Sorry to ruin your evening." She hoped she didn't sound sarcastic, but she was so unnerved she wasn't sure.
Darryl was someone important to her. He was not only a bartender, he was also an English teacher, a musician, and a member of a family she knew and liked a lot. Once, they had made tentative moves toward dating, when she wasn't sure where her relationship with Steve was going. Jimmy Dee adored him and so did Kenny. Sheila was frankly in love with him.
Skip couldn't bear to have him think ill of her.
He said, "But what are you doing here?"
"She wouldn't go home. She—" She stopped, unsure what to say next.
He must have seen how upset she was. "Let's go get her."
When Skip let Tricia out of the car and took the cuffs off, she began the hysterical sobbing again, but this time on Darryl's shoulder.
He looked at Skip over Tricia's wracked body and his face was inexpressibly sad. She had seen him look that way before, and it always had the same effect—it made her want to press him to her breast.
A woman stood on the porch, a young black woman, also light-skinned, with long, brownish, curly hair. She was in silhouette, but Skip had the impression she looked like a movie star. She got back in the car.
"Are you okay?" asked Jim.
"There's nothing wrong with me a little crystal wouldn't fix."
"I'll take you to Charity."
He took her to Steve.
10
Grady had gone home for a few hours to write and to get more clothes, and since his mother had company, to be away from her for a while. He was pleased with the children's story he'd written—not that it was anything he would ever be able to sell (or would even want to), but it was fiction and it wasn't about vampires, and it was a start. Toward what, he wasn't sure; maybe just away from the damned Undead. He was realizing more and more how sick he was of their everlasting blood lust.
With his father dead on the dining room floor and most of the rest of his family missing, vampires seemed a trifle superfluous, a sort of playing at gruesomeness. It came to him suddenly that he was truly done with them—that there was no going back—and that surprised him. All he had written was the tiny exercise about the planet where spaghetti grew on trees, and he had no plans for anything else. Yet he knew in that moment—when he said good-bye to the vampires—that there would be something else. He just didn't know what.
That was frightening. Writing was safe because it wasn't life. If he didn't know what to write, he cou1dn't write now, and if he couldn't write, how could he keep reality at bay?
There's the House of Blues, of course. And alcohol.
But if I stay out late and drink, then I won't feel like working tomorrow.
The thing was, he wanted to get on with it, he wanted to do it, whatever it was.
The only thing to do is gut it out.
He turned on his computer and sat in front of it, a quote he had once heard flitting through his head. It was a recipe for successful writing: "Sit staring at paper until drops of blood form on forehead."
If that's what it takes, I'll do it.
But his mother came over.
Nonplussed, he let her in. "Are you all right?"
"I just wanted to see if you're all right."
"Why wouldn't I be?" She never came to Race Street.
"I don't know. You know how I'm kind of psychic sometimes. I thought maybe you were feeling a little down."
"Can I get you something? I have tea and beer."
She seemed to consider. "Maybe just some water."
He got her water and himself a beer, which might interfere with the writing, but it didn't look like that was happening anyway.
"Mother, you know I'll be over there soon. You should have waited for me. You're moving around too much for someone who's—um, bereaved." He was shocked at himself—shocked that he couldn't even say "lost her husband" or "widowed."
"People are supposed to come to you," he said.
"Well, I was kind of passing by."
"Nina told me you were at the restaurant today. Don't you think you should leave that alone for a while? I don't see how you can even think straight with all this going on."
"Well, Grady, somebody's got to do it—a restaurant just doesn't run itself."
"Mother, no one expects you to be down there right now. And Nina's got years of experience. She can handle it."
"Grady, I'm going to ask you something. You know I don't intrude on you and your relationships—I'm always very careful about that—but I'm going to ask you something about Nina."
Oh, Lord. Here we go.
"Why does she hate me? What possible reason does she have to treat me like she does?" Here, as Grady had known she would, Sugar teared up. He went to get her a tissue.
"I'm sure she doesn't hate you, Mother."
"Yes, she does. It's evident in all her dealings with me. She treats me like I haven't got good sense."
"She's got a lot on her mind right now, with Dad and Reed gone."
"She ought to think about the fact that I'm her boss."
"You're her boss?" Grady hadn't even begun to consider that.
"I'm your father's heir."
"But Reed—"
"Reed's not here, Grady."
"Well, look, I wouldn't worry about Nina. She does a good job and you shouldn't let her get under your skin."
"I don't think she's doing such a good job. I went in there today and she wouldn't even order crabmeat! Can you imagine Hebert's without crab? People are going to quit coming if they try to order all our famous dishes and they get told they don't even exist."
"Mother, the dishes exist, we just don't have them every day."
"I think she was just being contrary. She doesn't like me, so she has to contradict everything I say."
Grady had gotten Nina's phone message about Sugar: "If you can't keep that woman out of the restaurant, there's not going to be any Hebert's."
He said: "You've got to remember she has a lot of experience. I think my inclination would be to defer to her."
"Well, I wouldn't min
d deferring if she just wouldn't be so mean to me. She hates my guts, Grady, and I don't know why." She was getting teary again.
"Mother, you always have an enemy. No matter where you end up, it's always somebody." He regretted it the minute he said it.
She looked utterly bewildered. "What do you mean by that?"
"Nothing. I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't talk to me about Nina, that's all. I think you know how I feel about her."
"No. I don't."
"You know we saw each other for a while."
"You're still in love with her."
Glad to have distracted her, he tried for an answer that might elicit her maternal concern, a bonding sort of answer that might also have been true, he wasn't sure. "I guess I am," he said.
"Well, she isn't in love with you." There was malice in her voice, all the nasty triumph of a child delivering a hurtful riposte. He felt the usual anger rise up, felt the way he was used to feeling when she said something mean, but it was only a flash.
It's just how she is, he thought, if not with resignation, then with something close to it; with something approaching calm. Perhaps his father's death was having the effect deaths are supposed to have, that of making much of life seem trivial.
He wasn't about to respond to the content of what she had said, and couldn't think how to answer the tone. Perhaps his silence told her she had gone too far, that she ought to backtrack.
She said in a softer voice, "Into each life some rain must fall."
He hated her clichés. Again he didn't answer.
"I've been unlucky in love too, Grady. It was one of my greatest sorrows when your father turned against me."
Oh, no.
"It was love at first sight, you know. He was so different then."
"Mother, please don't tell me."
Tears flowed out of her eyes, as much on cue as if he'd turned a faucet. "I don't have anybody to talk to. My own son—"
See a shrink, dammit. But he said, "It's just painful, that's all. If you really need to talk, go ahead."
Wimp.
"We met on a blind date—did you know that?"
He shook his head, stunned that he hadn't known it, that it wasn't a piece of family mythology. His parents had never talked about such things.
"I was a senior at Sacred Heart and he was already in college.
He was a junior at LSU, home for Christmas vacation. I couldn't believe someone like me got to go out with someone like him."
Grady's curiosity was piqued. "What were you like?"
"Well, I was naive."
"What else?"
"I guess I was pretty."
"Come on, Mother—you had to have been pretty."
"Well, I was considered rather . . . pretty."
Suddenly he saw her through his father's eyes: blond with big tits.
"And he was . .
"Worldly?"
"More than that."
"Well, what?"
She looked uncomfortable. Finally, she shrugged, apparently deciding there was only one way to say it. "He was Arthur Hebert."
"What did that mean?" He thought he knew full well.
"There was nobody like him in New Orleans. When I saw him in that coat and tie, hair slicked back, so tall and everything, I thought I'd swoon. We went to a fraternity party, and I had my first drink. Can you imagine? I just never dreamed I could marry somebody like that. Then when the children were young . . . She stopped and started to cry again. This time he waited her out, wondering about her odd reference to "the children"—probably she was talking to herself more than to him.
"We were so happy, Grady. You can't imagine how happy we were. You were the cutest little boy and your father just loved you so much. And then a few years later, I don't know, this mean streak came out."
She had never talked like this. He said, "You saw it too?"
"Saw it! or course I saw it. He started treating me like a servant."
"Oh. Did he change toward other people?" Meaning himself.
"Other people? How should I know? All I know is one day we were in love and the next day he hated me. He just turned against me, right in midstream."
"When was it, do you remember?"
"I don't know when I first noticed it. It must have happened gradually. All I know is one day I woke up and I had no husband."
"Do you think it had anything to do with what happened?"
The Thing.
They never spoke of it. Grady's heart pounded.
"What do you mean ‘with what happened'?"
"You know. At the restaurant that day; that time. On Sunday." Don't make me name it. He couldn't; he was quite sure he couldn't get the words out.
"Oh. No, of course not. In fact, we were close for a while after that, and then he went back to treating me like dirt again. He just turned against me, that's all. One day, he up and turned against me. My own husband."
She could probably get a golden retriever to tum against her—or at least she could convince herself that it had.
"And then he turned you against me," she said.
"What?"
"My own children. I know the way he talked about me. What am I talking about? Usually he did it in front of my face. He made you hate me."
"Mother, you know that isn't true."
She was sobbing, sunk in such a swamp of self-pity it would take a crane to pull her out of it.
"Do you think Reed hates you?"
"Once he turned against me, then he just didn't care, that's all. He had all the mistresses he wanted—slept with everybody in town and didn't care who knew it."
"Did he?" Grady had never heard a whiff of it, and he didn't like to think of himself as naive.
"Well, if you didn't know, that's a blessing, that's all I can say about it. I've been thinking about what happened the other night, Grady."
"What happened the other night." A new euphemism for those madcap Heberts.
"He did the same thing to one of his women that he did to me—and she killed him for it. But she didn't think Reed and Dennis and Sally would be there, so she had to kidnap them."
Was this possible? If Arthur was a philanderer, he supposed it was, but most of Sugar's stories were cut from whole cloth. And he didn't want to say it, but he thought killing the Fouchers would have been a better solution than kidnapping.
"See, she thought if she kidnapped them, then it would look like some kind of mob thing or—you know—something criminal."
Grady hooted involuntarily. "Not that," he said, for a moment almost enjoying himself
Even Sugar saw the humor of it. She smiled. "Well, you know what I mean. A cover-up." Her cheeks were flushed with the thrill of the chase—Sugar liked nothing better than to be on the trail of some crackpot theory or other.
"Who do you think the woman is?"
"Whoever he just dumped. How hard could that be to find out?"
Grady suddenly saw how much mischief she could make if she took it into her head to do it. "Mother," he began, "you've really got to cool your heels."
* * *
Sugar drove back to Reed and Dennis's alone, stewing. Grady wanted to write for a while.
Write. Sure.
The great artist was going to spend the evening kidding himself as usual.
How dare he try to talk me out of trying to find out who killed my husband? If not me, then who?
She was good at this—when her children were sick, she always knew what was wrong with them before the doctor did. If Grady cried a certain way, for instance, she knew he had an ear infection. Being a mother was detective work—figuring things out.
Who does he think he is, trying to lecture me? He could never do anything right—Arthur always had to help him. And now that he's grown up, he'll never amount to anything.
Her mouth set in a hard line as she realized she was for the first time facing the truth about her son: Grady was a ne'er-do-well.
I'll always have to help him, always have to be Mama, just like it alwa
ys was. My little boy's not growing up. Ever.
Her mouth relaxed. This was something she knew how to do, something with which she was comfortable.
He was such a precious little boy, and absolutely the apple of his daddy's eye. But we spoiled him, I guess—he just doesn't think it's up to him to make his own way in the world.
Nina must have dumped him because he's so worthless. He's always going to need my help. Always, always.
He's never going to find a woman of his own.
* * *
Grady was trying to get her on paper, but he didn't think he understood her well enough.
What drives her? What's she about?
Don't try to answer that. Just tell her story.
But what was her story? What could have made her so insecure?
So paranoid.
Was something medically wrong with her? Was there a chemical imbalance? Something like that seemed the only explanation.
Just tell what happened when. Like that time we went to Florida.
He was six at the time and he had dived happily into a swimming pool, only to feel the horrible sensation of last year's bathing suit coming off his bottom. The elastic, rotten from drying in the sun, had snapped on impact. He cried out but, being underwater, swallowed a bucket or so of water. He came up coughing; drowning, he thought.
He panicked, not knowing what to do next.
So he started crying, crying and coughing at the same time, not really caring whether he drowned or not, just afraid he wouldn't get his trunks back before it was too late.
"What is it, son?" his father had yelled, and about that time arms had closed around him, and he realized he was being rescued—by a heavyset woman his mother's age.
"No!" he screamed. And he fought and kicked, because if she pulled him out, everyone would see him naked.
"Goddamn brat," she said, and let go.
His father laughed. Sat on the side of the swimming pool and laughed while Grady coughed and struggled. Later, he said it was because Grady's trunks had come floating up and he'd caught on to what the problem was.
But while his father laughed at him, Sugar had dived in and pulled him out, apparently not even noticing he was naked.
"No!No!" he yelled, and again kicked and struggled, but she was a mom saving her kid and she wasn't letting go.
