Bayou, Whispers from the Past: A Novel

by Lauren Faulkenberry

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Enza. We almost burned the apartment building down making bourbon-glazed chicken.”

  “The firemen were very sympathetic,” I said.

  “Yeah, but the landlord wasn’t.”

  “That won’t be a problem this time,” I said. “And now I have a live-in fireman.”

  “Christmas is more than a week away. That’s too long for a houseguest.”

  “Come on. When’s the last time we got to spend this much time together?”

  She sighed, but I could tell from her hint of a grin that she’d have a whisk in her hand and an apron on in no time.

  ~~~~

  That night, I called my father.

  “How are you?” I asked him.

  “Fine,” he said. “Busy.”

  My father always said “busy,” as if the only alternative was laziness. He hadn’t always been that way. When I was a kid, we did more together. He used to take me along to his job sites sometimes, letting me build miniature houses out of scrap pieces of lumber. Once, when they were rebuilding a porch for an old Queen Anne, the carpenter had saved all of the bits he trimmed from the banister rails. They looked like building blocks for kids, but with a dotted pattern left from the saw. My twelve-year-old self was smitten with them, building towers in the grass in the shade of a tree.

  Oddly enough, my father and I spent more time together before my mother left us. Once she was gone, it was like he didn’t know what to do with me any more. He didn’t know what to talk about, besides work. When I was in college, I realized that if we were ever going to spend time together, it would have to be on job sites, and I was too old to build towers out of blocks. I liked labor that put my hands to work, so working with him wasn’t a bad compromise. I just hadn’t imagined it would be so hard for us to get along.

  That he thought I’d abandoned him just like my mother had wasn’t lost on me. I sometimes felt that my departure hurt him more than he’d ever admit. But I didn’t know how to talk about that with him.

  “What are you working on?” I asked.

  “A couple of historic houses in Durham. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  Sometimes he told me details about his houses. He’d describe intricate woodwork his second-in-command, Mike, was doing, or tell me about difficulties with subcontractors, or complain about city ordinances, and it almost felt like really talking.

  When I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I got to the point. “Dad, I’ve been thinking about Christmas. How would you like to come out here for dinner?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Dad?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  I could hear him typing in the background.

  “I thought you might like to get to know Jack a little better. His aunt and uncle will be here, and since his uncle’s had an accident, I should stay out here to help.”

  “You’re still seeing that Jack fellow, huh?”

  Only my father used words like “fellow” to describe a man you share a bed with.

  “Yes,” I said. “And I think you’d like him.”

  “I wouldn’t want to impose.” His tone was cool.

  “You’re not imposing. I’m inviting you.”

  After another long pause, he said, “I suppose I could take a couple of days off.”

  “Make it a mini-vacation,” I told him. “I know a nice little bed and breakfast you’d like. I can show you the new house we’re working on too.”

  “I’ll look at my schedule and let you know for sure. I might just fly out Christmas Eve.”

  “It would be good to see you, Dad.”

  “You, too,” he said, and I almost believed him.

  ~~~~

  My father and I had never had what I would call a good relationship. We didn’t understand each other, and we had stopped pretending to when I got out of college. I’d been working for him a couple of years by then and thought it might bring us closer. We saw each other almost every day back then, and sometimes I even got the impression he thought I was good at renovations. He occasionally praised my work, but he still didn’t give me the same latitude with decision-making that he did with some of the guys on the crew. I’d tried everything I could think of to increase my father’s faith in me, and flipping Vergie’s house probably would have done it if I hadn’t ended up staying here with Jack.

  Last summer, my father had sent me down here to flip her house and sell it, even though she’d left it to me when she died. I’d thought, in the beginning, I could use this property to prove to my father I was ready to lead my own crew, just like his favorite guy, Mike. Mike was about my age, married with a couple of kids, and did amazing work with renovations. He was no doubt the son my father always wished he’d had. Instead of a master woodworker, my father had gotten me: a tomboy who challenged him and wanted things done her own way—at least most of the time.

  When I decided to keep Vergie’s house rather than sell it, my father thought I was making a huge mistake. You’ll be in debt because of sentimentality, he’d said. But the more I worked on the house, and the more of Vergie I saw in every room, the harder it was to think of selling it to a stranger. This house held secrets, and if I stuck around long enough, they might be unearthed.

  And then there was Jack. I’d fallen hard for him and hadn’t wanted to leave him.

  My father was one of those people who would rather be locked in a broom closet with starving coyotes than admit he was wrong. But he had been wrong. Wrong about Jack and wrong about me.

  No matter how difficult things were with my father, part of me still wanted to try to save the relationship. He was the only family I had left. It was one thing for people to leave you by dying. But it was far sadder for someone to make the choice to cut you out of her life, to know that person is still out there in the world, choosing not to be anywhere near you.

  I didn’t want that to happen with my father too.

  ~~~~

  After Jack left for work, Kate and I made a chicken pot pie for dinner. It was definitely a contender for Christmas because it was ridiculously easy to make. The crust required more effort and skill, but I’d have Kate around to help me with advanced pastry techniques.

  After we’d cleaned the kitchen and had a couple of glasses of wine, I brought the bag full of my mother’s letters into the living room. I sat next to Kate and laid the stack of envelopes between us.

  “What’s this?” she asked, picking one up.

  “Letters from my mother.”

  Her eyes widened. “Where did you get all these?”

  “George.” I stared at them, thinking of how archaeologists must feel right before they open a mysterious box or jar that has been sealed for a thousand years. “Would you help me go through them?”

  “You want me to read your mother’s letters?”

  “It’s taking me too long,” I said. “I want to know what happened to her, where she is.”

  She held an envelope close to her face, studying the scrawled writing.

  “It drives me crazy, not knowing what’s inside them,” I said. “There are journals too.”

  “OK,” she said. “If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  She opened the first letter like it was fragile as glass, then started reading.

  “Look for anything about her, or why she left, or where she’s going,” I said. “So far most of what I’ve read has just been about her traveling out West, but if you come across anything that looks pertinent, let me know.”

  “Will do,” she said, slipping on her reading glasses. They were cat’s-eye tortoise-shell, something I could never pull off.

  After a couple of hours, we were down to the last of the letters. So far, they had mostly been about her travels through Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. She’d never mentioned why she went to these places, just described the sites she visited and some friends she made along the way. These letters could have been from anyone, about virtu
ally any place. I was disappointed in how generic they were, how little they revealed about their writer.

  “Let’s move on to the journals,” I said to Kate. “I’ve got three, I think.”

  “Oh, Enza. It’s late. Let’s pick this up tomorrow.”

  It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. Kate took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.

  “You’re right.” I sighed. “Thanks for the help.”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for,” she said, and hugged me before going up to bed. “Don’t stay up all night obsessing over this, OK?”

  I nodded, still turning the letters over in my hands as she climbed the stairs.

  ~~~~

  I lay in bed for what seemed like hours, willing myself to go to sleep. It was always harder for me to get to sleep when Jack wasn’t there. When it was after two and I was still wide awake, I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. I pulled the journals out of the breadbox and found the one with the earliest dates and started to read.

  When the kettle began to steam, I poured a cup of tea and took the journals back to the bedroom, hoping that reading would make me tired enough to fall asleep.

  I propped myself up in the bed, skimming the pages in the dim light. Vergie’s journals were more like scrapbooks. The softcover leather-bound books had straps you wrapped around the covers and tied to keep them closed. It was a good thing, too, because the books were filled with photographs and stray pieces of paper. News clippings, recipe cards, Polaroid pictures—all kinds of ephemera had been taped to the pages. The tape had disintegrated, and some of the pictures had slipped out of place, her writing around them indicating the places where they had been. I turned the pages carefully, not wanting the pieces to fall out of their context completely.

  I skimmed over a lot of passages, wanting to skip ahead and find out more about my mother. The first journal didn’t have much about her at all. There were some postcards she’d sent from her travels—supplemental to the letters, no doubt—and Vergie occasionally wrote that she was concerned about Martine. It took a while to get used to seeing her name, Martine, written in my grandmother’s gentle looping script.

  These postcards were intermingled with drawings of flowers Vergie was growing, recipes she’d gathered from her friends, and passages that described days she’d spent with George. One page included a drawing of a hosta leaf and a detailed description of how she and George had tried to cross-pollinate a couple of varieties they particularly liked. I chuckled to myself, imagining the two of them with cotton swabs and bifocals, trying to create a new hybrid of their own. She called him a nice fella with good intentions and zero practical knowledge of gardening, and I smiled, thinking he probably had plenty of other practical knowledge that endeared him to her.

  A postcard from Mesa Verde was nestled in the next page, and Vergie switched from hosta drawings to one simple thought about my mother: I hope this time away will do her good, she wrote. I think sometimes she wants to go back, and I think sometimes that she might be able to, and there might be hope for them yet.

  She had to be talking about going back to me and my father. I flipped through the next several pages, past more entries about George, making a mental note to study those more closely later. Part of me felt guilty reading about her with George, these intimate details she might never have told me in person, given the chance. That was the thing about diaries: They were sometimes the only way to really learn what another person was thinking, but reading them was almost certainly a kind of betrayal, because if that person wanted you to know those thoughts, he or she would have told you.

  I’d kept a journal for a few years when I was a teenager. I’d have died from embarrassment if anyone had ever read it. When I was in college, I’d re-read those pages and then burned them in the fireplace one winter when I was visiting my father. Sometimes I regretted that now, but I’d been tired of holding on to the memories in those journals, and setting fire to the pages seemed the only way to ensure I’d someday forget.

  I was halfway through the first book, and the rest of my tea was cold. My eyelids had grown heavy, and I was starting to nod off, so I placed the journal on the nightstand and turned out the light. I sighed in the darkness, wondering if I should continue reading or if I was only going to uncover more truths that I would later wish to forget.

  Chapter 5

  The next afternoon, Kate and I went back over to Buck and Josie’s. I still felt it was at least partially my fault Buck had hurt himself, and the only real way I knew how to express that guilt was through pie. With Kate’s help, I made an apple pie from local Winesaps Jack and I had picked.

  When we got to their house, Josie was cleaning up the kitchen and had a pot of chili cooking.

  “Buck’s out cold with the painkillers,” she said, stirring the chili. “But Lucille got here a little earlier, so if you stay a few minutes, you can meet her.”

  Kate set the pie on the counter, and Josie put a kettle on.

  “I was about to make some hot chocolate and pretend it’s winter,” Josie said. “Would you gals like some?”

  Before we could answer, she was pulling out three mugs and a bottle of coffee liqueur. “I like mine with a little sass.”

  Kate and I smiled as she set them on the counter.

  “Josie,” I said, “can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.” Josie’s eyes looked tired, and for a split second, I thought of dropping it. But I knew I wouldn’t sleep until I had some answers.

  “Did you know my mother at all?”

  Kate’s eyes widened as Josie poured the liqueur into our mugs, an extra slosh into her own.

  Josie sighed. “Not really, hon. I met her once, I think, and I knew she came back several years ago to stay with your grandmother for a while, but I never got the particulars. That happened a lot around here, when women needed to go back to stay with their parents for a while. Sometimes a parent got sick, and that brought them back for a bit, but Vergie always seemed to be in good health.”

  I nodded, drinking the cocoa. It had a bite that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

  “I’m sorry… I wish I could tell you more, but I wasn’t that close with your grandmother, and I didn’t ask her such things.”

  “It’s OK.” But I thought it was odd there weren’t at least some rumors that had circulated. Where I grew up, women who came back home to live with their parents generated all kinds of gossip. Granted, gossip might not help me much, but it seemed gossip always contained a kernel of truth, and that could give me a place to start.

  “Did you ever hear when my mom moved away again or where she might have gone?” I asked her.

  She shook her head, taking a sip of cocoa, but she looked troubled, like this was a subject she wanted to escape from as soon as possible.

  A clatter outside broke into my thoughts, and the door to the kitchen opened and banged against the door stop. A tall, slim young woman with strawberry blond hair entered, holding two paper bags of groceries against her chest. Behind her, a guy about her age—late twenties—carried a case of beer. She struggled to squeeze through the door.

  “Hey,” Josie said to her, “you’re just in time.”

  The girl set the groceries on the counter and motioned for the guy to put the beer in the refrigerator.

  “Enza,” Josie said, “this is our daughter, Lucille.”

  “Hi,” Lucille said, shaking my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  Up close, I could see the resemblance to Josie: the pale greenish eyes, the bright smile. Her hair fell just past her shoulders, wildly curly and windblown.

  “You, too,” I said. “This is my friend Kate. She’s visiting for a while.”

  Lucille shook Kate’s hand and said, “This is Toph.”

  Toph nodded at us as he sat down at the table and pulled his cell phone from his pocket.

  Lucille started putting the groceries away. Josie stood to help her, but Lucille shooed her away. “I’ve
got this, Mom. Just rest a while, will you?”

  Toph said, “Babe, can you hand me a bowl of chili?”

  “It’s for supper,” Lucille said.

  “Yeah, but I’m starving.”

  “It’s OK,” Josie said. “It’s been cooking a while.”

  Lucille frowned as she scooped some chili into a bowl and brought it to the table. Toph stirred it and turned back to his phone. He wore a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and jeans with that expensive kind of excessive stitching on the pockets. When he brushed a lock of shaggy hair out of his eyes—just barely—I saw a watch on his wrist that likely cost more than my annual car insurance. He looked like the least likely partner for Lucille, who wore an old Gorillaz T-shirt and jeans with a hole in the knee and Chuck Taylors that squeaked as she dashed around the kitchen.

  “So, Lucille,” I said, “Josie told me you’re in grad school.”

  “Yeah. I took a few years off to work and just started the arts management program last year.”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “She’s working part time at the biggest theater in Baton Rouge,” Josie said. “And she got a full scholarship for school.”

  “Way to go,” I said.

  Lucille smiled and shrugged. “Toph got me in at the theater. He has a friend there.”

  Toph glanced up from the chili and winked at her. “You were a perfect fit,” he said to her.

  “Are you in school there too?” I asked him.

  “Yeah.” He looked at me only briefly. “I’m in the creative writing program.”

  “Toph writes movies,” Lucille said.

  “Scripts,” he said.

  “No stage plays?” I asked. “Seems like having a friend in a theater would be a big leg up for that.”

  “There’s no money in stage plays,” he said. “Formulaic scripts are where it’s at. An MFA gets your scripts out of the slush pile, and a friend at UCLA who has a friend at a major studio gets you into a meeting. Cronyism is the new talent.”