He laughed, swatting me on the behind. “I’m going to get cleaned up,” he said. “Then I’m making you dinner.”
Of the two of us, Jack was the better chef by far. I’d occasionally cook, but Jack, having been raised by spice-loving Cajuns, easily put my dishes to shame. He’d humor me and eat what I made, but most nights he offered to cook, saying it relaxed him after a long stint at the firehouse. Apparently all of the firefighters at his engine were excellent cooks, always trading recipes and cooking for each other during shifts.
“No fires this time?” I said.
“Nope, just some training sessions. Hence the desperate need for the shower.”
As he stepped inside, I called after him, “You want some company?”
“When have I ever said no to that, cher?” He stripped his shirt off and tossed it at me.
I draped the string of lights on the ladder and followed him into the house. He slipped up behind me in the hall and wrapped his arms around me, squeezing me against his bare chest. I laughed, squirming as he tickled my sides, but then his grip tightened. Nuzzling my ear, he said, “When’s Kate coming? Tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I said, giggling as he tickled my neck with his stubbly cheek.
“Perfect,” he said. “One more night to ourselves.”
He scooped me up over his shoulder and headed for the stairs.
“Jack!” I said. “Put me down!”
He laughed, his feet thumping on the hardwood. “No ma’am, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
~~~~
It was after lunch the next day when I heard Kate’s car coming down the gravel lane. A cloud of dust followed her little red Volkswagen sedan as it curled along the meadow, and I went out on the porch to greet her.
“Good grief,” she said, climbing out. “I thought the damn GPS was going to send me right into the ocean. It seems to think canals are roadways.” She pulled a suitcase out of the backseat and trudged through the grass in a pair of impossibly tall wedges. Kate was my best friend and had been ever since college. We agreed on a lot of things, but fashion was not one of them. Kate loved being girly—she loved swishy skirts and lipstick, high heels and hairspray. I was perfectly happy as a tomboy in jeans and beat-up cowboy boots. She’d tried to make me appreciate fashion for the last ten years, but the most I could muster was some pale lipstick and a flat iron every now and then.
“That can’t be the only bag you have,” I said, nodding toward the tiny suitcase.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh please. This is overflow from the trunk.”
She set the suitcase on the steps and hugged me, tighter than she had in a long time.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“As well as I can be, after that cheating jackass.”
I grabbed her bag and said, “Come in and let me make you a drink.”
In the kitchen, I introduced her to Jack.
“Glad to have you with us,” he said, shaking her hand.
“It’s good to meet you for real this time.”
She’d met Jack for a brief moment at Vergie’s funeral, before I’d even met him. She’d teased me the rest of that weekend about the handsome man in the pale gray suit. When I’d told Jack about that later, he’d laughed and said, “I only wear a suit about twice a year, but if you like it that much, I might find an excuse to wear it around the house.”
~~~~
Kate and I sat on the porch swing for a long time, drinking vodka tonics and watching the clouds drift across the sky. From there, we had a clear view of the lagoon at the edge of the cypresses. Kate had piled her honey-blond hair high up on her head and changed into a pair of jeans and a blouse.
“Thanks for letting me stay with you,” she said after a while.
“Of course,” I said. “You needed to get away.”
“Understatement of the year.” She held the glass against her face. She’d called me the week before and told me she’d found out her fiancé, Ben, was cheating on her. They’d been going out a year and had set a date for May. Kate had discovered a second cell phone in a coat pocket of Ben’s and had done enough investigating to learn he only used it for the woman he was seeing in secret.
Kate had called me the day she’d confronted him. He’d denied everything at first, but he couldn’t make up enough lies to convince her she was wrong. Kate was a biologist, an observer of patterns of behavior. It had killed her to think she hadn’t been able to see his.
I told her to come stay as long as she wanted. She never took vacation days, so she had enough time accrued to carry her through the New Year. I knew she wouldn’t take more than a week, though. She thought guests had an expiration date. I thought that rule didn’t apply to friends, and sometimes I could convince her of that.
After we’d lost track of our refills, she said, “Why didn’t you tell me I was being stupid?”
“Because you weren’t being stupid.”
She grimaced, squeezing the lime into her drink. “A year was too soon to get engaged. I should have made him pay for the deposits on the vineyard and the cake.”
“He’s the one that was stupid. Let’s get that straight.”
She raised her glass. “Maybe I’ll still get the cake. It was chocolate raspberry. The best I’ve ever had.”
“Not all behaviors are predictable,” I said. “You know that.”
“I just feel like the worst cliché ever.”
“He’s the cliché.”
“Maybe I’ll just stick with single-celled organisms for a while.”
I leaned back in the swing, feeling tipsy. “I never liked him that much anyway. He winked too much, like a car salesman.”
“Enza Parker!” she said, tossing her lime at me. “You said you liked him.”
“You’re like my sister. What did you expect me to say?”
She was quiet for a long moment, then fixed me with a hard stare. “Did you know what he was doing?”
I sat up straight. “Of course not. Why would you ask me that?”
She stared at me, as if calculating something, and then looked away.
“Hey,” I said. “Look at me.”
She did.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I wouldn’t keep his cheating a secret.”
“Well, you lied about liking him.”
“Kate,” I said, resting my hand on her arm. “It was only important that you liked him.”
She turned away, staring out into the field. Although the humidity lingered, the air was starting to turn chilly.
“My mother used to tell me I should never get married,” Kate said. “Said I had expectations of loyalty no man could live up to. Maybe I should take her advice.”
“Mothers don’t always have the answers,” I said.
She stared out over the field, sipping her drink. It was impossible to read her mind. Her face never revealed her thoughts. My head was fuzzy from the vodka, and I wondered if hers was too.
“Do you ever wonder?” she said at last. “Do you ever want to find her?”
I’d told her about the letters, the journals I’d found in my grandmother’s closet. When I was younger, I’d imagined meeting my mother again someday, considered what we might say to each other. But at Vergie’s funeral, when it had occurred to me I might see her there, lurking like a phantom, I’d panicked and run out of the church and into a raging thunderstorm.
“Sometimes,” I said. The truth was, I wished I didn’t want to find her. I wanted to not care any more, to not wonder where she was, why she left, what she was like. But as hard as I tried to bury those thoughts, they still gnawed at me, down deep where I couldn’t always reach. I wished I could rip them from my head, like weeding a garden, but it just didn’t work that way.
“Maybe you should find her,” she said. “Just get it over with, and then you’d no longer wonder.”
“Some things might be better left unknown.”
“Imagine my marriage with Ben if I hadn’t found out he was cheating on me. The unknown neve
r helped anybody. Trust me on that. I’m a scientist.”
~~~~
Later, when Kate was sound asleep in the guest room, I slipped into my own bedroom where Jack lay with his back toward me. I stripped out of my clothes and settled into bed next to him. He rolled over and draped his arm around my waist, pulling me against him.
No matter how quiet I was, I always woke him.
“You two have a nice chat?” he mumbled, half asleep.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Figured I should make myself scarce, given the circumstances with her fiancé.”
I scoffed, my head still buzzing from the alcohol. “She’s hardly going to take it out on you. You’ll like her.”
“I don’t doubt that. I just figure right about now she’s wishing there were four billion less of us fellas around.”
I slipped my hand over his. “She liked you from the get-go, remember?”
He muttered something I couldn’t quite make out. He was drifting off again.
For a while I lay there thinking about what Kate had said. Why had I been so afraid of bumping into my mother at Vergie’s funeral? For a ghost, she occupied an awful lot of real estate in my mind. My memories may have been fragmented, but it was shocking how being down here brought back so many of them. Now that Kate was here, I kept thinking back to the funeral, the way the little gray-haired lady had said I looked just like my mother, how she said she hadn’t seen her in a while. It made me wonder where she’d seen her last and how long ago. She might not be as far away as I thought.
My stomach clenched, and everything inside me seemed to squeeze tighter.
“Jack,” I whispered. “You still awake?”
“Hmmm,” he muttered, slipping his feet over mine as his arm tightened around my hips.
“Do you remember when you told me about the man Vergie was seeing before she died?”
“Yeah,” he said. “George.”
“Do you know his last name?”
“Don’t remember off hand. Might have it written down somewhere.”
“Didn’t you say he worked at the jazz museum?”
He kissed my neck and said, “Go to sleep, cher. Let’s talk in the morning.”
“I could go down there and look for him. That might be better than a phone call anyway. If you went with me, would you recognize him?”
“Sure,” he said. “But why do you want to see George?”
I stared at the window. The moonlight sliced through the room, so intense I could see the pattern of the lace curtains on the floorboards, pale blue and black. My chest tightened, and I felt wide awake.
“I want to ask him if Vergie ever told him about my mother.”
Bayou, Whispers from the Past will be out in 2016! Join Lauren’s new release mailing list to be notified when it’s available: http://bit.ly/lauren-news.
Bayou My Love: A Novel Page 30
