Chapter 18: Festival

Luc walked out of the bottling house whistling, the same way he'd walked out of row nine on Red Day.

Mireille followed him with her clipboard against her chest.

Two hundred people watched them go.

Etienne was gone by the time I turned around.

He'd walked out the side door, between the conveyor lines, without a word to me.

He'd meant that part too.

Lise closed the café on Saturday for the first time since the storm.

She taped a sign to the door.

"GONE TO NEW ORLEANS TO MAKE JOSETTE RICH. BACK SUNDAY. STEAL NOTHING."

We left at three in the morning with six hundred jars of green sauce in her van.

They rode in milk crates and towels.

I'd made a real label this time.

A green pepper with a crown of salt crystals, drawn by the foreman's daughter, who was fourteen and charged me in boudin.

ARCENEAUX GREEN.

Lise read it under the dome light at a gas station in Houma.

"Arceneaux," she said. "Not Guidry."

"The seed's Arceneaux. The island's Arceneaux. Luc doesn't get the name just because he was born with it."

"That's not how marriage works, cher."

"It's how sauce works."

The makers' tent was a white circus tent in a park by the river.

It held eighty booths in long rows, and a brass band was warming up at one end.

Booth forty-one was a folding table, a pop-up canopy and a hand-lettered sign that said our name wrong.

"Arcenaux," Lise read. "No E. Very French."

We were setting up when a truck I knew pulled onto the grass behind the tent.

Etienne got out.

He didn't come to the table.

He stood by the truck in a clean blue work shirt.

Lise looked at me.

I looked at the six hundred jars.

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