The Taste of My Husband's Brother (A Wife's Revenge) novel · Chapter 28 of 32

Chapter 28: Supper

The whole café waited.

The old shrimper turned all the way around on his stool.

"Well?" Lise said. "The man's standing there, cher. His knees aren't getting any younger."

"Yes," I said.

The café went off.

Somebody banged a cup.

Somebody yelled, "Finally!"

The old shrimper said, "That's two Arceneaux boys," and Lise threw a dish towel at his head.

Etienne just nodded, very serious.

Then he walked out the door without another word.

Through the window I watched him get to his truck, resting both hands on the hood in the cool evening air.

He took me to supper on the second Saturday in December.

He wouldn't tell me where.

He picked me up at seven in a pressed shirt and drove me exactly two hundred feet.

Around the café to the front door.

"Etienne."

"It's the only restaurant on the island," he said. "And it's got a new roof. I hear the guy who built it is very good."

Lise had cleared the dining room down to one table, by the window, with a white cloth and a candle stuck in an empty bottle of Arceneaux Green.

She was wearing a bow tie over her bandana.

"Welcome," she said, in a French accent that wasn't French. "Tonight we have gumbo, and also gumbo."

"What do you recommend?" Etienne said.

"The gumbo."

We sat.

That was when I noticed the window.

Every face on Pointe Rouge was pressed against it.

The bottling crew.

The pickers.

The foreman and his wife, and the foreman's daughter, who'd drawn our label, holding up her phone.

The receptionist was standing on a milk crate in the back.

"Lise," I said. "You sold tickets."

"I sold coffee. In the parking lot. What they do with their eyes is their business."

Etienne looked at the window.

The window looked back at him.

He raised his water glass to it.

The whole parking lot raised their coffee cups back, and somebody honked.

We ate gumbo.

We talked about everything except Luc.

The national order, the new labels, the receptionist yelling at me about a fax machine.

He told me about the time he was nine and sank a pirogue in the bayou trying to impress a girl with a cooler of Cokes.

"Did it work?"

"She married a dentist."

I laughed so hard that a picker outside knocked on the glass to ask what was funny.

At dessert, Lise brought out bread pudding with one candle in it, which made no sense, and then she stood by the table with her arms crossed.

"Toast," she said.

"To what?" I said.

Etienne lifted his glass.

"To the green," he said. "And to the woman who never once let anybody tell her no."

Outside the window, two hundred people lifted their cups.

Christmas Eve was Mémère's eighty-second birthday.

A year ago it was going to be the night she signed the island away.

Instead the big house was so full that people stood on the porch and handed plates in through the windows.

The great-aunts came from the mainland with a pecan pie each.

The bottling crew strung lights on the oak where the signing table had stood.

Mémère sat at the head of the dining room in a new cardigan and her pearls and let people kiss her cheek, which she hates.

When the cake came out, she blew out every candle in one breath.

Then she looked down the table at me and Etienne, sitting side by side, his arm along the back of my chair.

"Last year," she said, "I thought tonight I'd be signing my name on a piece of paper in Houston's folder."

The room went quiet.

"Instead I've got a grocery order, a workers' trust, a taster who runs my company, and a grandson who finally learned to talk." She lifted her glass. "Joyeux Noël. Now somebody get me my cigarette."

Everybody laughed, and the foreman lit it for her.

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