I Married the Don for the Debt, and My Husband Walked In Alive novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: Her Name
The second line came out of the Bayou Rose hall at four in the afternoon with the sun low and orange on Esplanade Avenue.
The band went first, brass and snare, and the whole Society came out behind it with their handkerchiefs in the air.
Women in church hats danced down the middle of the street with their umbrellas open, though it was not raining.
The old bandsman had put his trombone to his lips and played as though he were twenty.
Nadine danced past me in her gold dress, shrieking, with both arms over her head.
Rafe's mother walked beside me with her rosary around her wrist and a handkerchief in her fist.
She was weeping so openly that a stranger offered her a second one.
"I haven't cried in front of a priest since 1989," she told me. "Don't tell anyone."
"I won't."
"Rafe," she said, to her son, "come here. Hold her hand properly."
Rafe took my hand.
He did not let go of it for the length of Esplanade.
At the corner I looked back once.
Odette Beaumont sat alone in the doorway of the hall on a folding chair, in her black hat, with her white gloves in her lap.
No one had turned the chair for her.
No one had spoken to her.
The president stood on the sidewalk twenty feet off, with his cane and her sash folded over his arm.
He could not meet her eye either.
She saw me looking.
"Camille," she said. "Baby."
"Don't call me that."
"I only wanted..."
"I know what you wanted." I did not raise my voice. "I wanted a mother-in-law. I'm sorry you chose a different one."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Married the Don for the Debt, and My Husband Walked In Alive are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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