The Taste of My Husband's Brother (A Wife's Revenge) novel · Chapter 23 of 32

Chapter 23: The Drying Shed

The boards of the dock were wet with dew.

I walked out to the end of it in my rubber boots, and he heard every step.

He didn't turn around.

"You sold your boat," I said.

"I sold a boat."

"Etienne."

"It was a good boat." He looked at the water where it used to be. "Man from Grand Isle is going to love her. He's got three boys."

I sat down beside him.

Not close.

Then closer.

The pilings stood up out of the black water with the cut ropes still knotted on them.

"Why?"

He took a long time.

"Daddy built that cabin with his own hands," he said. "I learned to throw a net off that bow when I was six. Every bad night of my marriage, I came out here and sat on her and knew I could untie her and go."

"Take the boat," I said. "Go shrimp somewhere warm."

"Luc knew me. That's why he wrote it." He rubbed his thumb over a knot in the board. "As long as she was tied here, part of me was always leaving."

"So you sold her for the green."

"I sold her so I'd stop leaving." He finally looked at me. "The green just needed the money at the same time."

"Did you do it to get me back?"

"No."

"Rule one."

"No," he said again. "If you never speak to me again, I'm still not leaving. I'm a fields man on an island. That's what I am."

I looked at his hands.

They were cracked from the cold rows.

He'd been stripping green peppers with the pickers all week, and he'd never once come in the café door.

"I don't know what I'm going to do with you," I said.

"You don't have to know tonight."

I stood up.

He didn't.

"Come to the line Sunday," I said.

"I'll be there."

I drove home and didn't sleep, and in the morning I knew exactly what I was going to do with him.

I just wanted to do it with something in my hands.

The bells on the bottling house rang at five on Sunday morning.

They had never rung on a Sunday.

People came out on their porches in their bathrobes to see who'd died.

Then they saw the lights on in the bottling house, and they came down the hill in their church clothes and stayed.

The crew ran the line in their blue shirts, unpaid, with the radio on.

The pickers fed in the green mash, tank after tank.

The women from accounts stood at the end of the belt with clipboards, counting cases out loud.

I tasted every tank off Mémère's paddle before it went to the vinegar.

Every one was right.

Etienne worked the dock all day.

He stacked cases on pallets until his shirt was black with sweat, and every time I looked up, he was already looking at me.

The foreman caught me at it.

"Taster," he said. "Eyes on the mash."

"My eyes are on the mash."

"Your eyes are on the dock, chère. Everybody's eyes are on the dock. We're placing bets."

At ten that night the last case came off the line.

Two thousand.

Lise wrote it on a piece of cardboard and held it up, and the whole bottling house cheered so loud the plywood rattled.

I packed the lab samples into a cooler for the morning courier and set it on the seat of my truck.

By eleven the lights were off and the island had gone home.

Etienne was the last one on the dock, sliding the big door shut.

I took his hand.

He looked down at it.

"Come with me," I said.

The drying shed sits between the bottling house and the greenhouse.

It's a long tin building where we dry the seed peppers every fall on window screens stacked in wooden racks, so the seed can be saved in the jars.

That November the racks were full of red ones, the best of the 1898 line.

The whole shed smelled sweet and hot, like the inside of the first barrel I ever tasted.

I pulled the string on the one bulb.

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