They Gave Me a Check at Twelfth Night, So I Took Their Mardi Gras novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Escort, Not Date

In her mother's Arabi kitchen Clem accepts a ride and a trailer from Gaspard and sets one rule, until a text says her things go to the curb.

My mother had the coffee on before I got the car door shut.

Her kitchen light was the only one lit on the whole block in Arabi, at a quarter to one in the morning.

She stood on the porch of the shotgun house in her housecoat and looked at the single suitcase in my hand.

"Six years," she said. "Six years in that house, and that's all you carry out?"

"It's what Hortense would let me carry."

"Come in, cher."

I sat at the kitchen table where I had done my homework.

The oilcloth was the same yellow one, with the burn mark from the night the roux got away from me when I was fourteen.

I told her everything, in order, with my hands flat on the cloth.

The check.

The blond woman behind the piano.

The cake.

When I got to the baby, Mama held out her palm.

I put the little plastic thing in it.

She turned it over and read the bottom, where my grandmother had scratched the year of the first cake with a pin.

"Your Mawmaw's baby," she said. "Well, that's one thing they didn't get to keep."

"It means I have to host the Lundi Gras supper, Mama."

I turned the cup in my hands.

"And sit at the Queen's table at every krewe event until Mardi Gras, with the whole family watching."

"Good," Mama said.

"I don't want to see them again."

"Then you'll look at them instead," my mother said, "and let them see you looking."

I laughed, and it turned into something wetter, and she let me.

Headlights swung across the kitchen window.

A truck door shut outside.

Boots came up the porch steps, slow and heavy, and a man knocked once with two knuckles.

I knew that knock.

I knew it from the year I was eleven.

A teenager from three houses down used to rap on this same door to ask if my mother needed her gutters cleaned.

"Mama," I said. "Who is that?"

"I called Gaspard Ravenel," she said, "when you phoned from the bridge."

I stood up so fast the chair scraped.

She opened the door.

Gaspard Ravenel filled the frame in his pilot's blues, with his jacket over one arm and a river-gray tiredness around his eyes.

He was thirty-eight, with silver coming in at his temples and a pale scar through his chin from a mooring line.

He had not been to this house in six years.

He had not come to my wedding either.

"Mrs. Mouton," he said to my mother. "Clem."

"Gaspard," I said.

"I just came off a double. Your mother said you needed a trailer."

"I need a lot of things. I don't know that a trailer is on the list yet."

"By Saturday it will be," he said. "They won't give you more than a day to clear your things."

He was right, which I didn't want him to be.

Mama poured him a cup of coffee, and he drank half of it standing, which was how he'd drunk everything since he was seventeen.

I looked at him over the rim of my own cup.

I had a list of things to say to him that was six years long.

The night before my wedding, he had told me in this kitchen that the Villeres would use me up.

I had called him jealous.

He had not answered, and he had not come to the church, and he had not written a word in all the years after.

I was not going to open any of that tonight.

"Why are you doing this?" I said.

"Your mother called," he said.

"That isn't a reason."

"It's the one I've got."

He set the cup down.

"I'll haul your things, Clem. I'll drive whatever needs driving. If you want me to say I told you so, I'll do that later, once, and you can throw something at me."

"I don't want to be a project," I said.

"I wouldn't make you one."

"And this is help," I said. "Only help. Nothing else, not until Fat Tuesday, and not if it turns into pity."

He studied me for a long moment.

"Help, then," he said. "Nothing else you haven't asked for."

He took the suitcase from my hand to carry it to the back room.

His fingers closed over mine on the handle, hard and warm and callused.

I felt it all the way up my arm.

Then he lifted the case, and the contact was gone.

I told myself it was the cold.

Behind us, Mama pretended to be extremely interested in the coffee pot.

My phone buzzed against the oilcloth.

It was a text from a number I had saved as H. Villere.

"The locks were changed at midnight," it read.

"Your belongings will be at the curb on Prytania at noon Saturday. Anything left after one o'clock goes to the dump. Do not come before noon."

I read it twice.

Then I held it up so that Gaspard and my mother could see.

"She's putting me on the curb," I said. "In front of the whole street."

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