He Paid a Million for One Night, and the Contract Was Signed by My Mother novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Fat Tuesday
In the back room of the Verlander ball, Margo finds the blank margin in the million-dollar contract Soren has already signed, writes three terms of her own in it, and signs at 11:58. He reads them and initials every line.
The agreement on the card table already had his signature at the bottom of page four.
It said one million dollars, wired tonight, for one night of my company at his river house.
The band in the hall was playing the last waltz before midnight.
When the bells rang, the ball would end, Lent would start, and the offer, by its own words, would expire.
I had a pen in my hand and I didn't remember picking it up.
Soren Verlander stood across the table in a black tuxedo with his tie pulled loose.
He didn't touch me, and he didn't come around the table.
"Read it in your own time, Miss Landry," he said. "You have until the bells."
Everybody on the river called him the Barge King.
He ran forty-one towboats and a grain terminal on the river, and the courthouse where I worked said his name the way you say the name of weather.
He was thirty-nine, tall, gray coming in at his temples, with a white scar across the back of his right hand.
He was looking at me like I was the only person in the cloakroom, and I was, except for him.
I read the agreement standing up, the way I read everything.
I take down two hundred and sixty words a minute for the Ascension Parish court, and I have never once repeated a word I heard in that room.
Page one named the money and the account.
Page two was typed on something old, with a lowercase e that dropped below the line.
I noticed it and didn't know why I'd noticed it.
Page three said the night would be spent at his house on the batture road, and that I could leave when I chose.
Page four held paragraph six, which said in plain words what he would have from me, for one night.
It was frank.
It said he would not leave a mark where a dress would show it.
My face went hot, and I kept reading.
Beside paragraph six the margin had been left blank.
A clean white strip an inch and a half wide, with nothing in it.
Out in the hall somebody laughed, and the bandleader called the last turn.
My mother was out there with a pincushion on her wrist, fixing zippers on the barge families' daughters, the way she had every Fat Tuesday of my life.
She had a hospital note she could not pay.
My father's shrimp boat sat in the bank's hands with a lien on it, and every captain's wife in that hall knew both things.
That was why I was in this room.
I said, "Why is the margin empty?"
Soren Verlander said, "So you can write in it."
I looked up at him.
He didn't look away.
"I don't sign what I can't be held to," he said. "Neither should you. Write what you need."
The clock over the door said eleven forty-one.
I had seventeen minutes of waltz and a pen.
I set page four flat on the card table and I wrote.
I wrote in my own shorthand, the dots and strokes I learned at sixteen, a language nobody in Donaldsonville could read over my shoulder.
I wrote three lines.
I initialed each one, M.L., small, down the margin.
Then I signed my name under his.
The clock said eleven fifty-eight.
Out in the hall the band held the last long note.
Soren picked up the page.
He couldn't read shorthand, and I watched him find that out.
"Read it to me," he said.
I read it to him.
"Lights on," I said.
Then, "Nothing where anyone can see."
My voice held.
"I may say Lent, and you stop."
The cloakroom went very quiet.
He looked at my three short lines with his thumb under each one, as if the dots would turn into words if he held still.
He didn't smile.
His hand wasn't quite steady, and I watched him make it steady.
Then he took the pen out of my fingers, and beside each of my initials he wrote his own: S.V.
The first bell of Lent began to ring from St. Catherine's across the street.
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