I Was Done Begging novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Christening
Everyone waits for Celia to wreck her husband's mistress's christening. She blesses the baby and walks out, and her bank card is declined.
The day my husband christened his mistress's son, three hundred people waited for me to scream.
I walked into the cathedral hall on a cane, nine days out of a three-year coma.
The talking stopped.
Every phone in the room came up.
A woman at the nearest table leaned toward her friend. "Watch her go straight for that cake table."
Julien was at my side before I reached the third table, with a glass of water already in his hand.
He put his phone face down on a chair to take my arm.
Across the hall, Simone held the baby in a long white gown, and she was crying a little already.
Three years ago I had thrown myself across Julien when a truck came through his window.
I took the hit so he wouldn't.
I woke up to a baby with his eyes.
He walked me across the floor with his hand under my elbow.
"Celia. You shouldn't be on your feet."
"I wanted to come."
"Then let me get you a chair near the font."
His mother watched from the front pew with her arms folded and her chin up.
She had put my chair right beside the font, so the whole room would have a good view.
Simone came to me with wet eyes.
"Celia, I never wanted you to find out like this. I'm so sorry."
She held the baby out to me.
"Would you like to hold him? Please. He's innocent in all this."
Her eyes went to my collar, then back to my face.
I looked at the baby.
He was three months old and he had done nothing to anyone.
I opened my bag and took out the small silver box Hattie had picked up for me at the cathedral gift shop that morning.
Inside was a guardian angel medal on a thin chain.
I laid it in the bassinet beside his hand.
"May you grow up safe and healthy," I said.
The room was so quiet I could hear the candles.
Julien's hand stayed on my arm.
"You're not angry?" he asked.
"Simone has given the Lacombe family another heir," I said. "That's worth celebrating."
His mother's mouth opened and shut.
Julien studied my face for a long moment.
He seemed to be waiting for the rest of it, and I wasn't going to give it to him.
I took my arm out of his hand and walked down the aisle between the tables.
Nobody threw anything.
Nobody clapped either.
Hattie caught up with me on the cathedral steps.
"Girl, the old you would have flipped that whole banquet table."
"You said it yourself, Hattie. That was the old me."
I looked back at the hall, at the white flowers and the three hundred faces.
"She died in that car crash three years ago."
Hattie put her hand on my back.
"Okay. Then I'll buy the new you a drink. Or another one of those DNA kits, like I tried when you turned twenty-five."
"Julien threw that one in the trash."
"I remember. He told you that you had a family now."
"He did."
"I wanted to throw him in the trash."
I almost laughed.
I hadn't told her what I knew from the years I slept.
In that other life I had screamed at Simone today, and Julien had chosen her, and six weeks later two men took me out of a hotel garage.
A couple named Everhart found me too late and said they had never stopped looking.
I woke from that one nine days ago, with every word of it still in my head.
This time I would not make the same mistakes.
A man with a camera shouted from the bottom of the steps.
"Mrs. Lacombe! Are you leaving your husband?"
"Ask me next week," I said.
Hattie squeezed my arm and grinned.
At the curb, Julien's driver was gone.
Hattie looked at her phone. "Let me get us a car."
"I have it," I said.
I opened the ride app and tapped Hattie's address.
The card was declined.
I tried the other card.
Declined.
The message said: Account restricted at the request of the primary holder. Restricted at 9:02 a.m.
It was a few minutes past noon.
I had walked into that hall holding a gift and a smile, and he had already shut me out before I opened my mouth.
It would not have mattered what I did.
Screaming or smiling, he had planned to freeze me either way.
"Hattie," I said. "I need to go downtown."
"With what money?"
I checked my coat pocket.
A few crumpled bills.
I put my hand against the old medal under my collar, the tarnished one I had worn since a bus depot when I was three years old.
"I have enough for the streetcar," I said.
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