They Gave Me a Check at Twelfth Night, So I Took Their Mardi Gras novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Baby in the Cake
At the Villere Twelfth Night party Hortense hands Clem a check, Auguste announces his mistress, and Clem finds the plastic baby in her slice, which makes her keeper of the krewe's Lundi Gras.
My mother-in-law handed me the envelope in front of a hundred and twenty people, with the king cake still on the table between us.
"For your service, Clementine," she said. "At Twelfth Night the household staff always receives a bonus."
The gallery of the old house went quiet, from the chandelier to the front steps.
I looked at the envelope.
It was cream-colored, and my name was typed on it.
It said Clementine Mouton, not Mrs. Villere, which was the name I had before I married her son.
"I'm not staff," I said.
"Of course you are, dear. You've done the flowers, the seating and the baking since the day you moved in."
She smiled with her whole mouth and none of her eyes.
"We are grateful. Please open it."
I tore the flap with my thumbnail.
The check inside was for twenty thousand dollars.
It was signed by my father-in-law, and the memo line said: severance.
My husband was standing a step behind his mother with a glass in his hand.
"Auguste," I said. "What is this?"
"Clem, let's not do this here."
"You're the one who's doing it here. You invited the whole krewe."
He drank half the glass.
Then he held out a hand toward the crowd, and a blond woman in a cream dress walked out from behind the piano.
I knew her.
She had been the florist's assistant at the Thanksgiving party, and she had stayed late to help me carry the centerpieces.
"This is Blythe," Auguste said. "We're expecting. Sixteen weeks."
Somebody gasped.
Somebody else, near the staircase, laughed with delight.
Blythe put a hand low on her stomach and looked at me with big, wet, sorry eyes.
"Clem, I wanted to tell you myself," she said. "I wish it had been somewhere private."
"Fourteen months," I said. "Since the Thanksgiving party. I carried your centerpieces."
Her mouth opened and shut.
"The family needs an heir," Hortense said.
"The lawyer will send the papers Monday. You'll have the guest room until Saturday noon, and then you'll move on."
She nodded toward the cake.
"Now. We cut the cake."
I had baked that cake at four in the morning from my grandmother's recipe.
Brioche dough, braided, with pecans and cinnamon sugar and purple, green and gold icing.
I had baked it every Twelfth Night for six years.
I had pushed the plastic baby into the underside myself, the way my grandmother did.
That was the rule of the Krewe of Thalassa, which had been parading through New Orleans since 1911.
One cake, one baby, and whoever's slice held it was the keeper of Carnival until Fat Tuesday.
Hortense reached for the knife.
"No," said an old voice from the corner. "The one who baked it cuts it, Hortense. It has been so for sixty years."
The oldest living queen of the krewe sat in a wingback chair by the window, ninety-one years old, with an ebony cane across her knees.
Nobody in the Villere family had ever told her no.
Hortense took her hand back.
I picked up the knife.
My hand was steady, which surprised me.
I cut the cake into twenty-four slices and handed them down the line to the nearest guests.
The last slice went to me.
I bit into it, and my tooth hit something hard.
I took it out of my mouth.
It was the baby, small and pink and plastic, with a smear of icing on its face.
The room made a sound I will never forget, a hundred and twenty people breathing in together.
"That's the baby," somebody said. "Clem has the baby."
Hortense's face went white.
"That's an accident," she said. "The girl has just been dismissed. The baby goes to Blythe."
"The baby goes to the one it falls to," the oldest queen said. "I enforce it. You know I do."
She tapped her cane on the floorboards, once.
"She hosts Lundi Gras. She sits at the Queen's table at every krewe event until Mardi Gras. She carries the first doubloon on the parade."
Maurice, my father-in-law, started to laugh, and then stopped, because nobody else had.
I looked down at the envelope in my left hand and the baby in my right.
I laid the check on the cake plate, face up, where everyone could read the word severance.
I put the baby in my pocket.
"Thank you for the bonus," I said. "I'll see all of you at Lundi Gras. Bring an appetite."
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