Chapter 31 #3
"Landry's fine, Mama. He's gonna come by tomorrow."
"He is not answering his phone."
"He will. Tomorrow."
She studies me. Her thumbs press the side of my jaw the way she used to press it when I came home with a scrape and tried to hide it.
"All right," she says. "All right."
She turns. She walks me up the porch steps with one hand at the small of my back like she is afraid I will turn and leave again if she lets go. Behind us, Jax is unfolding from the Lincoln with the duffel I left in the trunk, and Odette is watching him the way she watches new dogs.
"Maw Maw."
"Tripp."
She does not get up. She folds the paper deliberately and sets it aside on the cushion next to her, and she pats the spot, and I sit. Mama hovers in the doorway behind me, half in the house and half on the porch, unwilling to go in alone but unwilling to interrupt.
Odette's hand finds mine. Her skin is paper-thin and warm from the sun.
"Your mama tells me you flew in this morning."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And how is San Francisco."
"It's good, Maw Maw."
"Foggy."
"Always."
She studies me. The blue eyes that Darcy got from her, the eyes that miss nothing, the eyes that watched my father lay his rifle down on the gun safe the night he died and made a small assessing sound and went back to her shrimp étouffée.
"There's a woman." It is not a question.
"There's a woman."
"Is she good to you."
I have to take a breath I did not know I was going to need. "Yes, ma'am."
"Then bring her next time."
"Yes, ma'am."
Mama makes a small sound from the doorway, somewhere between a sob and a laugh, and disappears into the house, and the screen door bangs softly behind her.
Odette pats my hand once. "Go inside. Eat. Your mama has been cooking since dawn and she will not survive it if you do not eat."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And use your phone outside, cher. Whatever you came home to do, you do it outside."
I stand. I look at her.
She is already opening her paper again.
The porch wraps around the side of the house and the side faces the camellias my grandfather planted forty years ago, and at the back of that wing is the small balcony off what used to be my father's study that nobody uses anymore.
I stand at the balcony rail and look out at a yard I have not stood in in eight years, and I dial.
She picks up on the second ring.
"Hi."
Her voice. Just her voice. The slight rasp of her morning voice that means she was reading and lost track of time, the way the hi comes out soft because she's not performing for anyone.
I close my eyes.
"Hi, dove."
"You're there."
"I'm here."
A pause. I hear something behind her, the soft slide of papers on the kitchen island, the distant whisper of the espresso machine she does not know how to use properly. The townhouse. Tuesday afternoon, late, sun coming down over the bay.
"How's your mom."
"Hysterical. She thinks I'm here to fix everything."
"She's seen you?"
"She's seen me."
"Good. Did she cry?"
"She cried."
"Good." I can hear her smile. "Maw Maw?"
"Fine. Mama exaggerated. She's reading the paper on the porch in pearls."
"Of course she is."
"Landry's fine too." The lie sits in my mouth the way every lie has sat in my mouth with her, with weight I can taste. "Banged up a little but he'll be all right. He's gonna come over tomorrow."
The pause this time is longer. She is reading me the way she has learned to read me, the silences and the placements, the small reroutes I make around words I cannot say to her over an open line.
"Okay," she says, and that is all.
I love her so much in that moment that my chest aches with it. Okay. No follow-up. No demand for the truth she knows is sitting underneath. She trusts me to tell her what I can tell her, and she trusts me with the rest in a way that nobody in my life has trusted me with anything.
"Listen," I say.
"Yeah."
"I should come home tomorrow night. Tie this up here, fly back."
"Tripp." The name lands soft. She uses it only when she means it. "Stay."
"Dove—"
"Stay a couple more days. Sit on the porch with your grandmother.
Eat your mom's red beans. Let her look at you long enough to believe you're real.
" A beat. "Everything here is normal. Damian's outside.
The team is solid. I'm answering emails and walking to the Italian place for dinner and going to bed at a reasonable hour.
There is nothing here that needs you tomorrow that won't still need you Friday. "
"You sure."
"I'm sure."
I look at the camellias. I look at the wrought-iron gate at the end of the drive. I look at nothing.
"Two more days."
"Two more days," she says. "And then you come home."
"I'll come home."
"Promise."
"I promise."
She is quiet. I hear her swallow. I hear her not say something. I hear her decide not to say it.
"I'll call you tomorrow," she says. "Tell Maw Maw I asked after her."
"I will."
"Tell your mom… tell your mom whatever she needs to hear."
"I will."
The line cuts.
I stand on the balcony with the phone warm against my ear, and the wind moves through the live oaks, and somewhere in the back of the house Mama is banging a cast-iron pan against a burner the way she has banged that exact pan against that exact burner for forty years.
I have one more call to make.
I pull up Kade.
It rings once.
"Saint."
"Kade. I need a quiet detail in Louisiana. Family compound, Garden District, plus my brother's law office and his home in Lakeview. Three rotations, hidden, no contact unless engaged. Yesterday."
"Done. Anything I should know."
"American Civic Trust knows my last name."
A pause.
"Done by sunrise. Don't tell me how. Don't call me on it."
"Wouldn't."
The line cuts. I slide the phone into my pocket. I press my palm flat against the balcony rail and the iron is warm from the afternoon sun.
Eighteen hundred miles. That's the distance between this rail and the kitchen island where she set a charger in my hand without a speech. Eighteen hundred miles and the gap sits like a bruise on the inside of my sternum.
She picked up. She told me to stay. Two more days. Everything is normal.
I push off the rail. I walk back through the screen door into the kitchen where Mama is at the stove and Jax is at the counter peeling shrimp with the expression of a man who has never met a shrimp before but is not going to be the one to admit it, and Odette has come in from the porch and is watching Jax peel shrimp with what might be amusement and might be the early stages of adopting him.
Mama looks up. Her hands are floured to the wrist.
"Wash up, cher. Supper's in fifteen."
I wash up.
I sit down at the table where my father used to sit and my brother used to sit and I used to sit, and the four chairs are the same four chairs, and Mama sets down a pan of red beans and rice that smells like every Tuesday of my childhood, and Jax is being told the long story of how Odette met my grandfather at a dance in 1962, and the porch light comes on outside as the sun starts to drop behind the camellias.
Day one.
I am still in Louisiana.
I am going to stay.