The Fry #2
I’d forgotten small towns did this.
Mrs. Tureaud, who was sixty-something and had the posture that was actively crumbling, held my hands and said: “A pastor needs someone steady. Someone who understands the work.”
“I'm the administrative coordinator,” I told her, trying not to let my face show my true thoughts and feelings about it.
“Of course you are,” she said, warm as syrup, and patted my hands.
Mrs. Fontenot — the wife of the late Curtis Fontenot I'd heard mentioned once in passing — looked me up and down and said: “You're good with the congregation already. I can tell. Some women take to it naturally.”
“I'm just doing my job,” I tried again.
“Mmhm,” she said.
I didn’t understand it.
The third time it happened I stopped correcting people and just smiled, because the corrections weren't landing and smiling required less energy.
Darlene found me near the sweet tea table, trying to — poorly — suppress her amusement.
“They're not subtle,” I said.
“They're not trying to be.” She handed me a cup. “In this town, subtle is how you miss your window.” She said it without any particular judgment — just information, the way she gave most information. “How are you holding up?”
“I've been introduced as a pastoral asset four times.”
Darlene's mouth curved. “That's actually restrained, for Ruth.”
The bayou sat at the edge of everything, patient and dark, the water gone still in the heat. You could see it from the tables if you looked past the children running through the fireflies — a flat black gleam between the cypress trees, the occasional sound of something moving in the reeds.
I was watching it, not for any reason, just because it was there and it was beautiful — like most beautiful things in Louisiana were. Complicated, a little threatening, more alive than felt entirely comfortable, and hot. And then I noticed the boat.
It was tied at the far dock, half-hidden by the cypress — flat-bottomed, used for the shallow runs through the back channels.
Two men I didn't recognize were talking to a man I did: Renard, who came to Sunday service and ran some kind of transport business.
He had shaken my hand at the fundraiser.
The conversation was low, efficient. Not the kind of talking men did at a fish fry. Certainly not about fish.
Then someone put a plate in my hands.
“You haven't eaten anything,” said a voice at my shoulder. I turned and it was Dice — crop top, cuffed jeans, sleeve tattoos vivid in the string light, looking as much like a church fish fry as a lit match looked like a candle. She tilted her head toward the spread. “Darlene's watching you.”
“How did you end up here?” I asked.
“Darlene invited me. She does every year.” Dice took a piece of cornbread off my plate without asking. “Don't read into it. She invites the whole town.”
I looked back toward the dock. The men were gone. The boat was still there, or another boat was. I couldn’t tell anymore.
“You good?” Dice asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just looking at the water.”
She looked at me. The sharp green eyes did something complicated. “Uh huh,” she said, which was nothing like the mmhm of the congregation women and everything like it at the same time — the same shape, different species.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“You can ask.”
“The things people say about the Beaumonts.” I kept my voice even. “The things people stop saying about the Beaumonts. Is it—” I looked for the right word. “Is there a version where it's just gossip?”
Dice ate the cornbread. Considered the question. A little too long if you asked me, but as it appeared in this fish fry — nobody was asking me.
“Sure,” she said finally. “There's a version where it's just gossip.” She looked at me. “That version's real comfortable.”
She moved off toward the sweet tea before I could decide what to do with that.
Billy arrived at nine, parked the Jaguar sideways and got out, a drink already in hand.
“M.” He spread his arms when he saw me. Kissed my cheek. I smelled rum in his breath — that explained the wide grin.
“Don’t look at the dress,” I told him before he could start staring.
He did anyway. And announced it. “Jesus fucking Christ. I can’t stop staring at the dress. Does our preacher know you’re wearing this?”
I tried to hide behind my palms, embarrassed — didn’t succeed.
“Evening,” I greeted a passing elderly couple that I had forgotten the names of.
“Oh, loosen up. Nobody would dare,” he said, leaning in. Billy looked across the field to where Judah was standing with four men, deep in conversation. “He may be a preacher but he has a mean left hook.”
“So I figured. He gave me like four hundred bucks to bail him out if things went south.”
“Even more south than St. Frankenville? Doubtful.” He helped himself to something from the table and fell into step beside me.
“The women have been very informative tonight,” I said.
“Have they.” He was watching Judah across the field.
“Mrs. Tureaud seems to think I have a vocation.”
“You do,” Billy said. “Just maybe not the one she's naming.”
“Billy.”
“I'm just—” He raised a hand. “Observing.”
Across the field, Judah turned. He found me without really trying — like we were two magnets being pulled close to each other by the mere fact of existence.
His eyes moved from my face to Billy's hand near my elbow, and something in his jaw made a small decision.
He excused himself from the men he'd been talking to.
Billy saw it happen. “Incoming,” he said, and took a long drink, very serene.
Judah came to stand beside me — not between me and Billy, not quite — but close enough that there was no ambiguity about it.
“You abandoned your guests,” Billy said.
“They're not my guests. It's a town event.”
“And yet you ran the whole setup.” Billy gestured at the string lights, the tables, the smokers. “Funny how that works.”
Judah looked at me. “You eating?”
“I have a plate.”
He stared at me.
“I'm going to eat,” I said, slightly exasperated. “I'm standing at a fish fry with a plate of food.”
His hand came to rest against my spine, between my shoulder blades — one touch, nothing more.
He said something low to Billy that I didn't catch; Billy laughed.
I felt like I had acquired a role of someone who I was not.
I stood between them in the Louisiana dark with the fireflies coming up out of the grass and the string lights throwing gold across everything, and thought about all those women who had already proclaimed me as something belonging to the pastor.
“Sister Ruth told me,” I said carefully, “that a pastor needs someone steady.” I don’t know why I said it out loud. Maybe because that thought didn’t quite sit all that well with me.
Judah was quiet for a moment. Then, like it mattered very little in the grand scheme of cosmic things, he declared: “She’s not wrong.”
“She said it directly to my face. Staring at me,” I told him.
“Ruth is not a woman who traffics in implication.”
“Neither are any of the others.” I looked up at him.
Something moved in his expression that wasn't quite amusement and wasn't quite something else — a middle thing, warm at the middle, still microwaveable at the edges.
“Is that so,” he said.
“You could correct them,” I said. “If you wanted.”
He looked at me. “I could,” he said.
“But he won’t,” Billy said, sipping from a flask. “You wanna know why?”
Judah shot him a look that screamed “careful.”
Billy ignored it. “Because he’d already imagined ten different ways of taking that particular dress off you,” he said, licking his fingers. “And about a hundred more of why he should.”
I looked up at Judah’s face and saw the barely suppressed smirk.
Billy looked at me with the expression of I told you, and proceeded to the table with the potato salad.
Mrs. Arceneaux caught me on my way back from the table — and took my free hand in both of hers with the grip of someone who had decided this conversation was happening regardless of my feelings about it. They did that here a lot, I noticed.
“You know,” she said, and her voice suddenly grew very serious, “I knew his mother.”
“Did you,” I said, not quite sure where this setup was going to lead us.
“Good woman. Hard life.” She patted my hand. “She would have liked you.”
I didn't know what to do with that so I said, “That's kind of you to say,” which was what you said when someone handed you something you didn’t rightly understand.
“He needs someone who isn't afraid of him,” she said. Matter-of-fact, no softening. “Most women are. Can't blame them.” She tilted her head and looked at me with those sharp eyes. “You're not, are you.”
It wasn't quite a question.
I thought about the boat that had been there and then wasn't. The PI with his cigarettes and his fresh eyes. I thought about the kitchen wall and his hands at my ribs and the way he'd looked at me across a fundraiser room with an expression I still hadn't fully decoded.
“No more than I am of God,” I said.
Mrs. Arceneaux smiled.
“Good,” she said. “Lord appreciates honesty.”
She let go of my hand and moved back into the party.
Which would’ve been all fine and well, if I had come to St. Francisville with the intention of becoming a pastor’s wife.
But I had come here with an intention to escape the cage of a clergyman, not fall into the arms of another one.
I stood with my sweet tea and my plate and the dark water at the edge of my vision and thought about all of it.
The fireflies rose in the dark over the bayou.
I ate my food, and realized I hadn’t seen a single gator.