Chapter 1 #2
"That's the thing." He turned the folder slightly, not showing me anything, just moving it.
"In most residential fires, we get a scene.
Somebody left a candle. Somebody's dryer vent.
Somebody's brother-in-law's wiring job. And then we get burglary fires, where they take and then they burn to cover it, and those look a certain way — you get a room that's cleaner than it should be, drawers open, that kind of thing. "
"And mine?"
"Yours is thorough," he said.
"Thorough."
"Every room. Front and back. Started in three places that I can see and probably four." He looked at the house, not at me. "Nothing's missing because nothing's left. It wasn't a robbery. It also wasn't sloppy."
I sat on that curb in a stranger's cardigan and something very cold moved through the middle of me, from about the sternum outward, and it had nothing to do with the temperature, because it was already eighty-one degrees at dawn, because it was New Orleans in June and the city does not observe grief.
"Somebody wanted something gone," I said.
"I didn't say that."
"You said four points of origin."
"I said three that I can see."
"Mr. Dupuy."
He stood up. He put a card in my hand. "Call your insurance today. Not tomorrow, today. And Miss Broussard — if you think of anything you had in that house that somebody might have wanted destroyed rather than stolen, you call me before you call anybody else."
Camille arrived forty minutes later driving like a woman who had run three lights and intended to run more.
She got out of the car and hugged me so hard my spine made a noise, and then she held me at arm's length and looked at the house and said, "Well."
"Well."
"The couch is gone."
"The couch is gone."
"Good," Camille said.
I made a sound. It was supposed to be a laugh and it came out with something else attached.
"No, listen to me." She turned my face. "That couch was ugly. That couch was mustard. I have been waiting nine years for something to happen to that couch. I want it on the record that I wished for a mild couch-specific event, and God, who has no restraint, overdelivered."
"Camille."
"The lamp with the fringe."
"Don't."
"Gone."
"That was Mamere's."
"Mamere didn't like it either! She gave it to you because she wanted it out of her house!
" Camille was crying now, doing this whole thing while crying, which is the most Broussard thing that has ever happened.
"That's what I'm saying. Half of what you owned was ugly and inherited and you kept it out of guilt, and now the ugly guilt is gone, and what's left is you standing in a yard, and you're the good part, Delphine. You were always the good part."
We stood there in Mr. Ancelet's yard and cried about a fringed lamp because that was the size of thing a person could actually cry about that morning.
At her house she put me in the shower and then took my clothes away, which is to say took the T-shirt and the shorts away, which was the entire wardrobe I now owned on this earth.
"They smell like the fire," she said through the door.
"That's all I have."
"I know. I'm burning them anyway. Ha."
"Camille."
"Too soon?"
"Genuinely, yes."
"I'm processing," she called. "I process out loud and fast and it's ugly and then I'm fine, and you process silently for eleven months and then you cry at a commercial about a bank. We each have our system."
I came out in her clothes. Her clothes do not fit me. My sister is four inches shorter and has, in her words, "the shoulders of a person who was almost a swimmer."
At the table she made me write a list.
"Of what?"
"Everything you have to replace. Not the sad ones. The boring ones. That's the thing nobody tells you." She slid a legal pad across. "You're going to spend eight months finding out you don't have a can opener."
So we did it, and it was the strangest hour of my life, sitting at my sister's table at eight in the morning listing objects.
Driver's license. Passport. Birth certificate. Reading glasses, both pairs. The good tweezers. Charger. Second charger. The tin of loose tea I don't like but keep for guests.
"Guests," said Camille.
"I have guests."
"Name a guest."
"You."
"I'm not a guest, I have a key, or I had a key, which is now a small piece of melted—"
"Camille."
"Sorry."
We got to eighty-one items and then I stopped, because at eighty-two I would have had to write down the box of my father's letters, and I wasn't going to do that in front of her before ten in the morning.
"Delphine," she said, after a while.
"Mm."
"Do you have any idea why?"
"No."
"Because you said the marshal said thorough."
"He did."
"That's not a house fire word."
"No," I said. "It's an inventory word."
At her kitchen table at nine a.m., wearing her clothes, I finally opened my work bag to find my phone charger.
The ledger was in there.
I'd forgotten it was in there. It had been in there for eleven days, since Mamere's estate cleanout, since my cousin handed me a shoebox and said this is yours, it's got words in it, nobody else wants words.
Great-uncle Thaddeus Broussard's business ledger, 1953 to 1971, brown leather, water-stained along the bottom edge, the kind of object I handle at work with cotton gloves and had been carrying around under a granola bar and an umbrella.
I hadn't read it. I'd flipped it. Freight receipts. Warehouse rents. A man's whole small life in columns.
I opened it now because my hands wanted something to do that wasn't shaking.
And on page one-forty-one, in the middle of a run of 1958 storage invoices, in handwriting that got suddenly, noticeably careful:
Held on behalf of the Consignment, per the 1821 numbering. Lot 6. Not to be inventoried. Not to be insured. See T. re: the Thibodeaux arrangement.
I read it four times.
Then I sat back in my sister's kitchen chair, in my sister's clothes, twenty-nine hours from the last time I'd been a person with a house, and I said, out loud, to nobody:
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."
Camille called from the other room. "What?"
"Nothing."
"You said something."
"I said nothing."
"You said it in your work voice," she said, coming to the doorway with a dish towel. "You only use the work voice for the dead and the funded. Which is it?"
I put my hand flat on the page, the way you'd hold something still in a storm.
"I don't know yet," I said.