CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“I NEVER LIKED that fool husband of yours,” her mother said decidedly two days later, and Valentina smiled inwardly. There was a time when she was younger, and even more foolish than she was now, that she’d have flared up and taken offense.
“You likely were right, Mama.”
“It wasn’t him, per se,” her mother replied. Her words were as slow and deliberate as they’d always been, with a dash of something outside of her Louisiana accent—a confidence and emphasis on what she said. “Although he was as slick as a greased sow. It was you. You…shrank around him. You were shy already, and he was so strong.”
Valentina smiled. “I didn’t want to be shy. I wanted to see the world.”
Her mother harrumphed. “You did, that.”
“It wasn’t all bad.” Especially in the early days, before her husband’s single-minded ambition completely took over. But then again, wasn’t it really? She remembered long, languid meals out at opulent restaurants, designer bags, him nagging her to dress “younger,” whatever that meant. Sex where she counted backward in her head, willing it to be over faster. Him calling her a lazy lay, no matter what she did. The fact that she’d never had an orgasm with a man until—
“It wasn’t about bad and good. It was about his character. Even bad men do good sometimes. I was worried because you hadn’t seen enough of the world to be able to pick a good man yet.”
“If I didn’t, it was because I’d never met one.” Valentina had to swallow hard against a prickling in her throat.
“I know. I think my trying to keep you safe backfired a bit, in that. But there’s no sign of him now. Are you going to tell me what happened?”
“I want to,” Valentina said. “I’m just afraid I’ll break down.”
“You’ve always been scared of crying.” Her mother’s lips lifted at the corners, not quite a smile. “It’s okay, honey. Let’s eat.”
She might cry anyway, Valentina thought ruefully, watching as her mother took a large willowware plate down from the cabinet, the same set she’d been using as long as Val could remember. It’d been passed down from her grandmother to her on her wedding day and would one day be Valentina’s. She decanted a hearty spoonful of jambalaya from the battered steel pot on the stove, then set it in front of her daughter.
“I’ll probably be in the mood to serve you until next week,” she joked, then saw to her own plate. Valentina waited, hands folded in her lap, until her mother was seated, before she picked up her heavy silver spoon.
Flavors exploded on her tongue the moment the first grains of rice touched it: thyme, oregano, pepper—plenty of pepper, just the way she liked it; tender pieces of chicken; rich, spicy sausage; the subtle sweetness of tomato and Vidalia onions. Things she couldn’t even identify, it’d been so long. The Middle East had every cuisine in the world available—she’d eaten cheeseburgers in Dubai, Thai food in Qatar, Nigerian food in Abu Dhabi, and American chain restaurants in all those places. But she hadn’t eaten Louisiana cooking in ten years. Her husband hadn’t cared for it, and after he’d abandoned her, she’d lost heart and hadn’t wanted reminders of the family she’d abandoned for him.
“I’ve got corn, too.” Her mother spooned maque choux onto her plate as well. “Fresh cream, from one of those farmers’ markets all the young people are going on about.”
“I always thought maque choux was such a fancy name for such a simple dish.”
Her mother chuckled. “Eat up.”
Valentina combined the corn and peppers with her rice, the way she had when she was a kid. She liked the candy-sweetness of the corn alongside everything else. As she ate, something was loosening in her chest—a knot that had been there since she’d arrived in Louisiana with a headache from crying on a sixteen-hour flight.
It finally allowed her to speak.
“He left, Mama,” she whispered. And then the whole story poured out, her spoon clattering down on the willowware because if she took another bite she’d stop talking and might never start again. When she’d finished, the food was cooling on both their plates and her mother was staring across the table at her as if she were a stranger.
“So… Malik left you in debt,” her mother said slowly. “And you went to prison? In the Middle East ?”
She swallowed hard. Her mother’s face was losing color. “Yes.”
“Are we really so bad, that you couldn’t phone home for help?”
It was very hard not to cry. “You had—I didn’t—I felt like I was taking up space, Mama, after you married Russell. It was time to make my own way. And I made such a fuss about marrying him that I… I couldn’t.”
Her mother looked faintly sick.
“And then you worked as a maid !”
“A nanny, Mama.” Valentina tried not to regret opening up about what had happened. “A companion. To young ladies.”
Her mother ignored this correction. “And then you met a man that paid off your debts?”
She knew how it sounded. Val looked down at the table. When her mother didn’t speak, she looked back up to find her mother was staring at her, something indecipherable in her eyes.
“You pretended to be his… wife ?”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said softly. The various colors were congealing on her plate and she chose to focus on them.
“Can you show me— What does he look like?”
Valentina looked up a photo from the celebration event and showed her mother. His head was tilted and he was looking at her with an intensity in his eyes that leaped off the screen. And her face…
Her ears began to burn.
There was a silence through which all she could hear was the ticking of the kitchen clock and the humming of the air conditioner.
“He’s handsome,” her mother said.
“Yes.”
“I thought you said he was younger than you.”
“He is. He’s just…tall.” Well, that and his experiences had probably etched years onto his face. But she didn’t want to get into that now.
“Were you—? Did you—?” her mother paused delicately so that her meaning was clear.
“We did,” Val admitted.
Her mother pursed her lips. “And you came running back here.”
“It’s not like you think, Mama. He was…he’s a good person. I just, I couldn’t…”
Her mother watched her flounder for a long moment before putting her daughter out of her misery. “Do you love him?”
Heat rushed to Valentina’s cheeks. “Mama. No!”
“Huh.”
Valentina took in a breath that exhaled on a very shaky laugh. “He’s entirely inappropriate, Mama. He’s younger than me, for one thing. He’s just signed a big deal that will keep him out there, and now that my debts are paid off, I have nothing to do there anymore. And he…well, he doesn’t want me.”
Even as the words came out, Val heard how unconvincing she sounded. Her mother’s raised eyebrows seemed to agree. She forged on. “He took me to the airport, and I gave him the ring back. He didn’t stop me.”
“There was a ring ?”
“It was part of the ruse, Mama. Trust me. We both knew it couldn’t work.”
“Did you give him any indication that it was a possibility? That you wanted it?”
“Why are you being so hard on me?” Val burst out, and then began to cry huge noisy sobs, all the emotions of the past weeks breaking through the self-imposed walls she’d put up.
“All I know,” her mother said, “is that you come home after nearly a decade, tell me this fantastic story about a man who cared for you when you didn’t have anyone else, and you looked as if I’d punched you in the gut when I asked if you loved him. It’s not unreasonable to think that maybe you do.”
“Mama,” Valentina managed to say through her tears. “I think… I think …maybe I do love him.”
* * *
The heat of the Louisiana summer came as it always did with the bitter, oily smell of exhaust from the road and the heavy damp smell of rain that always threatened to fall. Summer brought a hum of mosquitos at night, hopping frogs, fireflies illuminating the sky and the slow creep of warm, swampy air that left a sheen on the skin and encouraged the mouth to hang slightly open to aid in breathing.
Valentina wasn’t ready for it at all. It was different from the heat of the dry Gulf, and it caught her off guard. She spent many mornings on the front porch, sipping iced peach sweet tea and applying listlessly for local teaching assistant jobs. It was too hot to sew, too hot to go to Armstrong Park and too hot to trail behind her mother where she worked painstakingly on her roses and magnolias in the little garden at the back of the house, the old jazz standards her father had recorded years ago playing out of the scratched boom box she’d had since the early nineties. They’d been alone all these weeks; her stepfather, Russell, was away, visiting family with his daughters, and for that, Valentina was grateful.
Valentina brooded and dabbed at the perspiration trickling between her breasts.
“You’ll stay here,” she said to herself, “until you decide what you want to do.”
She still hadn’t told Desmond. She would, of course, but processing it all and thinking about what this new stage in her life meant took priority.
Part of her was grateful for this new beginning—making up with her mother, being free of debt and of Malik. The freedom to start a new life, on her own terms. But a part of her also mourned the loss of the beginning of something with him ; the beginning of something she felt like she’d abandoned, despite wanting it very much. It was nothing like how she’d felt when she fell under Malik’s spell back in the early days. Then, she’d quickly been overwhelmed by the force of his personality, coupled with her desire to be swept away somewhere that wasn’t NOLA.
She pushed aside her laptop and sat up straight, taking another slug of iced tea. It seemed to pool in her throat, tightened by a nervous tension she couldn’t explain. She pushed away her tumbler and picked up her mobile. Aside from a couple of texts from Hind, one from Sheikh Rashid’s office about her severance pay, notifications from a food delivery app she hadn’t read and a couple of responses from job-hunting websites, there was nothing. It was unsettling, seeing such stark evidence of her isolation over the past several years.
Enough of that.
She scrolled to Desmond’s number. Their last exchange was the morning she’d flown back to the US. There was no acknowledgement in the messages of what had happened between them only hours before.
As if she had summoned him by thought alone, a bubble suddenly appeared under his name.
I’m in Louisiana.
Valentina stared at the phone, stunned. She didn’t drop it, but she was close. Before she could gather herself together enough to call, he was texting again. Then she did yelp, because the phone rang, startling her so badly her hand jerked out, spilling the tea precariously close to her laptop. She snatched the machine out of the way of the expanding puddle and answered. “Hello?” If she’d had any doubt about her feelings for him, it dissolved as her core heated and her heart pounded.
“Valentina.” His voice was low and restrained. They were both silent for nearly a full minute before she spoke.
“You’re in Louisiana.”
“Yes.” He paused. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to show up on your front step. Not without your permission, anyway. It was impulsive flying over without saying anything to you, but I’m happy to go home unless…” He stopped. He sounded so unsure of himself. “Unless you’d be willing to see me.”
She closed her eyes.
“Valentina?” He hesitated. “Sorry. Val. You’re just always Valentina, to me.”
Being back home, where she had always been known as Valentina, had shifted something inside her, and that included the use of the name she’d rejected for so long. Perhaps it was part of her admitting that she was still vulnerable to love.
“Valentina is fine. Yes, I’m here.” The hand gripping the phone was now incredibly sweaty. “And… I’m willing.”
“I’ll be real with you,” Desmond said, and his voice was now so quiet she had to strain to hear. “I’d like us to go out, maybe to dinner, and…talk, I—” His voice broke off. “Sorry. I’m doing a terrible job at this.”
“Yes,” she said. Her heart was thudding so hard in her chest she could barely hear her own voice. “Yes, I—I can meet.”
He was here ! He’d come.
And need was, once again, clawing at her insides, just in response to the sound of his voice.