CHAPTER 6
“To what do I owe this honor?” Colter asked.
“It’s lunch, Colter,” India replied, dropping the burger and fries he had asked for when she had texted to ask him to have lunch earlier on the table.
“It’s lunch with my big sister, who never asks if I want to have lunch.”
“Well, I wanted to talk to you,” she replied and sat down next to him on his office sofa.
“You never want to talk to me. I see you at holidays and funerals,” he said, opening the Styrofoam container, revealing his food. “Where’s yours?”
“I already ate,” she said.
“You asked to have lunch with me, but you already ate?”
“Your burger took about thirty minutes to prepare, so even though I ordered it at the same time as my sandwich, I got bored and ate my food while I had to wait for yours.”
“It’s the best burger in town. It takes time.” He laughed a little.
“It’s also the most expensive. How many ingredients are on that thing?”
“At least ten,” he said. “The fried egg makes it, though. They fry it perfectly and add their sauce. That combo is perfection.” He used the plastic knife to cut it in half and stared as the egg yolk ran down the burger. “See? Perfection.”
“Not a big fan of runny eggs,” she replied. “Or waiting thirty minutes for a burger, Colter. Do you eat like this every day?”
“No, but your office is down the street from this place, so I thought you could grab it for me. Usually, I’ll just grab something from the nearest place or have my assistant do it for me.”
“I know you don’t have someone who is only your assistant as a city councilor.”
“I have staff,” Colter said.
“And they all have actual titles that probably don’t have the word ‘assistant’ in them.”
Colter took a bite, and as he chewed with his mouth half-open, which was something India had always found to be annoying, he asked, “What do you want, India?”
India reached into her purse and found another candy bar. She unwrapped it, put it in her mouth, and chewed for a moment with her mouth closed as if to entice him to do the same.
“Your campaign.”
“What about it?” he asked, wiping his chin with a napkin, bringing her attention to his five o’clock shadow.
“How is it going?”
“Fine. Why?”
“Just curious.”
“You’ve never been interested in any of my campaigns before,” he noted, eating a French fry. “This is my fourth.”
It was true: he had run for a couple of lower offices, lost once, won the second time, and then ran for his current position after buying a condo in the district that had an open and vulnerable seat so that he could claim to be part of the community.
India wasn’t sure he’d ever even spent a single night there.
He’d had it furnished, and he’d taken a lot of publicity photos there, but he had been given a very nice house in the Garden District by his father over a decade ago when he got out of Princeton.
Colter was only her half-brother. When her mother had left her father, she had met Colter’s father, married him, and had Colter, who was seven years her junior.
At his thirty-two, he’d never had a day job outside of the offices he had held, hadn’t had to work for anything in his life, including those offices, and had been handed the keys to a four-bedroom estate in the richest part of the city at age twenty-two.
While India had gone to business school, Colter had graduated at the bottom of his class from Princeton and had come straight home, where his house awaited him.
He had spent most of his time partying in the Quarter with his friends and sleeping with any interested woman in sight.
As a result, he now had three children from three different women whom he had to pay child support for but didn’t actually parent.
India never saw her two nieces and one nephew.
They weren’t recognized as actual family members by her mother and stepfather, who viewed legitimate heirs as children born to a husband and wife.
In India’s case, it would be wife and wife, and she had already talked to her mother and her own father about the fact that she’d never marry a man, so if she had kids, it would be with a woman.
They had not made too big a deal about it, but every so often, she got a comment or two about how it would’ve been easier if she were straight.
They hadn’t liked Finley at all, and neither had Colter.
They were all so stuck-up, while Finley was the opposite of stuck-up, so her mother telling her repeatedly that she’d only been with Finley because it had been a fun fling had been one of the tactics she had used to try to get India to end things.
When India had finally told her that it was over between them, her mother had sent her the names of three eligible women she’d known of who dated women.
India considered that a positive thing but annoying at the same time.
India had a half-sibling on her father’s side as well, but she hardly saw her.
They talked on the phone a lot, but Isabella lived in a small town in California.
Arguably, her sister was the smartest of them all: she’d taken the money and run far from the family’s sphere of influence.
Isabella was always busy with her husband and two kids, as well as running her own Etsy business from home on the side, which made her more money than Colter’s city council salary. India laughed at that silently.
“How’s the girlfriend, India?” Colter asked when India hadn’t said anything for a while.
“We broke up.”
“Again?” he asked as he took another bite of his burger. “Are all lesbian relationships this complicated and dramatic?”
“For good this time,” she said. “And how are your kids, Colter?” she asked, lifting an eyebrow at him.
“I don’t know. Rich?” he replied. “With the amount of money I pay their mothers every month, they should be more than happy.”
“When was the last time you saw them?”
“Which one?” He shrugged.
“Literally any of them.”
“The oldest one, I saw a few months ago when I had to drop a check off for her mother because the direct deposit into her account didn’t work. The other two…” he said with another shrug. “Maybe a year or so.”
“Have you never thought of being a father to them?”
“Why are you up my ass about this? You’ve never cared before.”
“I cared. They’re my nieces and nephew. But I’m not allowed to see them.”
“They’re biologically mine, yeah, but they’re not family.
I had sex, and a woman decided to have the kid.
Sometimes, I wonder if they did this on purpose: find me in a bar, hook up with me, and tell me I didn’t need to wrap it up just so that they could get pregnant.
Now, they’re taken care of for life.” Colter ate a fry and added, “Anyway, they’re all fine, I think.
One of the women got married, too, so that kid has a new dad now. You can relax.”
“How did we come from the same mother?” India said and shook her head.
“No clue because you’re an uptight workaholic, and I’m a chill guy who knows how to have fun. Seriously, India, when was the last time you had actual fun?”
“I have fun,” she said. “I’m just not reckless.”
“Well, it’s not like you can knock a woman up the old-fashioned way, so you can have as much of that kind of fun as you want without the possibility of consequences.”
“There are easy ways to avoid those consequences, you know?” she offered.
“Why bother? I can have as much fun as I want, and I can afford to deal with the consequences.”
“What about your campaign?”
“Why do you keep asking about that?”
“The kids, Colter. You have three kids from three different women, and you aren’t involved in their lives at all. You don’t think that’ll look bad for your campaign?”
“And who’s going to find out? My competitor owns a bookstore and runs her campaign from the back of it. She has buttons, India. Actual buttons. I saw them. I’m not going to lose this one.”
She thought about Maisie and how cute she had looked when she handed India one of those buttons. She wanted to smile at that memory, but she didn’t want Colter asking why she was smiling at him, when she couldn’t remember a single time she’d smiled at her own brother.
“I thought you wanted to run for mayor.”
“I do. And I’ll figure it all out then. I might just make them sign something to keep quiet.”
“It would still get out, Colter.”
“Are you all about me running for mayor now or something? Why are you concerned about this?”
“I’m not. I’m trying to get you to think this through. Maybe you should find another hobby. Politics has a way of bringing out all of people’s skeletons, and you have many.”
“So?” he said. “I’ve got all the connections I need to make this happen. I’m not worried.”
“I heard about the bookstore trying to get landmark status.”
“You did? Where?”
“The shop is right next to my office, Colter. I overheard someone talking about it,” India lied. “You’re not worried about that?”
Her brother didn’t need to know that she’d done some research after she met Maisie, curious about the owner more than the shop, she supposed.
“No. Why?”
“Why not just get the city council to give it the status? I bet the owner would probably drop out of the race if you did.”
“Maybe, but I’m not exactly worried. Why should I give her something?”
“Because it’s part of the history of New Orleans. Why not?”
“If we grant that status, we can’t ever tear it down and build there, and that’s an attractive piece of land in a popular spot. I’m going to keep bringing businesses here, India. I’ll need places to put them. And that is a good place.”
“You’d really play a part in taking away–”
“It’s a fucking bookstore. She can literally pick up the books and sell them somewhere else, making a lot of money in the process. What is the big deal?” he asked.
“The building is–”
“Bricks. It’s just a pile of old bricks that some dude put together a long time ago, probably not expecting his stupid little book business to last because who even read books back then?
No one reads them now, either. I’m not going out of my way to try to get that place some stupid status that would mean I can’t tear down the place if I get a good offer for it. ”
“If you get a good offer for it?”
Colter closed the food container and said, “You know what I mean. Anyway, lunch has been weird, and I’ve got to get back to work. I’ll see you at Thanksgiving or something.”
“I’m not going to Mom’s this year.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Going to your dad’s, then?”
“He’s on the yacht.”
“Isn’t he always? Why don’t you fly to wherever the thing is docked and have the holiday there?”
“Because I don’t want to,” she replied. “Maybe I’ll do Thanksgiving at my place this year and invite some friends.”
“What friends?” Colter stood up and walked over to his desk. “Wasn’t it only Funley you spent time with?”
“I know you know her name is Finley.”
“Mom and I always called her Funley behind your back because she was fun for you but wouldn’t last. Now that it’s over for good, I can call her that to your face.”
“No, you can’t,” India said, standing up. “Finley and I were together for years. We were in love. It didn’t work, but you’ve never been with a woman for more than a few weeks. You wouldn’t know anything about love.”
“Good. I don’t want to. Love comes with strings, and I don’t like strings.”
“I’ll leave you to enjoy your burger,” India stated.
“Great. Thanks,” he said. “And why do you care about some tiny bookstore? Is it because it’s next to where you work or something?”
“I know it because it’s next to my office, yes, but I also think we should preserve our history. It’s all we have here.”
“That’s short-sighted, India. We can have more than the past.”
“Colter, you can offer tax breaks and tell the community about jobs all you want. New Orleans is more than just corporations and drunk tourists. At least, it is to a lot of people. Those people want to remember and maintain where we come from for future generations.”
“We can put a plaque up on the business that moves in and replaces it,” he said. “Best I can do. I’ll even pay for the thing myself. How much are plaques? Like, five dollars?”
“Goodbye, Colter,” she replied.
India left his office and felt worse for making the trip.
She’d thought she would be able to convince him to at least protect Maisie’s business.
She knew it wasn’t exactly her place, but she was a fixer.
She always had been. Whenever she and Finley had ended things, India had gone into fix-it mode, trying to find ways to put them back together again.
Her most recent and embarrassing attempt had been to try to convince Finley to move in with her.
She’d felt her slipping away and wanted to give it one last effort to make Finley see that they belonged together.
When she got back to work, she caught sight of Finley and Molly in the lobby café, laughing about something.
She knew now that she was wrong. Deciding to make a U-turn to not run into them, she went back outside and breathed in the humid air of the city.
It was better this time of year, but New Orleans was on the water and had enough rain to make the humidity feel nearly impossible at times.
When her feet turned on their own in the direction of Chapter & Verse, she smiled as she pulled open the door and saw Maisie behind the counter, talking to a customer.
Maisie laughed at something the old man had said, but the man looked serious and almost offended that she would laugh.
Then, Maisie looked up, and when she caught sight of India, she smiled at her and gave India a small wave.
“My bag,” the man said.
“Oh, sorry,” Maisie replied.
She reached for a paper bag from under the counter and bagged up the man’s book for him.
He probably would have been fine carrying the singular book without the bag, but he seemed like the kind of customer Maisie might just want to get out of the shop before he started complaining about the loud music from the store next to the shop, even though it wasn’t something Chapter & Verse could control.
India moved out of the man’s way as he lumbered toward the door. She pushed it open for him, trying to be nice, and he gave her a grunt as he walked past.
“Um… Hi,” Maisie said.
“Hey,” India replied as the door closed behind her.
“Maise, we got that shipment of new guidebooks in.”
Maisie looked up and said, “Thanks, Lainey. Just leave them in the back. I’ll get them checked in.”
“Okay. I’m going to reshelve.”
“That’s fine,” Maisie replied.
The woman named Lainey turned back around after eyeing India, which was strange, but India let it go and returned her attention to Maisie.
“Hi,” Maisie said again with a bright smile and welcoming eyes.