Chapter 77
The house was dark and silent when I returned from my shift.
The TV was off in the living room. I couldn’t remember the last time the TV was off.
I wandered into the kitchen. It was empty.
A faint murmur reached me from the backyard.
I opened the screen door to find my dad and Brad dumping a bucket of live crawfish into a boiling pot.
I hadn’t actually met Brad in the two weeks he’d lived there since I was working now.
He looked exactly how I expected: blue eyes, blond hair, a white supremacist’s wet dream but wearing a gray “I Public Radio” T-shirt.
I eased into the yard, understanding there was a weird and delicate dynamic at play between the two of them that I didn’t understand. Carefully, I said, “Hey hey.”
“Oh, hey! You must be Cat.” Brad reached out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”
I shook it. “Yeah, you too.”
“Your dad was just saying you’re a writer. That’s cool.”
I was surprised my dad had said anything about my writing. Whenever I brought it up to him, he acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. I found myself wishing I could’ve heard what exactly he said, wondering if there’d been a shimmer of pride in it.
I turned to my dad, who hadn’t said anything. “You’re making crawfish?”
He said, “Mm-hm,” like it hadn’t been over a decade since he boiled crawfish.
“Why?”
“Why not?”
I couldn’t argue with that. The three of us sat in lawn chairs, waiting for the crawfish to cook. My dad started telling us a strange story about how my grandma had killed my grandfather.
I coughed. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“I know you know this story.”
“I thought she just pointed a rifle at him?”
Brad was leaning forward, suspended. My dad said, “She did! And then she shot him!”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Right in the eye.”
“That’s crazy!” Brad said. “She didn’t go to jail or anything?”
My dad reclined in his chair, lifting his arm over the seatback, more relaxed than I’d seen him in months. “Nope. But you could kill a Black man back then and get away with it. Dumped his butt in the river. No one was looking into the details. This is Louisiana, remember.”
I thought, no wonder my dad has so many issues.
“I’m sorry, Daddy, I didn’t know that.”
“Sorry? That man was whooping my ass—he had it coming.” My dad stood to empty a pan of corn, onions, and potatoes into the pot and stirred.
He was walking freely, without crutches now, but still dragged his foot a bit.
The sky was navy and purple. Brad asked him a series of breathless questions, and my dad answered them happily.
It struck me that all this time, he was looking for someone to listen to him, someone who cared about what he had to say.
After we ate, Brad went back to the basement. He was a better tenant than I expected. There was a hole in the house that he didn’t fill exactly but seemed to patch over with his presence.
“How come you never told me the full story?” I said.
“I thought I did.”
I shook my head, laughing. “That’s a pretty big detail you left out.”
“I’m just glad she died before all this crap,” he said, looking at the sky.