Bayou, Whispers from the Past: A Novel Page 3

  After a while, Kate came downstairs wearing jeans and a blue gingham shirt, an outfit I rarely saw her in. From her spot in the doorway, she glared at Andre.

  He stood abruptly, nearly knocking his chair over.

  She looked angelic, standing in the glowing pastel of the kitchen—but she also looked like she wanted to throw something heavier than a hair dryer at Andre. He gave her a look I’d never seen from him, though, like a calf in a hailstorm, and her face softened.

  “So,” Kate said, “this is going to be awkward for a minute, but since Enza tells me y’all are such good friends, I figure we might as well get the uncomfortable part over as quickly as possible. She assures me we’ll be laughing about this at some point, but that assumes we get past this.” She waved her hand in the space between them, in a circular motion that seemed to indicate all particles of awkwardness floating among us.

  Andre stared at her slack-jawed, then glanced away as if he didn’t quite know where to rest his eyes. He looked as fidgety as a kid on his first date.

  She glanced at me. “Didn’t you say you had beer?”

  Jack went to the fridge, trying to hide his smile as he pulled out four bottles and opened them one by one.

  Kate raised one eyebrow at Andre and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “I’m really sorry I scared you, jolie,” Andre said at last. “I thought the house was empty.” Right then, I’d have never taken him for a sheriff. His eyebrows had a sad little arch to them, and his eyes were as wide and warm as a puppy’s.

  “Didn’t you ever hear of knocking?” she said.

  “I did knock, but obviously it wasn’t loud enough.”

  “Well,” she said, taking a beer from Jack. “I’m sorry I clocked you with the hair dryer. It’s salon quality.”

  “It’s OK. I’m sorry I saw you—you know.”

  “Without a stitch.”

  He blushed all the way down past the collar of his shirt. I’d never seen Andre Dufresne this flustered. Ever.

  Jack handed me a beer and gave me a look that said he was just as taken aback by all of this as I was.

  “Indeed,” Andre said. “If it helps, though, you were kind of a blur.”

  A tiny smile touched her lips. “Not really, but thanks for trying.”

  He held his hand out to her and said, “Bygones, then?”

  She shook his hand, and I could have sworn his face lit up from her touch.

  “Bygones,” she said.

  “See?” I said. “That wasn’t too awkward.”

  Andre and Kate exchanged a look, but he still couldn’t hold her gaze for long.

  He leaned against the counter and said to Jack, “Want to come out on the lake with me for a while, or do you go on duty tonight?”

  “I just finished a week of training,” Jack said. “Got a couple extra days off this rotation.”

  “We can just go out back,” Andre said. “Ladies, if we catch anything, we’ll fry it up for dinner.”

  “What do you mean ‘if’?” Jack said.

  “Great,” I said. “Kate, I was thinking of checking on the house we’re flipping. Want to come?”

  “Absolutely.” She drained the rest of her beer and gave Andre one last long look as we headed out to the car.

  ~~~~

  The house Jack and I were working on was the third house we’d renovated together. The first had been Vergie’s, and when I decided I wanted to stop working for my father and run my own house-flipping business, Jack had been one hundred percent supportive. Partly because that meant I wasn’t leaving him to return to North Carolina, but partly because he liked working with me. He’d been working as a firefighter for a few years now, but truth be told, I thought he preferred working with his hands. He liked to build and create, just like I did.

  After we’d finished Vergie’s house, I’d sold the home I’d owned in North Carolina and used the money to invest in the second house we flipped. Jack’s uncle and aunt—Buck and Josie—owned a hardware store in Bayou Sabine, and they also did carpentry and painting. When I’d mentioned to Buck I could use their help on the flips and could pay them as subcontractors, they agreed to help us. Buck did beautiful restorations of historic architecture—carved crown molding, newel posts, and windows with fancy dividers. He was also skilled at procuring historic pieces from other houses that had been demolished or “upgraded.” He had friends who would alert him when original windows and carved doors were being tossed out and replaced with newer parts. He could sniff out clawfoot tubs, stained glass windows and heart pine floorboards—and knew exactly how to combine them into a masterpiece.

  When he put them in the homes we rebuilt together, it felt sometimes more like resurrection that renovation.

  It was a good feeling, to save something that had been left to rot.

  We’d sold the second house for a good profit, and now we were working on another house that was just on the outskirts of Bayou Sabine, situated on two acres along one of the canals. I worked on the house almost every day, taking a weekend for myself every couple of weeks. Jack worked with me on most of his days off from the station. We took time away when we needed to, but lately we’d been spending more time at the house so we could finish it in January.

  When I pulled into the driveway, Kate said, “Hey, this is really cute.”

  It was a river-style house with a big porch, and my favorite thing about the place was the huge shuttered windows. Along the front and spaced a couple of feet apart, they were eight feet tall and opened out to a forty-five degree angle with poles in the bottoms to prop them open. The house was painted charcoal, the shutters aqua. The inside was filled with dark-colored wood, and a second screened-in porch on the back faced the canal. Jack and I had already stripped the wallpaper and repainted, and Buck had replaced some broken banister rails and put up crown molding where it was missing. There wasn’t much left to do on the house, so I expected our deadline to be a snap.

  ~~~~

  I gave Kate a quick tour. One of the nicest parts of the house was its open kitchen and living area. The previous owners had knocked out a wall to make one big space, which I was glad of, but they had ignored the floors, leaving in place the old linoleum in the kitchen and installing a cheap-looking trim to offset the different flooring of the living room.

  “I think Andre liked you,” I said. “I’ve never seen him get flustered like that around anybody before.”

  She frowned, tracing her fingers over the new marble countertop we’d installed. “Oh, please.”

  “He’s a great guy,” I said. “And he’s single.”

  “Give me time to get over the last one, will you?”

  “I’m just saying, maybe you should expand your search into another state.”

  Benjamin was the first guy Kate had been serious enough about to marry. Men had proposed to her before, but she almost always thought it was too soon—and for her, it almost always was. Kate was easy to like but hard to get to know. It had taken us months to really learn about each other back in college, even though I had liked her the instant we met. I suspected she was the same way with men, slow to reveal her secrets, carefully guarding her heart. She hadn’t told me a lot about her past relationships, but in the time we’d been friends, I’d only seen her date casually for the most part. It was rare for her to stay with a guy for more than three months, and I’d been surprised when she stayed with Benjamin for so long. He wasn’t the kind of guy I pictured her with—he was slick and status quo, and she was an astonishing blend of intelligence and wit. He was generic, and she was everything but.

  In my estimation, Benjamin wasn’t right for her, but that wasn’t my call to make. I had breathed a little sigh of relief when she said she was finished with him, though, and hoped she’d not be so heartbroken she’d get into a funk and bury herself in her work. She did that sometimes too. She’d dive into some research project that required sixty-hour work weeks and claim she didn’t have time for a relationship that consisted of m
ore than cocktails and movie tickets.

  “New subject,” she said, studying the cabinets. “How was your outing today? I hope it was better than my day.”

  “It was good. I found George, who was Vergie’s boyfriend. She was living with him in New Orleans when she died.”

  “Ooh. Scandalous.”

  “He said he had some things of hers he wanted to give me.” I led her down the narrow hall to the two nearly finished bedrooms. In the first one, we’d painted the wood paneling beige, then refinished the hardwood floors. Removing the dark stain and using a color closer to pine had made the room feel big enough to turn cartwheels in. The second, we’d painted off-white and used the same shade of stain. When we’d started, the whole house was so dark it felt sinister. We’d traded the outdated mini-blinds for pine matchstick blinds that allowed light to diffuse throughout the house. The place was nestled among cypress, and being able to see the patterns of their curling limbs from inside made it feel like this house belonged right there, among the water and the reeds.

  “Did you ask George about your mom?” she asked, leaning against the window.

  “No. I figured that was a conversation for another day, when he wasn’t on the clock.”

  “Ah. Good call.”

  We wandered into the kitchen, where we’d soon be pulling up the old, beat-up linoleum. I was hoping the hardwood would be in good shape, but if not, I had my eye on some vintage-inspired tile I’d seen at the hardware store.

  “How are you doing?” I asked. “Aside from the sheriff giving you a heart attack.”

  “Oh, you know.” She leaned against the counter, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Alternating between boiling over with anger and feeling totally stupid.”

  I nodded. “The good news is you caught this in time. It could have been a lot worse. You could have showed up a year from now filing for divorce.”

  “I know. But why did it have to happen at all? I thought I was past this part of my life. I thought I’d seen all the patterns and learned how to weed out the liars and the cheaters.”

  “I know you did, Kate.” Kate thought she should be bulletproof in this sense because she studied patterns of behavior in unusual organisms for a living. But nature was always finding new and heartbreaking ways to be unusual. We were no different from the single-celled fauna in that regard.

  ~~~~

  When we got home, Andre and Jack were busy deep-frying catfish. The kitchen looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy had exploded. A fine dusting of flour covered every surface—the table, the countertops, the seats of the kitchen chairs. The contents of two frying pans popped and hissed on the stovetop, sending a spray of grease all over the stove.

  Even Bella, who lay under the table, had flour on her snout.

  “Look,” I said to Kate. “It’s Bayou Iron Chef.”

  Kate dusted off one of the chairs with a tea towel so she could sit.

  “Hey, cher,” Jack said to me. “You’re back sooner than we thought you’d be.”

  “Our plan,” Andre said, “was to have everything cleaned up by the time y’all got back.” A layer of white covered his shirt.

  “Oh my,” I said, dragging my finger through the flour on the counter.

  Jack walked over to me, holding his batter-covered hands out by his sides. He leaned down and kissed me, and I knew part of him was wishing Kate and Andre were long gone.

  Part of me was too.

  I tousled his hair, and he grinned. “You have flour in your hair,” I said.

  He inched his hands toward my face, and I swatted them away. “Don’t you dare,” I said, dodging the batter.

  “Anything we can do to help?” Kate asked.

  “Not a thing,” Andre replied, slapping the lid back on a pot. “Potatoes are ready, veggies are done. Just waiting on the last fish to fry.”

  ~~~~

  We sat outside to eat since it had finally cooled off enough that the yard no longer felt like the surface of the sun. I’d strung some lights in the oak tree closest to the house, in the limbs that curled near to the ground. Near our feet, Bella looked at us with an expression Vergie would call “woebegone.”

  We never fed her from the table, but she still looked hopeful every time. Especially when we ate at the picnic table.

  “You still going to meet George tomorrow?” Jack asked me.

  “Yeah. But I forgot I was supposed to meet Buck over at the house in the afternoon. He was going to install some light fixtures he found for me.”

  “I can help him,” Jack said.

  Kate laughed from the opposite end of the table. Andre was grinning his mischievous grin.

  “What’d I tell you?” I said. “A couple of beers, and they’d be all right.”

  “Hey,” Kate said, still laughing, but clearly a little tipsy. “I’m still mortified. I was hoping that lick on the head would make him forget.”

  Andre frowned. “You’d rob me of that memory? You standing there like Venus on the clamshell, perfectly lovely.”

  Kate’s eyes got wide. “You said everything was a blur!”

  He shrugged. “I’m sort of trained to record every little detail.”

  Her jaw dropped.

  “Hey,” he said, “would it make us even if you saw me naked?”

  I looked at Jack, but he just shook his head as if he’d seen this particular train wreck many times before.

  Kate studied him for a minute and said, “What if I said yes?”

  Andre coughed as he took a swallow of his beer.

  When she continued staring at him, he said, “What?”

  “Well?” Her voice was a dare.

  He ran his hand through his hair. “Nobody ever actually took me up on that offer.”

  “This happens often, does it?” Kate said.

  “OK,” I said, clearing their plates. “Nobody else is getting naked today. Let’s just chalk this up to one of those stories you can tell at a cocktail party a few years from now.”

  Kate grabbed the last couple of dishes and followed me up to the house, still snickering. “Did you see the look on his face?” she said. “For a second I thought he’d strip down right there at the table!”

  I went back to get my glass and heard Andre say to Jack, “They didn’t make women like that in my neighborhood. How long’s she staying?”

  ~~~~

  The next morning, Kate took off early for another outing in New Orleans. She liked small towns, but she couldn’t go long without seeing concrete and cobblestone. Jack had made us all breakfast—scrambled eggs with an ungodly amount of cheese and peppers, plus roasted potatoes from last night—and after lingering over coffee, Kate had taken off. As soon as I heard her car disappear down the drive, I stood to clear the last of the dishes, and Jack pulled me onto his lap.

  He kissed me hard, sliding his hands down my back. I gripped his shoulders, flinching as his stubbly cheek slid along my neck. “I thought she’d never leave,” he said, his lips moving against my skin.

  I laughed as he peeled my thin T-shirt away.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “You looked hot, cher. I’m only trying to help.” With that, he stood, carrying me into the bedroom. I laughed as I wrapped my legs around his waist.

  “Something funny?” he asked.

  I tangled my fingers in his hair and pulled. “You’re tickling me.”

  “Hmm,” he said, nuzzling his cheek along my collarbone. “I’m so very sorry.”

  I laughed and squirmed in his arms, but that only made him grip me tighter. He dropped me onto the bed and fixed his eyes on me. When he looked at me that way, I couldn’t stand to be so far away from him. He slipped his shirt over his head and then eased on top of me, teasing me with his slow movements.

  “Better hurry, before she comes back,” I said.

  “When have I ever hurried with you, cher?”

  He slid one hand into my hair, tugging as he kissed me, stealing my breath. My heart banged against my ribs as his other hand s
lid down to my waist, unfastening my jeans.

  “Come here,” I whispered, and he only laughed, a wicked sound from deep in his throat that I felt against my skin as he kissed a line down my ribs to my hip. I gasped as I felt the pinch of his teeth, and he slid my jeans down to my ankles and tossed them onto the floor.

  “I’ve wanted you so bad these last few nights,” he said.

  “She won’t be here long.” I unbuttoned his jeans and slid them down over his hips. He groaned as I took him in my hand, and then he wriggled out of his jeans and kicked them to the floor.

  He grasped my hip, holding me firmly in place, then sat back and pulled my leg over his shoulder. He kissed my ankle as he slid his hand along my thigh. My breath caught in my throat as he eased himself inside me in one long, slow maneuver I was sure would unravel me. He moved faster, matching my breaths as his teeth pinched my ankle and his hand squeezed my hip.

  “Jack,” I whispered, and he grinned.

  “I love to hear you call my name,” he said, his voice ragged.

  He tilted my hips higher, and I called his name again and again, until there were tiny pinpricks of light all around him, and it almost hurt to breathe.

  Chapter 3

  It was hard to concentrate on working on the house after a morning like that, but I wanted to finish a few things before Buck got there with the light fixtures. I wanted to paint the living room ceiling, since he’d be hanging a ceiling fan, and I wanted to repaint some chair rails just because I was tired of seeing them unfinished. I liked to strike rooms off the list in order to feel like I was really making progress. And the living room and back bedroom were so close to being done.

  I painted until one, when I stopped to eat a sandwich. Most of the morning I’d spent thinking about George. How much could I ask him without seeming just plain nosy? I had no idea if Vergie actually told him about my mother, but I wanted to know. That much was for sure. He seemed like a nice man, and I didn’t want him to feel like I was just picking him apart for information.