BIANCA
Whoever coined the phrase beauty sleep had obviously never seen me in the morning.
“Damn, girl,” I said to my haggard reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Those aren’t bags under your eyes, that’s a full set of luggage.”
I splashed cold water on my face, pressed a wet washcloth to my lids, and held it there for a minute, to no effect. When I opened my eyes, I looked just as bad as I did before.
Serves me right for staying up into the wee hours of the morning working on a new menu.
But if Jackson Boudreaux was serious about his threat to sue, I’d have to revamp everything, fast. Then I supposed I’d have to hire myself a lawyer.
Stuck-up son of a lazy-eyed catfish!
What little sleep I’d had was filled with nightmares about being chased from the restaurant by a pack of wolves, led by one particularly large and nasty specimen that was all sharp teeth and vicious growls, his black fur bristling as he snapped at my heels. I woke with my heart pounding, the sheets drenched in sweat. And now I looked like I’d been chewed up and spit out by an ornery gator.
I pinned my hair into a bun, then smoothed a dollop of pomade over all the rebellious little flyaways staging a protest around my hairline. Then I brushed my teeth and got dressed, not bothering with makeup. There was no concealer on earth that could tackle my undereye bags today, and I’d never quite mastered the art of applying mascara. Or lipstick, for that matter. The last time I wore it was at Christmas, and by the time mass was over at church it had smeared all over my teeth. I looked like I’d eaten a box of red crayons.
So it was barefaced that I appeared at my mother’s door to check on her on my way to the restaurant, as I did every morning. She took one look at me and raised her brows.
“Well,” she said, “I know you don’t look so rough because of a man, chère, so come on in and tell me the story.”
“Actually it is because of a man.”
I gave my mother a hug, then stepped past her into the small but beautiful front parlor of her home. Perfumed with vases of flowers and the scent of her Shalimar, with the low, throaty voice of Ella Fitzgerald crooning from the hidden speakers in the walls, it was a little oasis of elegance and style amid the gentle decay of Tremé.
The oldest African American neighborhood in the United States, Tremé was the musical heart of New Orleans, going all the way back to the seventeen hundreds, when slaves were allowed to gather in Congo Square on Sundays to dance and play music. Jazz was invented here. The civil rights movement started here. We have brass bands, incredible cuisine, cultural history museums, more festivals than days of the week, and famous historical sites galore.
But it’s a bad idea for tourists to take a stroll after dark. Drugs are a problem, and jobs are in short supply. And all those boarded-up houses that were abandoned after the flood still stand, flowering with toxic black mold, a daily reminder of the heartbreak of Hurricane Katrina.
Life can be good in Tremé, but it’s never been easy.
At the mention of a man, my mother got excited. “Well let me put on my glasses so I can hear you better!”
She often said nonsensical things like that. It was part of her charm. That, and her gift of making you feel welcome.
She slid her glasses up her nose and peered at me through them. Worn on a silver chain around her neck, they were her one concession to the fact that she was aging.
“It’s a long story, Mama,” I said with a sigh. “And not worth retelling.”
She squinted. Her big brown eyes were magnified even bigger through the lenses of her glasses. “No saucy bits?”
“Not even one.”
Instantly losing interest, she removed the dreaded glasses and let them dangle from the chain once more. “Did you have breakfast, chère?”
I shrugged. “Coffee and some aspirin.”
“That’s not breakfast, silly child!” she scolded. “Get your skinny behind in this house and eat!”
She turned and floated away to the kitchen in a cloud of perfume and motherly disappointment, her flowing purple robe billowing around her ankles as she moved. Barefoot and nimble, she still had her beauty queen’s graceful, gliding gait, even at sixty-four years old.
Excuse me. Thirty-nine. For a second there I forgot what year it was that she’d stopped aging.
“I made collard greens, shrimp and grits, and Cajun benedict,” she called over her shoulder. “And I’ve got okra gumbo and my famous jambalaya simmerin’ on the stove for later.”
That would’ve been a lot of food for a single woman living alone, but my mother had a steady stream of callers throughout the day, from brunch straight through to cocktail hour and beyond. There was nothing she enjoyed more than visiting. Or “holding court,” as I liked to call it.
And speaking of callers . . .
“Good morning, Colonel!” I called down the hall toward my mother’s closed bedroom door.
There was a pause, and then a muffled reply. “Mornin’, sugar!”
There was only one reason my mother’s bedroom door was closed in the morning, and the Colonel was it. Trying not to picture what might go on behind that door, I smiled.
“Leave him be, Bianca,” said my mother from the kitchen. “C’mon now, I’m making you up a plate.”
I strolled into the kitchen, dropped my knapsack on the floor next to the square wood table where I ate every meal as a child, and sat down, watching my mother put together a plate of food for me: a scoop from one pot, a ladle from another. She was more at home in front of a stove than anywhere else in the world.
I asked, “Another sleepover? Is this getting serious with you two?”
My mother looked over her shoulder and smiled. Her eyes danced with mischief. “No man could ever compete with your father, chère, God bless his soul, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop them from trying.” She fanned herself. “And my word, the Colonel is certainly trying.”
“Ugh. It’s depressing that you get more action than I do. I can already feel the emotional scars forming.”
“Please, child, you’re not that fragile. And how many times do I have to tell you to get back out there? Don’t let that fool boy put a hex on your love life. He isn’t worth it!”
The “fool boy” in question was my ex, Trace. I’d been head over heels for him, sure we’d get married, until I discovered his definition of monogamy meant he’d only cheat on me with one girl at a time. I’d been happily single for almost two years now, much to Mama’s dismay. As an only child, I was her sole hope for the grandbabies she so desperately wanted.
Avoiding that minefield, I quickly steered the conversation into safer, and more important, waters. “So what did Doc Halloran say?”
Mama turned back to the stove. There was a brief, almost-unnoticeable pause before she answered. “Just what I told you he’d say, baby. I’m right as rain.”
I frowned. “But you’ve had that cough for months now, Mama.”
Smiling brightly, she turned around again and faced me. I was struck by how beautiful she still was, her face unlined in the bright morning light spilling through the kitchen windows. I got my complexion from her—“toasted chestnuts” my milk-pale father called it—and hoped I’d age as well as she was.
Though if the bags under my eyes were any indication, I was out of luck.
“It’s nothing to worry about.” She placed the plate of food on the table in front of me. “Just a side effect of getting old.”
I laughed out loud. “Am I hearing things, or did the fabulous Miss Davina Hardwick just say the word old ? I didn’t think it was even in your vocabulary!”
“Hush, you!” My mother gave me a light, loving slap on my shoulder. “Or the whole neighborhood will hear!”
“Hear what?” said a booming baritone behind me.
I turned to find the Colonel in the doorway, grinning and pulling his suspenders over his shoulders. Trimly built and of below average height, he nonetheless had a big presence, fashioned in part from that booming voice, but mostly from twenty-five years leading soldiers in the army. As always, he was dressed in impeccable white, right down to his patent leather shoes. His eyes were an unusual, gunmetal gray, pale and arresting against the dark canvas of his skin.
My mother laughed and waved her hand at the table. “Nothing for you to be worrying about, just girl talk. Sit yourself down and eat.”
Grinning wider, he propped his hands on his hips. “I’ve already got a belly full of sweetness from spending the night with you, woman.”
My eye roll was so loud it could probably be heard from space.
Coy as a debutante, my mother pursed her lips and batted her lashes at him. “Why you silver-tongued devil. Whatever will I do with you?”
Faster than you’d think a seventy-year-old man could move, the Colonel had crossed the room and embraced my mother. He swung her around, lifting her so her feet cleared the floor, laughing in delight when she girlishly squealed.
“I can think of one or two things!” he boomed, rattling the windows. Then he set her on her feet and gave her such a passionate kiss my cheeks went red.
“Only one or two?” she said breathlessly when the kiss was over. “I thought you had more imagination than that, tahyo!”
Tahyo is Cajun French for a big, hungry dog.
I dropped my face into my hands and groaned. “Someone please kill me. Just kill me now.”
“I told you not to talk to yourself, child, you sound like one of the hobos over on the boulevard!” Mama scolded.
Into my head popped a vivid image of Jackson Boudreaux’s shocked expression after I’d told him he looked like one of the homeless panhandlers on the boulevard. It made me feel much better.
“You look a little tired this mornin’, sugar.” Finished slobbering all over Mama, the Colonel sat down beside me at the table and eyed me with concern. “Everything all right?”
Mama said, “Says it’s a man that gave her that face, but she isn’t saying who.”
With a wink, she made another plate of food and set it in front of the Colonel. She gave us forks, and we dug in.
“I just had a late night is all,” I said around a mouthful of succulent eggs.
The Colonel drawled, “This wouldn’t have anything to do with your visit from a certain Mr. Jackson Boudreaux, would it?”
“Jackson Boudreaux!” Eyes wide, my mother whirled around and stared at me. “Good Lord in heaven, what were you doing with him? I hear that boy’s meaner than a wet panther!”
I shot a sour glance at the Colonel, who lifted a shoulder unapologetically.
He said, “Word gets around this town fast, sugar, ’specially when it has to do with the most eligible bachelor in the state gettin’ a tongue-lashin’ in public from the owner of the hottest new restaurant in the French Quarter.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Rumor has it you nearly snapped that boy’s head clean off.”
I winced at the memory. “Not my best moment, for sure. But he deserved it. I’ve never met a more asinine, self-important, son of a—”
“Keep it up and I’ll cancel your birth certificate!” my mother warned.
“—rabid crawdad in my life,” I finished, smiling.
Even at thirty-one, I wasn’t allowed to curse in her presence. Some things never changed.
The Colonel chuckled. “You didn’t think the boy got the nickname ‘the Beast’ by bein’ all rainbows and butterflies, did you?”
A beast he is, but a boy he most certainly is not. I remembered the breadth of Jackson’s shoulders, the deep rumble of his voice, that hard, burning stare. The thought of it made me squirm in my seat.
Because I hated him, not because I found him attractive. Obviously.
My cheeks burning again, I stuffed another forkful of eggs into my mouth.
“Snapped his head off?” Mama pushed her glasses up her nose, took a seat opposite me, and leaned over the table, all ears.
I told a shortened version of the events at the restaurant last night. When I was finished, she took her glasses off, tsked, and patted my hand.
“Just goes to show that money is no substitute for class, chère. The true measure of a man is how he treats those less fortunate than him, make no mistake.”
That was a reference to my late father, a Harvard-educated attorney who disappointed his wealthy parents when he decided to dedicate his life to helping minorities in the poorest communities of Louisiana instead of following in his father’s footsteps and pursuing corporate law, and then a spot on the judicial bench. His parents’ disappointment turned to outrage when he married my mother. Marrying “down” simply wasn’t done by a Hardwick, especially when “down” included brown.
My mother was the first woman of color to marry into the Hardwick family tree.
Soon after I was born, my father was cut from his parents’ wills. I’d never met my paternal grandparents, and God help them if I ever did. The tongue-lashing I gave Jackson Boudreaux would sound like a love song in comparison.
“Anyway it doesn’t matter because I’ll never see him again,” I said, finishing my food. “Now I really need to get a move on or I’ll be late for the produce shipment—”
Mama started to cough. Violent, dry, hacking coughs that racked her body and made her eyes water and her face turn scarlet.
“Mama!” I jumped to my feet and went to her. Gripping her shoulder, I was surprised by how frail the bones felt under my hand.
“I’m fine,” she rasped, waving me away. “I’m just a little dry, chère, I need a glass of—”
A second round of coughing stole her words and bent her in half at the waist.
As I started to panic, the Colonel went to her other side and gently rubbed her back. “Easy, now, Davina, just take it easy, girl,” he said softly. He glanced up and met my gaze.
I knew from his look that this coughing fit wasn’t the first she’d had today. My body went cold. What was she hiding from me?
I rushed to the sink and poured water from the tap into a glass. My hand shook when I offered it to her.
“Thank you, baby,” she said weakly after she’d swallowed it. “That’s better.”
I sat across from her again. Her skin had taken on an unhealthy ashen hue, and little beads of perspiration glistened at her hairline. Like mine, her hands were trembling.
I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but something about this smelled bad enough to gag a maggot.
I looked my mother straight in the eye and said firmly, “Mama. You better spit out the truth right now or I’m gonna cream your corn, as Daddy used to say. What did Doc Halloran really tell you about that cough?”
Something crossed her face. It was an expression I’d never seen my vibrant, carefree, and confident mother wear—an awful mix of resignation, sadness, and, worst of all, fear.
When she said quietly, “Owen, would you please give us a moment?” all the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
The Colonel gently kissed my mother’s head. “Of course, Davina.” He squeezed her shoulders, shot me a worried look, and left, quiet as a kitchen mouse.
Then my mother gathered my hands in hers and started to talk, but I only heard a single word. A word that made my heart stop beating and my soul bleed.
Cancer.