Aaron had another suggestion then. “What say we skip the sanding for today and see if there’s any cold beer in the fridge?”
“Now, there’s an idea.”
As they walked back to the house, Aaron realized that he hadn’t thought about Fleur for the past hour. A remarkable feat, considering his “infatuation.” See, all I needed was something to occupy my mind. A project. Swimming pool in, infatuation out.
He glanced skyward and asked silently, So, what do you think, Jude? A swimming pool memorial?
The voice in his head responded immediately, Cool!
Chapter Three
Fancy is in the eye of the beholder . . .
A fuming Fleur maneuvered the big lavender convertible through the stone archway marked Bayou Rose before stopping at the tip of the horseshoe-shaped driveway. Okay, she wasn’t exactly fuming. More like, very irritated. Still . . .
She left the motor running as she inhaled and exhaled several times to calm down before she said something she would later, like immediately, regret. Bad words were not an attribute of a person with aspirations to the religious life. Nor was irritability.
“Girl, you got a bad case of the grumpies,” Tante Lulu observed. “I thought nuns, even almost-nuns, enjoyed church. I thought they got all holy and stuff from prayin’. Sorta like gassin’ up fer another week. Dint ya like my church?”
Fleur decided then and there to get herself one of those metal hand clickers, the kind nuns used when she was back in grade school to signal certain commands. One click, genuflect. Another click, stand in line. Click to take books out. Click to put books away. Click for recess. Yeah, that’s what Fleur needed—a clicker to help control her errant behavior. Every time an unkind thought came into her head, CLICK! Or worse yet, if a swear word slipped out, CLICK!
Now that she had a plan, Fleur patted Tante Lulu on the arm and said, “Our Lady of the Bayou Church is lovely. The service was lovely.”
“Then what burr’s wiggled under yer saddle?”
You, she thought. CLICK! With exaggerated patience, she explained, “Somehow, you failed to mention when we were getting ready for church this morning that we would be going to brunch afterward.” And then not so patiently, she continued, “At some fancy mansion owned by that annoying Aaron LeDeux and his brother, a fancy doctor, and his wife, a fancy heiress of some kind. Fancy, fancy, fancy!”
Too late for a click with that one. It just slipped out. Fleur put her face in one hand and counted to ten, in Latin.
“Ya got a headache, sweetie?” Tante Lulu asked. “Is it that time of the month?”
CLICK. Hallelujah! It worked. I didn’t say what I was tempted to say.
“I got a remedy fer that in my herb bag. Wait till we get ta the house. It’s gotta be mixed with tea.” Tante Lulu looked at her with sympathy.
And Fleur was touched.
Where are all these conflicting emotions coming from? One minute, I’m annoyed by the old lady’s machinations. Next, I feel like giving her a hug. Mother Jacinta must be right. I do have issues that need to be resolved before I take vows.
“Huh? You think Aaron LeDeux is fancy?” the old lady said, picking out the least important thing she’d said. “The way he dresses! I’ve seen hoboes with nicer duds. Not that the boy dint look handsome as all get-out this mornin’ in church, but did he hafta wear cowboy boots with his suit and tie?”
Fleur nodded. “And what’s with Aaron I-dress-like-a-broke-cowboy LeDeux being a part owner of a bayou McMansion?” CLICK.
“Sometimes you doan talk much like a nun.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Not that I’m complainin’. Sometimes, I talk like I ain’t got no education, when actually I’m smarter than mos’ folks.”
That was probably the truth, Fleur realized.
“Anyways, if ya saw Bayou Rose Plantation when they bought it, you’d be callin’ it a McDump. Stinky, the snake catcher, nabbed one hundred and eighty-seven snakes here one afternoon. Aaron about had a heart attack. He’s not too fond of the creepy crawlers.” She gave Fleur a long, sideways look, her gray eyebrows raised in question, probably because of Fleur’s overreaction to this visit. The gray eyebrows were a sharp contrast to Tante Lulu’s cap of curls, dyed red overnight, topped by a green straw “church hat” with a bird’s nest perched on one side of its wide brim. At least Fleur thought it was a bird’s nest. Maybe it was a snake in a pile of grass. The hat matched, sort of, a puke green dress that might have been purchased in the children’s department of Walmart to fit her petite frame. Same went for the lime green wedge sandals. And green eye shadow.
“I still say that I should just drop you off. I can pick you up later,” Fleur said.
“No, that won’t do. I hired ya ta be my companion, and companions stick like butter on a pig’s snout.”
Nice picture! “That’s the first I’ve heard that my job description includes ‘companion.’ I thought I was to be your traiteur assistant and your biographer.”
“Can’t ya be all three?” Tante Lulu asked. “Get a grip, girl. All this grumblin’ jist ’cause we’re gonna be neighborly?”
Neighbors? The old lady’s cottage was miles away. CLICK. But that was beside the point. As annoying as she was, Tante Lulu meant well, Fleur reminded herself. With a sigh, she tried to explain, “I don’t mean to be difficult, but these are not the kind of people I mix with, not when I grew up in this very neck of bayou woods as poor white trash, and not as an adult almost-nun, who hopes—expects—to take a vow of poverty.”
“There’s nothin’ wrong with workin’ hard and makin’ a good living. It all depends on what ya do with the money. Personally, I could buy a plantation myself if I wanted to. That doan make me bad.”
Somehow, Tante Lulu had missed Fleur’s point.
“Me and you need ta talk sometime ’bout that ‘poor white trash’ remark of yers. I’m thinkin’ you have a chip the size of a boulder on yer shoulder. I’m no shrink, but I could give ya advice.”
Over my dead body. CLICK! Fleur paused, then berated herself. Another snarky response. I’m going to start a novena tonight. Maybe to St. Jude. Yeah, that would be good. The patron saint of hopeless cases.
“Ya better hurry up, girl, or my Peachy Praline Cobbler Cake is gonna melt.”
“So, that’s why you were up at five a.m. baking. I thought it was for a church bake sale or something.”
“No, that’s next week. You kin help me make the beignets.”
A baker, too. Fleur sighed her surrender and released her foot from the brake. As the car moved forward slowly, she took in her surroundings. Yes, there were signs of a renovation in progress everywhere, from the half-cleared jungle that encroached on the edges of the property with shovels and rakes and wheelbarrows left unattended, from ladders and scaffolding near the house, and a bulldozer parked to one side. But still it was a gem, unpolished yet, but its promise showing through the years of neglect.
The branches of live oak trees that were probably two hundred years old dripped hanging moss, forming a canopied allée, or alley, in a U-shape of the driveway. A raised, three-story plantation house sat majestically on the center curve. Between the sides of that horseshoe was a stretch of sloping lawn leading down to a road and across from that, a bayou stream.
“There are even columns!” she exclaimed. “I feel like Alice in Wonderland falling into the Tara garden hole.” That wasn’t too snarky. No click needed.
“Alice who?” Tante Lulu replied, playing dumb. As the old lady had just said, she was smart as a whip, and she had the memory of an elephant.
Fleur would have to be careful not to underestimate her in the future. Only twenty-four hours of living with the old lady and Fleur was becoming savvy to her manipulations. She gave away clues, sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle. Why else would Fleur have picked “a little okra” this morning which turned into a bushel basket? “Oh, did I fergit ta mention, honey, it’s fer the food bank at the church kitchen??
??
Uh, okay.
Or ended up wearing an old sundress of Charmaine’s that had been conveniently hanging in the guest room closet. “It’s jist till we have a chance ta go shoppin’.”
We?
Or found herself the target of the Cajun yenta’s matchmaking efforts, which was not going to happen. “Ya never heard of the Thunderbolt of Love? Oh, honey! Ya came ta the right place.”
Ya think? It was a coincidence, of course, that it thundered through the night.
Fleur had drawn the line at Tante Lulu’s effort to probe into her estranged Gaudet family.
“There’s nothin’ so strange about families that it can’t be fixed,” Tante Lulu had insisted.
“I didn’t say strange, I said estranged. And don’t you dare try to contact any of my brothers or sisters.”
Tante Lulu had given her one of those “Who me?” wounded puppy expressions that didn’t fool anyone.
Now, acting as chauffeur, which was apparently another one of her jobs, in addition to organizing Tante Lulu’s folk recipes and writing her memoir and being a companion, Fleur brought the car to a stop in front of a ten-foot-wide staircase that rose from the clamshell driveway up to the second floor, which was probably the main living quarters. In the Southland with its high-water table, you only had to dig a foot to reach water; so, fearing floods, important rooms were never on the first floor. At least for the rich.
“Smile, honey,” Tante Lulu advised. “It’s not that hard, y’know. Jist turn that frown upside down. Ha, ha, ha.”
CLICK! Fleur felt like shoving the old lady out of the car and taking off for parts unknown. CLICK! The convent in Mexico, maybe. CLICK! But, no. Mother Jacinta would say that she hadn’t given this respite a chance. She was definitely starting a novena tonight.
Besides, it was too late. Standing at the top of the steps on the wide porch, or what the upper crust would call the verandah, she supposed, was Aaron LeDeux, his twin brother Daniel LeDeux, Daniel’s wife, who was hugely pregnant, and a tall, slightly foreign-looking woman, maybe Asian or Native American or Hawaiian . . . no, she must be from Alaska, where Aaron and his brother had been raised. Fleur had seen them all earlier in church and had managed to scoot Tante Lulu outside to avoid introductions, not realizing she and Tante Lulu were headed this way.
There were also a bunch of animals lined up beside the humans. A big old German shepherd, a huge amber-colored cat with black spots, two other smaller cats, and a potbellied pig. A pig!
Fleur smiled then. People who loved animals couldn’t be all that bad, or too fancy. Fleur loved animals, though she hadn’t had one since she was five years old. A mangy old dog named Harry—because he shed so much hair. Her older brothers Eustace and Joe Lee, who’d been eight and nine at the time, thought it great fun to see if the dog could outswim a gator in the nearby bayou. Her mother had smacked them both upside their heads, but her father just said, “The dog ate too much anyway, and it had fleas.” The dog ate hardly anything at all, only that which slipped from Fleur’s own plate, and as for fleas—their whole house had been a flea bag, before and after Harry.
But she hadn’t really wanted her father to punish Eustace and Joe Lee. She’d witnessed too many of her father’s punishments, usually accompanied by the smell of home brew and the whiz-bam, whiz-bam, whiz-bam of his leather belt. One time he broke Eustace’s arm for stealing apples from a neighbor’s orchard. Another time he knocked Gloria’s front tooth out for sassing back.
That was the least of the things her family had done, and not worth thinking about now. Ironically, though, her father and mother fashioned themselves devout churchgoers, and on Sunday mornings they and their nine children went to church in clean clothes and scrubbed bodies, presenting a false impression to the community.
And speaking, or thinking, of church clothes, she noticed that Aaron and Daniel had already lost their jackets and ties, and their dress shirts were unbuttoned at the collar and rolled up at the sleeves.
Samantha’s red hair, which had been down and about her shoulders in church, was pulled back off her face into a high ponytail. She wore a sleeveless, scoop-necked, very full dress, which did nothing to hide her numerous freckles, or her enormous baby bump.
The older woman with them had already changed from a dress to shorts and a T-shirt with “Alaska Air Shipping” on its front.
Fleur was introduced first to Melanie Yutu, or Aunt Mel, who had come from Juneau to help with the babies when they arrived. “I love your dress,” Aunt Mel said to Fleur. “It looks so cool and summery.”
Fleur glanced down at the white sundress covered with bright red peonies and started to say, “Oh, this belongs to—” but Tante Lulu elbowed her, and Fleur said, “Thank you.”
Next up was Daniel, who looked just like Aaron, but different somehow. His hair was shorter, his demeanor more serious. He shook her hand warmly and said, “Welcome. Aaron has told me so much about you.”
Fleur gave Aaron a sideways look, but for once he didn’t make a crack or tease. He just nodded, apparently on his best behavior today.
She didn’t trust him one bayou inch.
Samantha attempted to hug Fleur in welcome when she was introduced, and they all had to laugh because her belly got in the way.
“When is the baby due?” Fleur asked politely.
“Babies,” Samantha corrected. “We’re expecting twins in about a month, but it feels like it should be today.” She patted her bulge, and her husband beamed beside her, looping an arm over her shoulders.
Fleur was used to big bellies. Hadn’t her mother had eight babies, beside herself? Not to mention at least three miscarriages, and two infant deaths.
“Please, God, don’t let it be today,” Daniel said. “I still need to finish painting the nursery.”
“By the way,” Tante Lulu interjected, “while we were in church, I came up with two more good names.”
Samantha groaned. “You’ve already given us several Biblical suggestions, including Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sarah, with nicknames Abe and Sari, and Isaac and Rebekah, nicknamed Ike and Becky.”
“I know, I know, but these new ones are even better.” Tante Lulu paused for a ta-da moment. “Boaz and Ruth.”
Samantha looked stunned, while Daniel and Aaron barely suppressed chuckles. Aunt Mel just smiled.
“Really,” Tante Lulu insisted. “Betcha no one else on the bayou was ever named Boaz.”
“I’ll think about it,” Samantha said and winked at Fleur.
“Everyone is always making suggestions of famous couple names for the twins, including me and Dan,” Aaron told Fleur. “Personally, I’m partial to Humphrey and Lauren.”
“Nicknamed Hump, I suppose,” Daniel remarked to his brother. “I like it.”
They grinned and gave each other high fives.
Samantha rolled her eyes and confided to Fleur, “They think they’re funny.”
“Daniel, take your wife out back to the patio and make her rest on one of the lounge chairs,” Aunt Mel advised. “She’s been on her feet too much today. Tante Lulu and I will take care of the food.”
Daniel looked suddenly alarmed, especially after glancing down at Samantha’s feet, which swelled out of and over her flat-heeled shoes. “Sweetheart, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m fine,” she said, but let him lead her on a path toward the side of the house, presumably to the back patio. “Have Aaron show you around the house, Fleur,” Samantha called back over her shoulder.
“I don’t need a tour,” Samantha protested, but no one was listening to her.
“Get that cooler in the trunk first, Aaron. Fleur, open the trunk fer him,” Tante Lulu ordered. She was already engrossed in conversation with Aunt Mel about some upcoming baby shower as they walked side by side through a door on the ground floor verandah, behind the steps, where the kitchen was probably located.
Shaking her head, Fleur went over with the car key to open the trunk—no remote keyless system fo
r this vintage vehicle—but Aaron didn’t immediately lift out the cooler. Instead, he stood next to her, turned slowly to look at her, and then he smiled, which caused a dimple to emerge, on the left side only. A dimple! That was so unfair!
“Hi,” he said. That was all, but there was a whole lot of meaning behind that one word.
A weaker woman, with a different history, would have surrendered right then.
A girl who still believed in love would have melted.
But a female whose body had been abused by men for more than five years remained indifferent. She may have healed in many ways these past ten years in the convent, but that part of her life was over.
Time to halt this nonsense of Aaron’s.
“Why are you doing this, Aaron?” she asked.
“What?”
“Pursuing me. I don’t mean physically, like stalking. But you’ve made your interest in me obvious from the beginning.”
He didn’t bother to deny her allegation. “I think . . . I think I’ve fallen in love with you.”
“That’s ridiculous. You don’t even know me.”
He shrugged.
Time for the big tell. “I was a prostitute.”
He recoiled, almost as if she’d struck him.
“For six years.”
His eyes widened.
“I doubt if I can have children anymore. I certainly have no interest in sex.”
She could swear there were tears in his eyes, but he said nothing. And so she walked away, not toward the house, but away. Away, away, away.
And Aaron didn’t try to stop her.
There’s Divine Intervention, then there’s Tante Lulu Intervention . . .
Louise Rivard was the first to notice that Fleur and Aaron were missing. And so was her Peachy Praline Cobbler Cake. The others made half-joking remarks about Aaron and his talent for charming women, insinuating that he’d probably talked Fleur into checking out his bachelor pad in the garçonniére, and a lot more. She wasn’t so sure.
“He better not be hitting on our guest,” Samantha remarked to her husband. They half reclined on side-by-side chaise lounges, glasses of iced sweet tea in the cup holders attached to the arms. “I warned him to behave himself today.”