A shotgun wedding? Oh, God! Rachel smiled despite her dreary mood. “There’s no fixing this, Granny, but bless you for being willing to set aside your biases.”
“Biases? Biases? I got every right to my opinions.”
“Why? What is it about the LeDeuxs that you find so repugnant?”
“I’ll tell you what it is. It’s that Valcour LeDeux and his father before him. Was a time when Valcour diddled around with Josette, Beau’s Mama, before the divorce. Not that he cared about her. She was jist one of a litter of girls he was fornicatin’ with at the time, and Lord knows, Josette allus was a flighty one. Broke up a marriage, Valcour did, and left Beau with neither a father or mother worth a plug nickel. All they did was drink and fight after that. Thass when Beau come to live with me.”
So that was the reason for all her hostility.
“They’re tomcats, them LeDeuxs are, allus looking fer new alleycats to poke.”
“Granny!” Rachel exclaimed. “You can’t condemn all the LeDeux because of one bad apple.”
“I can and I do!” Her grandmother squeezed her hand. “Does this mean yer gonna skedaddle back to Washington, cut our visit short?”
“No. No, I won’t do that,” Rachel said, taking her grandmother’s hand in both of hers and squeezing back. “The whole point of my coming here was to get to know you, my only family. I just got sidetracked a bit.”
Granny nodded. “Just one more thing, girlie, yer gonna end up with a big belly lessen you stop this hanky-panky with that Remy. Thass all I’ll say on the subject.”
“No, I won’t,” Rachel wailed and burst out bawling, because Remy can’t have children. Rachel hurt so bad, and she didn’t know how to make the hurt stop. It’s over.
Her grandmother reached over and took her in her arms, patting her back as only a mother or grandmother could do. “Now, now! Hush you, honey. It cain’t be as bad as all that.”
The problem was, it was as bad as all that.
It’s over.
More advice than Dear Abby
Rachel managed to reduce the puffiness in her eyes with some cold cloths and finally emerged downstairs a half-hour later, only to be confronted with thick black coffee and a plate full of fried bacon fresh from the slab, scrambled eggs and grits with two slices of buttered toast. Comfort food, her grandmother probably thought. But to Rachel it just looked like a monumental amount of food to get past the lump in her throat.
While she nibbled and gulped, Granny told her, “I forgot to tell you, Remy called for you five times this mornin’.”
“You forgot?” Rachel arched her brows in disbelief.
Her grandmother didn’t even look at her. She was busy at the sink, stirring beans which had been simmering slowly on the stove all morning.
“What are you making, Granny?”
“Black beans and rice. Same as allus on a Monday.”
“Every Monday?”
Granny nodded. “Black beans and rice is a traditional Cajun meal. The reason it’s served every Monday is ’cause Monday is laundry day. The hard beans gotta cook a long time, but they doan need no tending. So, the housewife kin do the weekly laundry without fussin’ over dinner.”
Peering out the window, Rachel saw fresh laundry on the clothesline in the side yard.
“Gonna cook up some collard greens with this leftover bacon grease, too. And bake some cornbread. Beau likes to sop up the drippings with his cornbread.”
“It sounds delicious.”
“Back to that Remy LeSkunk,” Granny said, resuming her earlier conversation, “I tol’ him you was ’indisposed.’ That means too busy to come to the phone, in case you doan know. I learnt that word from my soaps. Riva on The Guiding Light is indisposed all the time.”
Granny and her soaps! The homemaker’s thesaurus! “Continue to say I’m ’indisposed’ if he calls again,” Rachel advised. It was as good a word as any for heartbroken.
Granny also informed her that her two friends from Washington, Laura and Jill, had called at different times the night before while Rachel had been out. “I tol’ ’em you went honky-tonkin’ with Beau. They was really surprised by that. Guess you doan do much honky-tonkin’ back in the city, huh?”
Rachel groaned. “Did you have to tell them that? Couldn’t you just say I was out?”
“Or indisposed?” Her grandmother grinned at her shyly, then ruined the pretty effect by spitting a stream of tobacco into the sink drain.
Now her friends would be grilling her for information, thinking she was having a wild good time here in the bayou. She wasn’t up to returning the calls if she would have to appear perky and happy when every breath she took reminded her, It’s over.
“Least I dint tell ’em you was off boinking with a lusty LeDeux.”
Practically choking on her coffee, Rachel responded, “Yes. Thank God for that.”
Deciding that work was the best antidote for depression, she called Charmaine to discuss a schedule for the wallpaper and painting contractors. They chatted about other ideas Rachel had for the spa. When she mentioned having seen Rusty the night before and his having been looking for his ex-wife, Charmaine asked hesitantly, “What did you think of him?”
“Gorgeous.”
“Yes, he is, isn’t he?” Her long sigh could be heard over the phone. “When I started going with him, he was a college boy, and I just won the Miss Loo-zee-ana competition. We were so young.”
“Sounds like you still have feelings for him.”
“Oh, I have feelins all right. The no-good lizard! Dumped me when I dropped outta college. Said that next thing, I’d be strippin’ like my Mama. Said I was a dim-witted floozie to think I could get by on my looks alone. Well, I showed him. I own two successful businesses and my own home. How dimwitted is that? And I never stripped for money in all my life, I swear.”
“I can see why you wouldn’t start something up with him again.” Charmaine’s vehemence was daunting.
“He is one handsome devil, though, I gotta admit that. But that’s water over the dam. How’re things with you and Remy?”
“They’re not.”
“Oh? What did he do?”
“He didn’t do anything. He just told me something . . . something personal, which changed everything.”
“Isn’t that just like a man? They’re like ticking bombs, men are. At the most perfect moment, when women are swoonin’ with love, they’ll say or do somethin’ to ruin the magic. Happens every time.”
Yep. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Just suffice it to say that it’s over, before it began.”
After she hung up with Charmaine, Rachel called the contractor who was to install Remy’s skylight, the craftsman who was to construct some of the built-in dressers and storage areas, the plumber who would install the bathroom fixtures, the tile man doing the bathroom walls and floor, and the seamstress who was working on the drapes. Once she knew their schedules, she took a deep breath and called Remy’s number, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t be home.
He wasn’t.
She left a coldly voiced message on his machine informing him when the people would be there to work and insisting that he be nowhere in sight when she arrived to check over the end results. If he showed up, she swore she would ditch the project altogether.
Tears welled in Rachel’s eyes when she hung up the phone. She hadn’t actually talked to Remy, nothing new had happened, but it felt as if she’d pounded one more nail into the coffin that represented their relationship—or non-relationship.
When she went out on the porch, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, she noticed Granny and Beau working in the vegetable garden. Their hoes and rakes were loosening up the soil which had been moistened by a cloudburst of hard rain an hour earlier. A clod buster, as Granny referred to the hard rains which came suddenly in this humid climate, then dried up just as fast.
“Could you use some help?” Rachel asked as she walked up to the penned area.
Granny leane
d against the handle of a rake and wheezed from her exertions. “Can you lift a hoe?”
A wave of guilt rippled over Rachel that she hadn’t noticed how hard her grandmother worked, not just today with the cooking, laundry and gardening, but every day. Nor had Rachel offered to help before. She felt especially guilty when she noticed the liver spots that marked the skin on her hands and bare arms in her short-sleeved house dress— “Flowers of Death,” some people called them. When had she forgotten that the primary purpose of her trip to Louisiana had been to bond with her grandmother? What better way to bond than help lift her load of work?
“I can learn,” Rachel said determinedly.
“You’ll be sorry,” Beau grumbled. “Pretty soon Granny’ll be ropin’ you into other jobs. Like butcherin’ hogs and pluckin’ dead chickens.”
“Oh, shush yerself, boy,” Granny said, spitting into the dirt. “You ain’t as overworked as you think you are.”
“I jist wish Rachel would stay here for awhile longer, ’til Christmas at least soze I could go to Florida and do my thing for a bit. Cain’t leave you here alone, Granny.”
“I doan need no babysitter,” Granny snarled at Beau, just before she warned Rachel, “Doan ask.”
“Florida?” Rachel asked, ignoring the warning.
“Yep, thass where some of the best professional wrestling schools is. The Funkin’ Conservatory. Bone Breakers. Mad Dog’s Palace. Skull Krushers. Me, my dream is to get involved with that there WWE, the World Wrestling Entertainment, and, damn, I know I would be good.” Beau wore a wife-beater T-shirt tucked into tight jeans today. Not a hair was out of place in his mullet. His arms and shoulders rippled with muscles from all the hard physical labor he engaged in. To some people, he might be considered an attractive man. She supposed those were some of the qualifications for a professional wrestler.
Rachel frowned, thinking over what he had said. “I thought it was called WWF.”
“Hah! Those tree-huggers in the World Wildlife Federation took ’em to court and won. Said they owned the letters first. Doan that beat all?”
“But wrestling. Of all careers to pursue, why wrestling?”
Beau lifted his chin haughtily. “Ain’t it jist like a city-slicker Yankee to look down her nose at us common folks. Football is fine and dandy, but wrestling is low class. I remember this lady—a Yankee fer shur—who come into a diner over in Houma one day. When the waiter asked her if she wanted butter on her cross-ant, she lifted her nose jist like this.” Beau demonstrated by tilting his face up to the sun. “She said, no, she’d rather have honey. Well, you know what that waiter tol’ her, dontcha? He said, ’Bee shit, coming right up.’”
Holy cow! What did I say to bring on this sermon? “Beau, all I did was ask you why wrestling? I never said anything about looking down on you. Lighten up.”
He ducked his head sheepishly, realizing he’d overreacted.
“Tell me about the wrestling,” she encouraged.
“I love it, pure and simple. My hero is The Rock, of course. I already got my persona picked out.”
“Doan ask,” Granny warned again.
But Rachel couldn’t resist. “What persona?”
“The Swamp Monster. Or mebbe even The Croc Rock, but I guess that would be too much like the real Rock. I’ll wear a crocodile skin over my shoulders and Cajun music will be my theme song. I’ll keep my mullet hairdo, of course, but mebbe I’ll wear a Daniel Boone-type hat. Not sure ’bout that yet. Ain’t that the most hellacious thing you ever heard of?”
“Sure is,” Granny and Rachel agreed at the same time.
“I already took some courses at the Louisiana wrestling schools. Now, I’m ready for the big time.”
“And you approve of this?” Rachel asked Granny.
“Hell, no!”
“It’s better than trappin’.” Beau raised his chin defiantly.
“You’ve got a point there,” Rachel said.
“No, it ain’t.” Granny shook her head decisively at Beau. “You get a steady income from trappin’. That wrestling business is too risky. Besides, you’d probably get dropped on yer head and be even screwier than you are now.”
“I ain’t screwy,” Beau argued.
“Beau, honey, last year you wanted to be a whittler. Now, you wanna be a wrestler. What’ll it be next year, a yo-deler?”
“A whistler? What kind of work can a whistler get?” Rachel was having trouble following this conversation.
“A whittler, not a whistler,” Beau answered with disgust. “Geesh almighty! What you must think of me to imagine I’d wanna work as a whistler! Do you think I’m gay or sumpin’?”
Right. Wrestling is okay, whistling is not okay. And what does homosexuality have to do with whistling? I think I’ve landed in a bayou version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The whole time they talked, they also worked, and it was backbreaking work, at that. The garden plot must be at least twenty by twenty, and the neat rows overflowed with lush staked tomatoes, climbing string beans and peas, collard greens, various squashes, onions, garlic, broccoli, cucumbers, asparagus, and more okra than any one person had a right to grow.
“Why are you growing so much okra?” Rachel asked.
“Why, sweetie, you cain’t live in Louisiana and not use okra in every other dish. It adds taste and acts as a thickener. Why, we’d no sooner give up okra than our rouxs or filés.” Rachel already knew that the Cajuns were famous for their rouxs, brown sauces, which were added to just about anything cooked in liquid. Filé or ground sassafras was also used as a thickener; it was an ingredient passed down from the Native Americans who’d lived here at one time. But okra? No way! It must be an acquired taste.
As if reading her mind, Beau glanced over and winked at her. “You get used to okra after awhile, ’specially if you got some Wild Turkey to wash it down.”
Granny reached over and swatted him on the arm. “I’ll give you Wild Turkey, boy!”
The phone rang inside the house and everyone jerked upright to alertness, leaning on the handles of their hoes and rake. Granny and Beau stared at Rachel, as if silently inquiring what they should do. Rachel’s heart just stopped beating for a moment, and a tightness lingered in her chest even after it resumed its rapid rhythm. She couldn’t speak.
Beau made a rough sound of disgust and jogged inside, saying it might be Mary Sue calling about their date that night. Mary Sue was the girl he’d met at The Swamp Shack on Saturday night.
Within seconds Beau returned to the porch and called out, “Rachel, it’s those two friends of yers. Laura and Jill. They’s on a conference phone to you. Are you here?”
She would have to be now since Beau had announced her presence loud enough for them to hear.
“You were supposed to say she was indisposed.” Granny shook her head and made tsking sounds at Beau.
“Huh?” Beau said.
Rachel took the call in Granny’s sitting room. “Hey, guys!”
“Well, hello, stranger,” Laura greeted her.
“What’s new, pussycat?” Jill inquired.
“Not much. I was just outside helping my grandmother and my cousin Beau do some gardening.”
“Gardening? You?” Jill laughed.
“Yep. And I’m thinking of shipping a bushel of okra to each of you.”
“Yeech!” they both said at the same time.
“We miss you,” Jill declared dolefully.
“Does Hank want his truck back sooner?” Rachel asked.
“No. He doesn’t even know it’s missing, hardly,” Jill answered. “He has a new hobby. Motorcycles.”
“Uh-oh! All that vibrating machinery and stuff. Bet your love life is interesting these days.” Rachel smiled to herself.
“Interesting!” Laura interjected. “You won’t believe what Jill told me they did after a biker’s meeting over the weekend. They call it Hog Sex, and—”
“That’ll be enough, Laura. Let’s leave some secrets to lure Rachel bac
k home. Are you coming home soon, sweetie?”
“In October, same as before. I really need this time with my grandmother. If it weren’t for her, believe me, I would be coming back today.”
“Rachel, what’s wrong?” Jill’s voice rose with alarm.
“Nothing. What do you mean?”
“You can’t hide anything from us,” Laura said. “We’ve been friends for ever. We can tell when something’s wrong. You sound as if you’re about to cry, and you hardly ever cry.”
“Oh, man!” Rachel took a deep breath to stifle a sob, then sank down to Granny’s upholstered rocker. “I’m in a bad way.”
“It’s a man, isn’t it?” Jill hooted, as if she’d just guessed the answer to some big puzzle.
“What’s his name?” Laura wanted to know.
“Remy LeDeux.”
“Oh, my God! I’m wetting my pants just hearing such a sexy name,” Jill said.
“Jill, you wet your pants at the wink of your husband’s eye,” Laura commented.
“Do not!” Jill countered. “But, Rachel, do tell. Why are you so glum if you’ve got this Cajun hunk, Remy what’s-his-name?”
“I don’t have him,” Rachel replied, trying to brace herself for the crying jag she felt coming on. She was unable to keep the tears from her voice, though, when she added, “It’s over.”
“It’s over?” Laura shrieked. “How could it be over when you didn’t even tell us, your best friends, that it had begun?”
Rachel would never tell anyone here in Louisiana what Remy had confided to her, but somehow it didn’t feel like a betrayal to tell these friends who lived so far away and would never meet him. “He can’t have children,” Rachel blurted out.
“I beg your pardon,” Laura said. “Since when is having children so important to you?”
“Do you love him?” Leave it to Jill to cut right to the chase.
“I did. I don’t know how I feel now.” She paused, then admitted, “Yeah, I love the jerk, but I’ll get over it.”
“Start over and tell us everything,” Laura urged.