Bayou My Love: A Novel (33 page)

She
turned away, staring out into the field. Although the humidity lingered, the
air was starting to turn chilly.

“My
mother used to tell me I should never get married,” Kate said. “Said I had
expectations of loyalty no man could live up to. Maybe I should take her
advice.”

“Mothers
don’t always have the answers,” I said.

She
stared out over the field, sipping her drink. It was impossible to read her
mind. Her face never revealed her thoughts. My head was fuzzy from the vodka,
and I wondered if hers was too.

“Do
you ever wonder?” she said at last. “Do you ever want to find her?”

I’d
told her about the letters, the journals I’d found in my grandmother’s closet.
When I was younger, I’d imagined meeting my mother again someday, considered
what we might say to each other. But at Vergie’s funeral, when it had occurred
to me I might see her there, lurking like a phantom, I’d panicked and run out
of the church and into a raging thunderstorm.

“Sometimes,”
I said. The truth was, I wished I didn’t want to find her. I wanted to not care
any more, to not wonder where she was, why she left, what she was like. But as
hard as I tried to bury those thoughts, they still gnawed at me, down deep
where I couldn’t always reach. I wished I could rip them from my head, like
weeding a garden, but it just didn’t work that way.

“Maybe
you should find her,” she said. “Just get it over with, and then you’d no
longer wonder.”

“Some
things might be better left unknown.”

“Imagine
my marriage with Ben if I hadn’t found out he was cheating on me. The unknown
never helped anybody. Trust me on that. I’m a scientist.”

~~~~

Later,
when Kate was sound asleep in the guest room, I slipped into my own bedroom
where Jack lay with his back toward me. I stripped out of my clothes and
settled into bed next to him. He rolled over and draped his arm around my
waist, pulling me against him.

No
matter how quiet I was, I always woke him.

“You
two have a nice chat?” he mumbled, half asleep.

“Yeah,”
I said.

“Figured
I should make myself scarce, given the circumstances with her fiancé.”

I
scoffed, my head still buzzing from the alcohol. “She’s hardly going to take it
out on you. You’ll like her.”

“I
don’t doubt that. I just figure right about now she’s wishing there were four
billion less of us fellas around.”

I
slipped my hand over his. “She liked you from the get-go, remember?”

He
muttered something I couldn’t quite make out. He was drifting off again.

For
a while I lay there thinking about what Kate had said. Why had I been so afraid
of bumping into my mother at Vergie’s funeral? For a ghost, she occupied an
awful lot of real estate in my mind. My memories may have been fragmented, but
it was shocking how being down here brought back so many of them. Now that Kate
was here, I kept thinking back to the funeral, the way the little gray-haired
lady had said I looked just like my mother, how she said she hadn’t seen her in
a while. It made me wonder where she’d seen her last and how long ago. She
might not be as far away as I thought.

My
stomach clenched, and everything inside me seemed to squeeze tighter.

“Jack,”
I whispered. “You still awake?”

“Hmmm,”
he muttered, slipping his feet over mine as his arm tightened around my hips.

“Do
you remember when you told me about the man Vergie was seeing before she died?”

“Yeah,”
he said. “George.”

“Do
you know his last name?”

“Don’t
remember off hand. Might have it written down somewhere.”

“Didn’t
you say he worked at the jazz museum?”

He
kissed my neck and said, “Go to sleep, cher. Let’s talk in the morning.”

“I
could go down there and look for him. That might be better than a phone call
anyway. If you went with me, would you recognize him?”

“Sure,”
he said. “But why do you want to see George?”

I
stared at the window. The moonlight sliced through the room, so intense I could
see the pattern of the lace curtains on the floorboards, pale blue and black.
My chest tightened, and I felt wide awake.

“I
want to ask him if Vergie ever told him about my mother.”

Bayou,
Whispers from the Past
will be out in 2016! Join Lauren’s new release
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