Crescent City Connection (3 page)

She didn’t ask him how he got his money—he was a businessman with lots of investments. She didn’t know he had his own apartment somewhere else and a life she knew nothing about, until the day he died. Leaving her with nothing. Leaving their daughter with nothing.

“Why didn’t you know, Dorise?” her mother had asked. Her sister had asked. Everyone had asked.

But they hadn’t known either. “Not for sure,” they said. It wasn’t polite to bring it up. Dorise came from a churchgoing family, and the day Delavon came into the video store with his fancy clothes and his fancy car and his silver tongue, he told Dorise he managed a band she’d heard of, everybody’d heard of. Later, when she asked why he never took her to concerts, he said he quit that job to “take care of some other bi’ness,” and she believed him. He bought her a nice little house, or so she thought. After he died, it turned out they didn’t really own it.

Dorise was strong, though. She picked up and moved to Gentilly, taking Shavonne with her. She kept applying for jobs until she got one, and because she was such a hard worker, she did well. “Just be nice,” her mother said, “and people’ll be nice to you.”

Her sister said being nice to white people was bullshit, but Dorise enjoyed it. “Law, girl,” her mother said. “You always had a good disposition. Miss Sunny Smile, yo’ daddy used to call you.”

She did have a pretty smile, to this day. She had a big butt and big hips, and she sort of floated when she walked. Her husband had picked on her, told her she’d gotten fat and he didn’t want to “have nothin’ to do with her no more,” by which he meant sex (though what he did and what he said were two different things). But other people liked her. “You look like a nice person,” the older lady had said, the one who told her about rugs.

“I try to be,” she answered, and the woman smiled back. That was all there was to it—that and being careful, respecting other people’s things. She was doing so good she almost didn’t believe it sometimes.

She had a little apartment, and enough money to buy clothes for herself and her daughter, and her mother had given her her old Chevy. Half the women she knew—other single mothers— didn’t even have cars.

She didn’t need all those presents her husband used to bring her—stereo systems and bracelets and things. A good thing, too, because she’d had to sell themall. There was no one to be home for anymore. And Dorise liked working. She liked the people she worked with and she liked meeting the clients.

What she missed was having a man.

Sometimes she missed her husband, even though he had an evil mouth on him and knew how to hurt her feelings. But when they made love, there was nobody better, nothing sweeter.

“Mmmm-mmmm,” she told her sister. “Chile, I tell you.”

Lawrence came in to pick up the equipment. “Just about over?”

“Seem like it. Few people still drinkin’ coffee.”

“This some place, huh? How you like to live here?”

“Would you like to? Tell me the truth.”

“You kiddin’? I got three kids and four rooms—now what you think?”

“But I mean here. With all this stuff in it—seem like home to you?”

He laughed. “Well, I sho’ wish it did.”

“I rather have a nice place out in the East.”

“Well, I could see that, but in a pinch.”

They both laughed. “Okay. In a pinch.”

Cammie clicked back into the kitchen. “Hey, Lawrence. Y’all hungry?”

Dorise appreciated the way she always asked. She and Lawrence shook their heads. Dorise said, “I’m tryin’ to lose a little weight.”

Cammie looked at her watch. “Don’t you have to pick up your little girl?”

She nodded. “Just soon’s I finish here.”

“Well, go ahead. I can do the rest of those.”

Dorise thought Cammie one of the most considerate of the women she worked for, but Lawrence said, “She just don’ want to pay for another hour.”

She rattled off in her old Chevy, arriving five minutes before school let out. Once she had been twenty minutes late, and her daughter had stood alone in front of the school in the rain, hair soaked, clothes plastered to her body, tears streaming down her face.

But Shavonne had lied to make her feel better: “These ain’ tears, Mama. They just raindrops.”

That was worse than if she’d stamped her foot and sassed. Now they had a deal: If Dorise wasn’t there as soon as school let out, Shavonne went home with her friend Chantelle.

Today she came running out in jeans and a turquoise T-shirt, hair neatly braided and held by clips. She was such a tiny thing!

Since Dorise had gained weight—shortly after Shavonne’s birth—the idea of unpadded bones was inconceivable to her. Her own mama was heavy and so was her sister. Yet they had all been skinny little kids once.

She could barely remember her own thin body or her childhood. Even Delavon’s memory was fading. Dorise prided herself on living in the present.

“How was school?”

“Good. You know about Passover?”

“Somethin’ in the Bible.”

“They still have it, Mama. Lady come in and tell us all about it.”

“Well, ain’t that nice.”

“Some days be better than other days.” Dorise didn’t know if she meant school or her own state of mind. Shavonne had watched her father die, shot to death in their living room.

Dorise said, “Honey, you still dreamin’?”

Slowly, reluctantly, Shavonne nodded, but half-heartedly, only a couple of times.

“You don’t call me no more.” At first her daughter had screamed out in the night, terrified, desperate to be reassured.

“Ain’t no point, Mama. I know it’s a dream. Ain’t nothing you can do.” She was looking at her lap.

Dorise said nothing, wondering what all this meant. It could mean her daughter was growing up a little, getting over what had happened. But something about the way Shavonne spoke sounded so calm, so resigned, it worried her. She wasn’t sure why, but it gave her the creeps.

She said, “Now don’t you be like that. Mama be right there. Right in a minute. Promise me now.”

“Okay.” But she didn’t raise her eyes. She was such a good girl. Some things just weren’t fair.

“Tell you what. Maybe Chantelle like to come over. You like that, precious?”

The way Shavonne nodded was much like she had before, when Dorise asked her if she still dreamed—slow and not very convincing.

“What’s the matter, baby?”

“Nothin’, Mama.”

Chantelle’s mama said why didn’t Shavonne come over there, spend the night even, give Dorise a night off? And Shavonne seemed to like that idea—but Dorise had a hard time reading her these days.

The upshot was, Dorise found herself home alone, something that hadn’t occurred since before Shavonne was born, maybe. Nobody was there—not her sister, not anybody. She could take a nap if she wanted.

But Dorise wasn’t the napping kind.
I could make gumbo,
she thought.
Then we’d have some for the weekend.

I could call Troy.

Troy was a man she’d met at her sister’s house, a neighbor, with whom she’d had a date or two. There was something about him she liked.

Yeah
, said her sister.
Somethin’ hang down between his legs.

Dorise said, “How I know about that? I ain’t even seen what he got down there.”

She thought,
I might like to, though,
and the thought scared her a little bit. She hadn’t been to bed with anyone but Delavon in ten years.

I need to get to know him better.

She called him at work. “Hey, Troy. I’m gon’ be down at Jack’s later on.” A bar near her sister’s.

“I was just thinkin’ about you.”

“You were?”

“Whatchew want to go to Jack’s for? Why don’t I pick you up, take you someplace nice?”

“I cain’t be late, now.”

He laughed. “Dorise, you worry too much.”

They went out and had crawfish and beer. Before, they’d been to hear music, or to a party. They hadn’t talked much yet. She knew what Troy did, he had a good job driving a bus, and he knew she was a widow with a little girl, but he didn’t know about Delavon—or anything about her, really.

She was sitting there working on her crawfish, poking at the tail joints, delicately separating meat from shell, when he said, “You got pretty hands, Dorise. I been watchin’ ’em.”

She didn’t know what to think. “That mean you don’t like my face.”

He laughed. “You funny, you know that? I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like your face. But you got pretty hands, too.”

He reached out and grabbed one of them. “Know what I like? You don’t put all that polish and shit on ’em.”

Her sister did. Her nails were royal purple one day, pussy-pink the next, and half the time they had designs on them. Dorise giggled. “Little moons and stars—you don’t like that? Gold-colored fleur-de-lis?”

“I like nice brown hands. Brown like God made ’em.” He turned her hand over. “Nice soft pink palms.”

He rubbed her palm with his finger and it gave her a funny feeling, the sort she’d almost forgotten. But she was embarrassed. She pulled her hand away.

“Dorise, what you do with those hands?”

“You don’ know?”

“You never told me.”

She could hardly believe it. “I work for Uptown Caterers.” She said the name and everything because she was proud of it, like men were when they said they worked for Shell Oil or something.

Sure enough, Troy was so impressed he whistled. “Well, ain’t that just—you know—uptown.”

“They nice people. I’m real lucky.”

“You cook and everything?”

“No, uh-uh, I’m a server.”

“You serve the food?”

She nodded. “Yeah, uh-huh, I supervise the jobs, really. Make sure everything’s there, then I serve—sometimes I tend bar if they want me to. And I wash dishes and pack up—do just about everything.”

“You like it?”

“Yeah. You know, I really do. I love it.”

“What you like about it?”

She had never had anyone ask her that. She told him, feeling as if she were giving him part of herself. Nobody else knew how she felt in those places, how comfortable and happy, as if she were Mistress of the Manor—but somehow, not at all grand. Simply as if she were in control for once.

* * *

In Skip’s life, Errol Jacomine was the one who got away. He was a con man and a murderer, but so were lots of scumballs. Jacomine was something else, someone who treated human life like gardeners treat bug life. He had run not one but many a con, and murdered as often as he felt the need—or possibly the desire. She’d messed up a very good thing he had, and she knew it was only a matter of time until he came for her—or for someone she loved.

Every spare moment she had, she tried to reel him back in. The problem was, he’d come to prominence in a big way almost overnight. She’d been able to run down his early life in Savannah, Georgia, including a murder he’d once been accused of. Then he’d had a period as a minister with a minuscule denomination called the Christian Community, during which he made a big splash in Atlanta.

That one ended when one of the ladies of the church complained of sexual favors required as part of pastoral counseling sessions, and other ladies came forward in something resembling a stampede.

He was perfecting the art of healing in Atlanta—some said he could even raise the dead—and he continued that when the church took away his congregation and sent him to southwest Louisiana. Eventually, he started his own church, the Blood of the Lamb Evangelical Following, which was about the time Skip encountered him. As a minister with growing influence, he began to dabble in politics.

The Christian Community had kept poor records. All Skip had was this: In Atlanta, he had a family—in Louisiana, none.

After things blew up in her face, his wife, Tourmaline, had quite literally gotten out of Dodge. The Community had three missions, one in the backwoods of Honduras, and Tourmaline Jacomine had asked them to send her there. It was the least they could do to oblige. Mary Lou, the bossy secretary for the Community, swore there was not only not a phone, there wasn’t even a fax machine. Skip doubted that, but her efforts to find a number had failed.

The good news, the Community said, was that Tourmaline had only another year to serve.

After Atlanta, there was no record at all of the Jacomines’ grown son—not so much as a Social Security number.

Despite the advice of her therapist to get on with her life, Skip had gone over and over the same old territory. But there was one thing she hadn’t done. The only person back in Savannah who really remembered mischievous young Earl (as he’d been called before he was Errol) was his talkative—if totally deaf—aunt Alice.

“I’m going back to see her,” she told Steve.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What about Layne’s healing?”

“What?” But she knew what he meant—she was just astounded that he remembered, given the way he’d scoffed.

Layne Bilderback was the lover of her neighbor, landlord, and best friend, Jimmy Dee Scoggin, who lived in the Big House along with Kenny, Sheila, and Angel.

Jimmy Dee had had no one but Skip until his sister died and he literally inherited Kenny and Sheila. About the same time, after many years of solitude, he met Layne, necessitating much emergency education for the children on gay lifestyles. As it turned out, they were great fans of the relationship—two uncles were better than one, in their opinion. “Especially,” as Jimmy Dee put it, “when I’m one of them.”

Then came Angel. Everybody loved her, Jimmy Dee included. In no time, he was fond of saying he’d fallen in love with three people and a dog.

The problem was, Layne was allergic to the dog.

No remedies, conventional or alternative, had the least effect, but Skip had an idea—she happened to know a coven of witches who’d agreed to try their hand at a healing. Layne could have managed without her, but she had promised to take Kenny, who was just dying to see witches at work.

“Maybe I’ll stay overnight,” she told Steve. “You can take Kenny to the healing.”

“Is it okay if I wear a garlic clove?”

“Oh, forget it. I’ll be back.”

Aunt Alice liked her—Skip felt this was due mostly to the fact that she offered the simple courtesy of not treating deaf as stupid. And Skip liked Aunt Alice—she liked her exuberance and her courage. When she visited the first time, Aunt Alice had talked candidly about a relative she thought was dangerous, though everyone else in the family had decided to find him amusing— Earl Jackson, aka Errol Jacomine.