“I knew this day was coming.” Aubrey’s voice was more world weary than her nearly forty-year-old life would have indicated.
Even though I’d knocked at the door of their small cottage, I had come in before she or Fabien had invited me. Their tiny kitchen was sunny and inviting despite the close quarters. They’d been sitting and eating beignets and sipping coffee. When he saw my face, Fabien nodded in silent greeting, then took his drink and pastry and excused himself.
“Want a beignet?”
I nodded. Aubrey’s had always been my favorite. The ones they peddled to tourists in New Orleans had always been doused in too much powdered sugar for my taste.
She placed one before me with café au lait. Mam hadn’t let me drink coffee until I was twelve or thirteen, but when her back was turned, Aubrey had given me very milky coffee. It was only one of the hundreds of secrets we’d shared.
“I thought we shared everything, Bree,” I said. My voice was petulant even though I knew she’d been an adult and I’d been a child. The secrets had mostly gone one way. She’d kept my secrets. Maybe she’d been such an expert because she was already keeping her own.
“I always knew this day was coming. Twenty-two years and seven months is how long I’ve waited for the other shoe to drop.”
“For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.”
“What verse is that?”
“Luke eight seventeen.”
“You always had a near photographic memory. My mama did too. You’re like her in a lot of ways.”
“Why?” It was a one-word question that held a thousand. Over the last week plus I’d silently contemplated all those other whys and hows and whats and wheres and whens. One lie begets so many others.
Bree didn’t answer the question. Instead, she asked another.
“What’s going to happen to that pastor?”
Tears welled up, and I batted them away as fast as I could. I hadn’t majored in women’s studies and even without all those classes, I knew that the history of the world was men doing whatever they wanted with impunity.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I got severance, a good reference, and enough money to get started somewhere else.” I left out daddy’s obligation, his complicity.
“Somewhere else?”
“Louisiana’s lost its appeal. I was going to move to New York or Boston anyway. I’ll just accelerate my plans, I guess.”
“Are you okay with that?”
“Remember my wild period?”
Aubrey’s nod was swift. I’d confided all that to her when it had happened. She’s the one who’d reassured me that I wasn’t bad, even though I’d sinned for sure. She’s always had a huge well of compassion for human behavior. Now I knew why.
“They all threatened to bludgeon me over the head with it. Whether it was bad press or whispers. In a fight between Pastor Seth Collins and me, there was no way I could win.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ll be far more careful in the future. That’s all I can do.”
“I thought it would be the best thing I could do for you,” Aubrey said, finally answering my big question.
I shook my head like a dog with a bug in its ear.
“Growing up without my mother? You thought that was best?” I didn’t have to say more. She’d had a front-row seat to Mam’s treatment. To Michelle’s.
“I was always here.”
“Best how?”
“You’d have money and status. The best of everything. You rode horses. Learned piano. Went to expensive summer camps. Private day school all the way through. That fancy college up north.”
All that Daddy had bought with oil money. He could just as easily have paid for that while my bedroom could have been a few hundred feet from where it had been. I looked her in the eye and knew that money wasn’t the reason.
“What did you mean by status?” I asked, though before the words left my mouth, I knew the answer.
“You’d pass for white. Even with all the money in the world, there’s nothing I could have done to give you all the privilege that carries.”
I looked at the back of my hand holding the remains of the pastry. It was pale, lighter than Aubrey’s, but not much. The thin veneer of Cajun French history laid over the ugly sins of slavery. Gave lots of men in our state plausible deniability that didn’t exist in places like Mississippi or Alabama.
“Are you related to Mam?” Her maiden name was the same as Aubrey’s. French surnames were as common as June bugs, though.
“Probably same great-grandfather.” The ‘probably’ was there for show.
“Did you ever want to leave here? Work somewhere else?” I asked. Most families like ours didn’t have the same setup we did. Like the upstairs/downstairs thing had changed in England after the First World War, our servant system had dismantled around the time of the civil rights movement.
“My mother worked here and her mother before that and before that. It’s not a great legacy, but it’s the one I was born into. When I met Fabien, he wanted to leave here. We talked about going to Michigan. He even had a shot at an engineering job up in Detroit. I had to tell him about you then. Told him why I couldn’t leave.”
Fabien must love the hell out of her to work for my father. I couldn’t imagine love that unconditional. Aubrey had at least been lucky in that one way if none other.
“And Daddy? Did you love him?”
“I thought so when I was sixteen. He came here all bold and brash and Texan. He’d married your mother because it was the right thing to do. The expected thing to do. She was from a well-regarded family. Texas oil wasn’t. He got legitimacy, access to country clubs and important people. She got money.”
What wasn’t a transaction? I asked myself as I thought of all the money that had been deposited in my bank account yesterday.
“What did you get?”
“I was young. I thought he was the love of my life. I thought he’d leave his wife behind and we’d run off and, I don’t know, live in some kind of one-room love nest with you sleeping in a dresser drawer. It sounds stupid now, like a bad novel, but in my sixteen-year-old mind back then it was entirely plausible.”
“What happened?”
“James’ father came down. Margaret’s father did the same. They had a long powwow in the study. When all was said and done, he was recommitting to his marriage and I got to stay in the back house.”
“Did Grandad Charles and Grandpa Patrick make the decision about me too?”
Aubrey nodded.
“That was the deal. I was pregnant. My mother was living here. I had nowhere to go. I got kicked out of school when I started showing.”
“Kicked out?”
“I was a junior in high school. Girls in trouble were considered a bad influence on the rest of the pure ones.”
“I was born in May…”
“Four days after my birthday. I went to the hospital. Handed you over to Margaret that day. Your family arranged the paperwork. I signed it right after I got home from the hospital. That was it. Mama had that stroke right after and I just took over her job.”
“How did you do it? You know how hard it is for me when someone just mentions Christopher’s name. I thought for months I was going to die. It still hurts to think about the time we were together. Falling in love. Planning our future. It still kills me how easy it was for him to end things.”
Bree had a hidden strength I’d never considered.
“I had to be strong. There was nothing else to it. You were the highlight of my life. It had to be enough. I took care of you when they couldn’t. I tried to make up for your mother’s preference for Michelle.”
“You could see that?”
“She tried. I’ll give her that. She tried real hard. I didn’t nurse you. She gave you formula. Tried to bond. Maybe if I hadn’t been here like a specter, it would have worked better.”
“I’m glad you were here,” I whispered.
She stood at the same time I did, and I hugged her as hard as I could. We were the same height. Her hair was the same color as mine. When I pulled back, I stared openly. I could see all the similarities I’d somehow ignored. Her fingers had the same knobby knuckles as mine. Where my mother and sister were well-endowed, I was shaped more like Aubrey: thin, no hips, no boobs. I had my father’s eyes though. Ice blue where hers were some indescribable color between brown and green.
“I don’t think I can stay,” I said. It was the first time I was acknowledging the truth of the situation.
“I don’t think you should stay,” she confirmed. “Take it from me, it’s hard to outlive the past. You deserve a fresh start.”
“I have no idea where I’m going to go. I was thinking about law school, though.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t get justice. Other people should. I want to prosecute men for the crimes they commit. Someone has to hold them accountable.”
“I have a cousin in Atlanta, Albertine.” After Aubrey said it, her right hand swiftly covered her mouth. She’d breached the invisible class divide with those words. I was finding I didn’t care as much as I would have thought.
“Do you think she’d take me in?”
Bree nodded. “You two are a lot alike. Smart. Stubborn. Resilient. It could give you time to do whatever you’d need to do to get ready for school. It’s far, but not too. I’d know you were safe.”
“Can you call her? Albertine?” I asked, as a plan formulated in my mind.
“Whatever you need. I’ll do whatever you need.”
Those were the exact words I needed to hear.