by Lynn Shurr
“I’m sure Dean would let you use the Jacuzzi if you stayed here.”
“I’m fine where I am right now.”
Junior Polk, irrepressible! Another staircase at the end of the wing brought them down to the expansive den where Dean flicked off the television. “Braves are up by seven hits already. Want to see my newly installed outdoor kitchen?”
“Absolutely.” Junior followed Dean outside while Xochi rejoined Stacy on the porch.
“Cookie?” Wynn asked, rather crossly.
“Two cookies,” Beck reminded her.
“I forgot. I’ll get them right away!” Xochi hastened to the kitchen, raided an old-fashioned cookie jar shaped like chubby pig, a good reminder for her not to sample. Suspecting Stacy had Mama Nell’s recipe for healthy treats, she returned with four oatmeal raisins in hand for the children.
“So Junior was that distracting, huh?” Stacy teased.
“I had a couple of narrow escapes upstairs. He said I was ripe, and he still isn’t moving out.”
“Ripe, huh?” Stacy eyed closest friend. “Yes, you are. Ready for the picking. Consider that Stevie Riley is older than her husband, and they get along great.”
“Stevie was around thirty when they married, and I think there was only a two or three-year difference there. Both of them were grownups, not right out of college.”
Someone buzzed at the rear gate. “It’s me, Mrs. Billodeaux, bringing the dog back from his walk.”
Stacy stretched out a thin arm and hit the remote on a bamboo table by her side. The gate creaked open and a white puff of an animal raced inside, squeezed in among the gargoyles and lapped from the fountain. Thirst satiated, he bounded up the steps to snuffle for cookie crumbs, licked some off of Beck’s face before jumping up next to his mistress and giving her a canine kiss.
“Pathetic that I can’t walk my own dog at the moment,” Stacy said.
Xo squeezed her hand. “This time next year you’ll be doing that again—and pushing a baby carriage.”
Exploring the outdoor kitchen, Junior admired the well to boil crawfish and crabs, the vast grill, and finally a wood-fired pizza oven. “Something even my dad doesn’t have,” Dean boomed. “Let’s get those steaks and burgers started.” The two men headed for the indoor kitchen to retrieve the meat.
Stacy started to rise. “I should put a salad together.”
Junior waved her back into her seat. “I’ll do that. Dean, let me show you how to season those steaks.”
“That’s right, princess, the men are cooking tonight.”
In the end, they produced a delicious, simple meal of tossed salad, fresh slices of chewy French bread, plain burgers and carrot sticks for the kids and steaks with Junior’s herbed cheese butter dripping down their thick sides. For Stacy, Junior nuked a large baked potato and dressed it with sour cream flecked with green specks. “Mint, not chives, to help your stomach and give you some dairy. Try it.”
“Good.” Stacy didn’t eat much else no matter how often a worried Dean encouraged her to consume some red meat. He had to be content that his wife accepted a small bowl of vanilla ice cream for dessert while the children demanded chocolate sauce, sprinkles, whipped cream, and a cherry on top. Junior made himself a banana split and convinced Xochi to eat part of it.
She leaned away from the teak picnic table where they’d enjoyed an afternoon in the shade before the summer heat set in. “I intended to suggest we take the streetcar back to Canal. Now, we’ll have to walk again.”
“That’s fine with me as soon as we clean up. You and me, let’s bus this table. Let the chef and his family rest.”
Stacy had retreated to the lounger again and fallen asleep. Dean hushed the kids and whispered, “Unlimited Cartoon Network while Mommy sleeps. Quiet now.”
They tiptoed across the courtyard and slipped into the den. Soon he had his children settled in front the huge TV with bright colors flashing by. Closing the door on the noise, their dad returned.
“Stacy lets them do that?” Xochi questioned.
“Nope, but I’m doing the best I can to buy her some rest. Thanks for your help, Junior. You can season my steaks anytime. Wait. That sounds like something Uncle Brian would say. I mean you are welcome here whenever.”
“Good to know. Look, we’ll clean up and let ourselves out. Be with your family, bro.” They exchanged those manly back slaps while Xochi cleared the table.
“Hey, I’m doing all the work here.”
“Because you didn’t lift a finger up till now.” Junior filled his broad arms with plates as if he’d done this chore dozens of times. They finished the cleanup and wended their way back to the apartment.
The heat had ramped up, and they walked as people did on a hot day in the South, a slow and easy stroll trying to keep to the shady side of the street. “Sad to see Stacy so sick,” Junior remarked.
“Her idea to get the family completed fast. Two children is the deal, then Dean is getting snipped.”
“Brave man—but I’d do it for my wife if she had the same problem. Being an only child I’d sort of like to have a large family though.”
“Oh, I don’t think Stacy and I have much in common that way. Lots of babies would be fine by me,” Xochi said absently, her mind slowed by rich steaks, banana splits, and a warm afternoon.
“Good,” Junior answered with some satisfaction. “We’re on the same page.”
“I didn’t mean us, you and me!” Xochi batted away his arm about to embrace her shoulders and kept her distance the rest of the way home.
Chapter Six
Xochi woke Sunday morning and prepared to go to early Mass at St. Louis Cathedral. She thought about inviting Junior. After all, they’d attended church at Ste. Jeanne d’Arc together most of their lives, Junior in his mother’s arms and herself escorted in Sunday best dress by MawMaw Nadine who herded all the boys and her reluctant son, Joe, into a couple of the box pews and kept them quiet with her stern eye and iron will. Xochi recalled Corazon whispering to her son, “Do not disgrace me,” even though a crying room sat readily available.
The rest of the Billodeaux girls, Stacy, and Teddy, who’d been raised a Baptist until he joined the family, went to the Episcopal Church with Mama Nell who maintained that the children could make up their own minds about religion when they grew up. In her way, she was as adamant as her mother-in-law. Since Xochi had been baptized in the Holy Catholic Church and attended services with her late mother, Nadine made a good case for carrying on in the same belief system. Xo often thought she’d been traded in exchange for Teddy, but accustomed to the ritual, the incense, and the statues of bloody martyred saints in niches along the walls, she felt at home and nearer to her birth mother than anywhere else.
Xochi paused by Junior’s door and heard his rhythmic snores clearly through the frame. Turning the knob gently, she peeked inside to see if he’d awaken, but Junior slept on with his big feet poking out from Stacy’s old silver duvet and two pillows covered in pale gray slips propped under his head. The plethora of little purple cushions, some lace edged, that Stacy used to adorn the bed lay scattered all over the floor. Junior’s clothes from yesterday draped a girly bedroom chair. She knew if she shook him he’d be appalled at the mess. Every day, he made that bed, replaced each and every cushion, and put his dirty laundry in a bag in the closet well before Xochi appeared at breakfast. Well, no fancy feasts today. She’d let him sleep.
Xochi eased out of her apartment, walked along Canal Street, relatively quiet on a Sunday morning with no work traffic and few tourists yet awake. Turning on Chartres Street, she followed it all the way to Jackson Square, site of the oldest cathedral in the United States. The triple-spired edifice in several resurrections had survived fire, flood, a bombing, and Hurricane Katrina. Xo felt a kinship with the building as she’d survived the murder of her parents, the burning of her home, and later, the arrival of her auras. As far as supernatural powers went, the ancient church was said to be haunted by two benign priests
.
She stepped inside its cool, towering space, genuflected, and moved into a pew. Immediately, she fell to her knees and said her usual prayers for all the Billodeauxs, others who had helped raise her—Corazon and her husband, Nurse Shammy and hers, the traiteur Rosemarie Leleux—all those who played football and risked injury, and especially for her beautiful mother who had died before reaching the age of twenty-one. She prayed for Junior and asked what to do about him, too.
Because Jesus preached forgiveness, she also prayed for the soul of her father: gambler, drug-runner, kidnapper, debaucher of girls half his age. She’d learned these facts as she grew older from Corazon who had thwarted Tom’s first kidnapping and from Tom’s birth mother who had borne him at seventeen after a liaison with Bijou Billodeaux. When she was a small child, he’d showered his Xochi with gifts and hit her with his belt if she gave him any sass. Her mother catered to his every whim, probably for the same reasons. When Papi called her mama into the bedroom, she cautioned her child, “Play quietly. Do not cry for me.” If Bijou Billodeaux did not already reside in Hell, he certainly served an infinite sentence in purgatory.
Personal prayers done, she lost herself in the ritual of the Mass and left calmed, as always. Answers would come, Rosemarie Leleux said. For the convenience of city dwellers early Mass began at nine, not eight like in Chapelle. By the time Xochi exited into the sunlight and rising humidity off the Mississippi, artists had hung their works on the iron fence of the square. Street performers claimed their corners to catch the eyes of the churchgoers with magic and music, and the mule-drawn carriages lined Decatur Street to begin the first tours of the day. She cut through Jackson Square blooming with lovely but poisonous white oleanders, and crossed to Café du Monde for café au lait and beignets, choosing a small table near the sidewalk where she could people watch. New Orleans never disappointed.
Customers staggered in from a night on the town to the café that never closed. They took their coffee black with chicory. Whole families devoured mounds of the square donuts blanketed deep in powdered sugar. Xochi finished her order of three and asked for a go-bag of six to take back for Junior. She sipped the last drop from her thick white mug of milky coffee while waiting. Auras, pink and blue, green and orange, drifted by colorful as a circus parade until she saw one of the dark men emerge from the park, a squat, brutal-looking thug with the broken nose of a boxer. He pushed away a panhandler who might have been discouraged with a mere no. Her sack of beignets for Junior arrived, and she lost track of that blot of evil as she paid the waitress.
Still rattled, Xochi bought a Sunday newspaper from a kiosk and headed toward the safety of her apartment with all the locks and gizmos Daddy Joe had installed when his girls moved in, the latest being a camera hidden under the fire escape placed there after the attack on Stacy. She walked briskly to calm her nerves and throw off anyone who might follow. Though dressed modestly for church, without Junior’s escort she drew and ignored the usual comments about her fine ass, which seemed to sway no matter how she tried to suppress its actions. Maybe next time she would wake Junior and insist he go to church, get some religion before the football season started, as good an excuse for his escort as any.
When she reached Canal again, she wove in and out of the thickening clumps of tourists and reached her place breathless but safe. Still her hand shook as she dealt with the multiple locks. Glancing up at the fish eye of the camera that recorded her every move, she glimpsed a man across the street and turned her head to stare. Not the same person she’d seen in the square, but black of aura and soul. He quickly passed the gap in the buildings where her apartment entry lay. Her door finally yielded. Xochi locked it behind her and raced up the stairs calling, “Junior, I brought you beignets for breakfast.” More than anything, she wanted to hear his deep voice and move into the sphere of his comforting presence.
He stood in the kitchen mixing a bowl of batter. “Shucks, here I am making pecan waffles. I figured you’d gone to church and would come back hungry.”
Xo cocked her head. “Did your mom leave us a waffle iron, too?”
“Nope. I bought it when I got the coffeemaker. It has interchangeable plates. We can grill panini too. Doesn’t matter. I can freeze these, and we’ll eat them tomorrow with warm maple syrup. Let me at those beignets.”
He poured the batter into the heavyweight iron and shut the lid before he accepted the white paper bag, got himself a cup of coffee, and delved deep into the powdered sugar to fish out a square donut. “I should have known you’d go to Café du Monde. Mawmaw Nadine always took us over to Pommier’s Bakery after Mass if we behaved well in church.”
The sugar caught in the scruff of beard around his mouth, and Xo had the greatest impulse to wipe it away with her fingertips. Two days in a row now that Junior hadn’t shaved, new for him. “Yes, the carrot and the stick, or rather the beignet versus the tongue lashing if we acted up, especially in front of her friends.”
Junior’s grin grew around the rim of his coffee mug. “You never acted up. Made us boys look bad. You were always sort of—pious.”
“Pious? Me, no! Wait until you see me dance at Paco’s before you say that again.”
“I’m really looking forward that.”
“But, maybe you’ll come to Mass with me next Sunday—like the old days.”
Junior didn’t answer immediately, which surprised Xo as he sought ways to be near her. Finally, he answered. “I haven’t been to confession in a long time, and lately, I’ve been having impure thoughts on a regular basis.” His deep brown eyes left no doubt who figured in those thoughts.
Xochi’s face grew warm. She thought she covered it well by saying, “You have all week to give your confession,” and tempered that statement with, “Maybe I’ll have just half a waffle. They smell so good.”
“Yeah, okay, I’ll go.”
The carrot and the stick still worked.
Chapter Seven
The week dragged for Junior Polk even though he went into the training center every day. When the Sinners scheduled the first mini-camp, he planned to be at the top of his game. At least, he had the satisfaction of making sure Xochi had a good breakfast every morning before she left for work. He suspected she skipped lunch, so he began having dinner ready to serve when he heard her light steps on the staircase—red beans and rice, chicken enchiladas, rich rabbit-sausage gumbo, though he didn’t tell her the meat was bunny.
“You’re going to make me fat!” she claimed.
He answered with a shrug. “My dad loves my mama no matter how big she gets.”
“Does he use the old line about there being more to love?” Xo spooned up gumbo scanty on the rice.
“No, he says a big woman is warm in bed.” He’d embarrassed her and rushed to lighten it up. “When I was little, I thought that meant he didn’t need as many blankets on the bed in January.”
Xochi laughed, a sound that always struck him as rich as deep, dark coffee with a dollop of chocolate added. “Of course, there were those nights Papi turned down the air-conditioning way low and didn’t explain why. I figured out what went on about the time I turned thirteen.”
“None of us ever want to believe our parents have sex.”
“Without it, we wouldn’t be here eating gumbo together. You think it’s hot in here? Maybe I should turn down the A/C?”
She’d whapped him on the arm with her gumbo spoon. “Cut it out, or you’ll have to move.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Still that little bit of banter was the highlight of his week, and he cherished the small bruise made by the spoon.
Xochi didn’t seem to notice or care that he hadn’t shaved all week. Thursday morning, he sought out a black barbershop one of the burly linemen who bench-pressed with him recommended. The guy looked pretty sharp, so he took his advice, doubting that Brian Lightfoot would have any better suggestions. No unisex place, this. Call Compton’s old-timey. Aged men with grizzled hair and closely trimmed beards flipped though dated Ebony an
d Jet magazines while guzzling free coffee. “That Beyoncé, she a fine lookin’ woman,” they all agreed. The gathering appeared to be there for company since the barber took Junior immediately. He shaved away all but a thin rim of beard outlining his face, trimmed the mustache and left two strips on either side of Junior’s mouth giving his face more definition and a distinct edge.
“You want me to do something with yo’ hair, boy? How about a fade along the sides? Let it grown out a tad on top so you don’t look like a casaba melon. I pity the woman who had to give birth to that head.” The barber’s audience laughed on cue.
Junior went along with the joke. “Got to confess I was a twelve-pound baby, hard on my mama. Sure, do what you can with me.”
By the time he left with talcum powder on his neck and his face slapped with a stinging aftershave, a new man stared from the mirror. He picked up the beard trimmer recommended by Compton himself, went home to whip up a crawfish etouffee and astound Xochi. He did a big reveal, keeping his back to her when she bounded into the kitchen and asked, “What’s cooking?”
Junior turned and with wooden spoon in hand, posed against the stove, said, “Me.”
“I asked what, not who, but you look nice.”
Nice? Up until a minute ago, he’d thought great. Compton suggested he might want to leave a small, pointed goatee to seem more devilish. “The ladies love that devil look, uh-huh.” His cronies agreed like a call and response choir. “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” Junior turned down that idea, but wondered if he’d made a big mistake. Oh well, beards grew back fairly fast.
“Thanks. Salad is on the table, warm bread in the oven.” He added the crawfish tails to his roux, last minute, to keep them from getting tough. At least, Xo had begun to look forward to his cooking if nothing else.
****
Finally, Friday night arrived, and so did Connor Bullock in a spotless and sedate silver Honda Accord ready to take them all to Paco’s. Xochi inspected his choice of vehicle. “We shouldn’t take that to Paco’s. The place is deep in the Treme.”