“Huh?” Junior said. Birdie put a hand to her ear. Meaning what? She and Junior hadn’t heard the question? I’d caught it, loud and clear.
The driver cut the engine, slipped off the bike with a nice easy motion, stood it on the kickstand, and came our way. She took off her helmet and shook out her hair. Hey! This was Snoozy’s customer from yesterday, the woman who’d shown lots of interest in his arm tattoos but hadn’t ended up spending one red cent, if I remembered right. Now I got a good close-up look at her. She was quite a bit younger than Mama and quite a bit older than Birdie, which was as far as I could go on the matter of age. And, yes, I loved that hair: short and dark on one side, long and bright green on the other. Her eyes were green, too, and also bright, like she was excited about something. Those green eyes went to Birdie, made a quick examination of Junior, and settled back on Birdie.
“Hi,” said the young woman. “What you got there?”
“Catfish,” said Birdie.
“It’s so big!”
“We both caught it,” Junior said.
“Cool,” said the young woman. “You caught it from up here on the bridge?”
“Yup,” said Junior. “Using shiners for bait. That’s how we roll with catfish, right, Birdie?”
“Did you happen—” The young woman began, and then paused, her green eyes shifted slightly, like they were getting tugged by some thought inside. “Your name’s Birdie?”
Birdie nodded.
“Great name,” the young woman said. “I’m Drea Bolden.”
“I’m Junior,” Junior said. “Junior Tebbets.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Drea Bolden. She gave Birdie a smile, maybe bigger than the normal friendly size. “And what’s your last name, Birdie?”
“Gaux,” Birdie said.
“Ah,” said Drea. Then she turned to me. “Who’s this handsome dude?”
Finally! What a long time she’d taken before getting to me! But in the end, she’d come up big. I decided I liked Drea.
“Bowser,” Birdie said.
“Think he’ll let me pat him?”
“I’d bet anything,” said Birdie.
Drea laughed and gave me a pat. Always nice to be on the receiving end of a pat, although Drea’s pat didn’t do much for me. Some humans don’t have a lot of patting experience, patting you the way they’d pat a pillow, just doing a job. Drea’s pat was like that. But no complaints.
Drea glanced over the rail. “Did you kids happen to see a boat go by?”
“What kind of boat?” Birdie said.
“I’m not good with boat types,” Drea said.
“There was a thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser, maybe a little longer, a few minutes ago,” Birdie said. “Red with black trim. It said Cardinal on the stern.”
“But you, on the other hand,” Drea said, “know a thing or two about boats.”
“She should,” said Junior. “The Gaux own Gaux Family Fish and Bait.”
“Ah,” said Drea. She put her helmet on, turned toward the motorcycle.
“That a guitar in the case?” Junior said.
“It is.”
“You play?”
“Some.”
“Know how to read music?”
“I do.”
“And write down a tune if you hear it?”
Drea nodded. “What’s up, Junior?”
“I get these tunes in my head, but then forget them,” Junior said. “We’re putting a band together, me and Birdie.”
“Well,” Birdie said. “I’m not—”
“What do you play, Junior?”
“Drums.”
“My first guess,” Drea said.
“And Birdie sings,” Junior said.
“Well, I don’t really …”
Drea’s bright green eyes brightened a little more. “Tell you what,” she said. “I could write down one or two of your tunes if you drop by a little later, say around four.”
“Drop by where?” said Junior.
“I’m staying at the campground. Green tent by the pond.”
“Santini’s Campground?” Birdie said.
“You come, too,” Drea said, getting on the bike. “I’ll sing the harmony to your melody.” She cranked the motor, wheeled around, and rode over the bridge, turning onto the road that ran next to the bayou path and zooming off in the same direction the red cruiser had gone. Cardinal? Was that the name? So much to keep track of!
“What’s harmony?” Junior said. “Or … what’s the other one? Melody?”
Birdie shrugged. The catfish kind of shrugged, too, giving one more little tail flutter and then hanging limp from Birdie’s hand.
“Can I keep it?” Junior said.
“The fish?”
“Get in good with my dad. He’ll make a blackened po’boy out of it.”
“Get in good with your dad?” Birdie said.
Junior nodded, not meeting her gaze.
“Sure,” Birdie said. “It’s all yours.”
We took the catfish over to the shop. Birdie woke Snoozy. He weighed the catfish. “Fifteen pounds, six ounces. Not too shabby.” Snoozy packed the catfish on ice, gave it to Junior. Junior went home, and so did we.
Grammy was out sweeping the breezeway floor, sweeping it in a severe sort of way, as though it had gotten her mad.
“Looks like you’re feeling better, Grammy,” Birdie said.
“Wasn’t feeling poorly in the first place.”
“Um, good,” Birdie said. “Good news.”
“Not news where I come from,” Grammy said. “News should be new. Nothing new about feeling how you always feel.”
“Grammy?”
“Out with it.”
“What do we know about the Richelieus?”
“Never spoken to them in my life.”
“They were the other people who got broken into.”
“So I hear,” Grammy said.
“They just went out on their boat.”
“Thirty-five-foot cabin cruiser, twin Merc three-fifty diesels?”
“I thought you didn’t know them,” Birdie said.
“Lots of people I don’t know in this neck of the woods,” said Grammy. “But I know all the boats.”
“What does a boat like theirs cost?”
“Depends. New? Used? Condition? Rigged how?” Grammy shook her finger. “But always remember one thing.”
“I know, Grammy. A boat is a hole in the ocean into which you throw money.”
Grammy nodded. “Don’t you forget.”
“I won’t, Grammy,” Birdie said. “What do the Richelieus do?”
“Do?”
“To make money.”
“Couldn’t tell you,” Grammy said. “They live here but they’re not from here. Biloxi, maybe? Or is she from Cleoma originally?”
“That’s only five miles away.”
“Five long miles,” Grammy said. “And I believe he’s from New Orleans.”
“Their son, Preston, is quarterback of the Hornets.”
“So what?”
“Not ‘so what,’ Grammy. Whenever anyone says Hornets you’re supposed to say woo-woo.”
“That was stupid back then and it’s still stupid.”
“What do you mean ‘back then’?” Birdie said.
Grammy got busy with the broom, did some more angry sweeping. I’m a big fan of sweeping. For one thing, it can stir up smells you didn’t even know were there. In this case, I learned something brand-new and maybe a little disturbing: We had a snake under our breezeway. And not a small one, if you could judge by the size of the scent. I’m not a fan of snakes, and from one or two past encounters, I knew that they’re not fans of me.
“Think I don’t know about the Hornets?” Grammy said. “Sat in the stands for every game, four years running, back in the day.”
“You were a football fan, Grammy?”
“Pah! Hated the game then and hate it now. But your daddy was the quarterback.”
“He was?”
“Calm under pressure,” Grammy said. “That’s what made him good.”
“I … I never knew that. About him playing in high school. In fact, there’s so much I … I don’t know about him. How come?”
“How come what?” Grammy said. “And what do you think you’re doing, buster?”
Buster? I knew no Busters. What I knew was that we had us a snake under the breezeway floor at 19 Gentilly Lane, where I just happened to be in charge of security. That meant I had to start digging a hole under the narrow strip of trellis that covered the space between the ground and the breezeway floor—a nice, substantial hole that would bring me face-to-face with the culprit so I could let him know what’s what. Any job worth doing is worth doing well, as I’d heard Grammy herself say more than once, meaning if big chunks of lawn were flying around, it was all for the best, nothing to see here, folks, just a working dude at his—
“WHOA!” Grammy yelled. How amazingly loud she could be for someone so old and small! I looked at her in surprise, and found that she seemed to be looking at me, and in a fierce sort of way, like … like something was wrong. I couldn’t think what, so I got right back to work, using all my paws to make up for the lost time. What fun to have all four paws in action at—
“Bowser?” Birdie said quietly, her hand on my collar, not hard. “How about a little time-out?”
Time-out? That meant going inside the house and having a treat. Treat yes, in the house no. That was my position.
Not long after that—maybe pretty soon after—I found myself in the kitchen. We were sitting around the table, Grammy, Birdie, and me. They sat in chairs. I sat at Birdie’s feet, waiting for my treat.
“What has he done to deserve a treat?” Grammy said.
“He did come inside,” said Birdie.
“Dragged at the end of a leash.”
I wondered briefly who they were talking about, then squeezed closer to Birdie, just in case I’d slipped her mind. Grammy gave me a glance that might not have been her friendliest, then sipped her ice tea.
“As for your father,” she said, “the fact is, you’re only eleven. When you were ready, you’d ask. That was how I saw it, and your mama, too.”
“I’m ready,” Birdie said.
“Ask away.”
Birdie closed her eyes for a moment. I loved when she did that! It meant she was thinking her deepest thoughts. A good time for me to think my deepest thoughts along with her, which I did: Treats!
Birdie’s eyes opened. So blue today, like she had the sky inside her. She turned to Grammy. “Am I like him?” she said.
Grammy grunted, maybe in surprise, and shook her head.
“I’m not?” Birdie said. “Not at all?”
Grammy shook her head again. “Quite the reverse,” she said. “That there—‘am I like him?’—is just the kind of question he’d ask. Question number one always came first with him.”
“I don’t understand,” Birdie said.
“Point being it’s uncanny sometimes,” Grammy said. She sipped more tea, seemed to be having deep thoughts of her own.
“Um,” Birdie said, “I know he was small like me when he was a kid.”
“Who told you that?” Grammy said.
“Snoozy’s uncle Lem.”
“Lem LaChance? One-man revenue stream for every bar in town?”
“I don’t know about that, Grammy. But he told me he coached peewee football back then—”
“A disgrace right there.”
“—and my daddy was one of the smallest players.”
“At least he’s got one clear memory,” Grammy said. “Robert—that was your father’s name, Robert Lee Gaux—”
“I know that, Grammy.”
“Don’t interrupt,” Grammy said. “Robert didn’t come into his size until the summer before senior year at the high school.”
“Will it be the same for me?” Birdie said.
“Do I look like a seer?” Grammy said.
“What’s a seer?”
“Someone who can see the future.”
Birdie cocked her head, maybe checking out Grammy from a different angle. I do the same thing myself. “I think so, Grammy.”
“Ain’t no seers in this life, child, and don’t you forget it.”
“I won’t.”
Grammy glanced at her watch. “More questions? Snoozy’s shift is over in twenty minutes. And he better be wide awake when I get there.”
“Well,” Birdie said, “what about the medal?”
Grammy gazed into her glass, poked at the lemon slice floating in the tea. “No comfort there,” she said. “It’s just a thing.”
Birdie nodded. “But how did he win it?”
“Win? Win? He won the medal, if that’s how you want to put it, by getting killed in the line of duty. Chief presented it to your mama at the funeral.” Grammy rose, patted her hair in the mirror, and headed to the door.
“But what happened, Grammy?” Birdie said.
“I don’t understand you,” Grammy said, her hand on the doorknob.
“What happened in the line of duty?”
Grammy turned. “He was working on a murder case. I don’t remember all the details, if I ever knew them in the first place.”
“In New Orleans?”
“ ’Course, New Orleans. That’s where he and your mama lived in the beginning, and you too. It was only after that you came up here.”
“Did the case end up getting solved?”
“What case?”
“That last case. The one he was working on.”
“Most certainly not,” Grammy said. “Some might say what difference does it make. But I’m here to tell you—”
All at once the door opened from the outside, bumping Grammy’s arm, and in came Mama.
“Oh, sorry,” Mama said. Her gaze went to Birdie, over at the table, and back to Grammy. Mama’s face looked pale, and her eyes seemed very big and very dark.
“Mama?” Birdie said. “Is something wrong?”
Mama smiled, a stiff kind of smile, like she was making it happen. “Not really,” she said. “Not in the long term.”
“But in the short term?” Grammy said.
“In the short term,” Mama said, “they closed down the whole division, effective today. Can’t make money at these prices, not on the deep-sea rigs. The numbers are the numbers.”
Birdie rose. I rose, too, stood beside her. “What does ‘close down the whole division’ mean?”
Mama’s smile, what there was of it, vanished completely. She almost looked as though she was angry at Birdie, which made no sense. But humans didn’t always make sense, not in my experience. “They fired one hundred and fifty-three people,” Mama said.
“Including you, Mama?”
“Number forty-seven on the list,” Mama said. “It was in alphabetical order.”
SILENCE FELL IN OUR LITTLE KITCHEN. SO many different silences in life! This kind was all about waiting to see what happens next.
“How about a glass of tea?” Grammy said.
“Thank you,” said Mama, going to the table and sitting down, somewhat heavily, as though her legs had gotten weak.
“A glass for your mama, please,” Grammy told Birdie, who went to the cupboard and brought back a glass. So tea was the answer? Tea was happening next? I’ve tried tea cold and I’ve tried tea hot—both times on private excursions in the kitchen—and it did nothing for me. Water is the drink for me and my kind.
They sat at the table. Mama spooned sugar in her tea. She still looked pale, and now so did Birdie. Grammy’s face, pale most of the time, seemed to have plenty of color all of a sudden. She raised her glass, clinked it against Mama’s.
“Here’s to the oil business,” she said.
Birdie’s eyebrows—the tidiest little eyebrows you’d ever want to see—rose straight up, but Mama laughed and gave Grammy’s glass a clink in return.
“We’ve handled much worse than this,” Grammy said.
> “True enough,” said Mama.
“And come through smelling like roses.”
Wow! Something to look forward to! Were all of them going to smell like roses, or just Grammy? Right now, Grammy smelled mostly like dried-up old newspapers, Mama smelled like this special yellow soap she used to get the oil out from under her fingernails, and Birdie smelled of the partially chewed strawberry gum she was storing behind her ear for the moment. All of them smelled slightly of fresh sweat, as well, what with the heat and humidity we’ve got at this time of year. As for roses, not a trace.
“So,” Birdie said, “we’ll be all right?”
Mama and Grammy turned to her. “Count on it,” Mama said.
“But what about money?”
“Nothing for you to worry about,” Mama said. “I’ve already started putting my résumé out there and I’ve got a ton of contacts in the industry.”
“Okay,” said Birdie. Mama reached across the table and patted Birdie’s hand. “Except,” Birdie went on, “if the wellhead price stays low, who’s going to be hiring?”
“Ha!” said Grammy.
Mama gave Grammy an annoyed look. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” Grammy said. “The kid asked a shrewd question, that’s all.”
“So?” said Mama. “Is there any point in worrying her?”
“No,” said Grammy. “My mistake.” She tapped her glass with her fingernail. “Birdie?”
“Yes, Grammy?”
“Don’t you worry now, hear? Even if it takes your Mama a bit of time to find something new, we can rely on the business indefinitely.”
“The business?” Birdie said.
“Gaux Family Fish and Bait, of course—what we’ve always relied on, hell or high water. And of high water we’ve had plenty.”
“What does ‘indefinitely’ mean?” Birdie said.
“Like for the foreseeable future,” said Grammy. “And has anyone ever told you that you ask too many darn questions?”
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