“I’m going to have nightmares,” she says. “Can you imagine me in a crown? I’d look like a French Quarter drag queen.”
Kendra is five foot eleven and the star of the varsity basketball team. It is safe to say she will never wear a crown. A championship ring, perhaps, but not a crown.
Kendra and I have kind of an unlikely friendship. She’s black and I’m white, mostly. She’s an athlete and I’m pretty much a nerd. But when she was little, Mamere used to watch her after school, so we always played together. When we got old enough to mind ourselves, we’d still walk home together after school. She comes over without even calling and doesn’t knock before coming in. I always say she’s the sister I always wished I had. Mandy loves that.
We get to the part of the day when I went out on the water and met that guy, Tru. I rush through the story and end with “Anyway, he lives in St. Bernard.”
She gives me one of her skeptical looks, with one eyebrow raised. “Mmm-hmm.”
“What?”
“There’s something different about the way you told that story.”
“What?”
“You like him.”
“I don’t even know him.”
“So? You like him. Maybe this is going to be the year.”
“What year?”
“The year you become a woman,” she jokes. I kick her in the shin. “Just playin’ with you. The year somebody comes in and sweeps you off your feet.”
I am not the kind of girl who has crushes all the time. When you spend as much time around guys as I do at the marina, there’s not a whole lot of mystery there. “OK, maybe. I’m interested. A little. Sort of. Don’t say anything to anyone,” I beg.
“Come on. Who would I tell?”
We don’t have any of the same friends at school, so it makes it easier for us to tell each other anything. Nothing we say to each other ever gets around, and that’s big. “So if this is going to be the year of love for me, what’s it going to be for you?”
“The year of victory,” she says with a laugh. I know she’s imagining a state championship, which will put her on the radar of college scouts. We both sit back and dream a little as a goldfinch’s song carries through the breeze, lightly scented with orange blossom.
The night before my birthday, Mamere and I are in her room. She is one of those real old-fashioned Cajun ladies who keeps her hair long, braided, and piled on her head in a bun. She says that in her day, a woman’s hair was her crowning glory and she would only let it down and show it off to her husband at night. Sometimes when I was little, I’d catch sight of her hair down, like in the morning when Mama would send me over to borrow a cup of milk or something and Mamere was still in her nightgown. It was like seeing a real live mermaid or something, breathtaking and rare. Now that we live together, she lets me brush it for her at night. It falls well below her shoulders. It looks like a waterfall in moonlight, silver and shining, long and flowing. I am brushing her hair, and I guess I’m humming because she says, “You’ve got something good inside of you that’s trying to get out.”
She has a way of saying things that I’m never sure if it’s her English or just her way of talking.
“It’s my birthday tomorrow.”
“Sweet sixteen,” she says. “I was your age when I met your grandfather.”
She tells me about when she was a girl my age, back in St. Martinville, and they used to have the fais do-do on Saturday nights. The girls would be on one side of the room and the boys on the other. There were some boys who were bold, as she put it, and they’d come up and ask any girl to dance. But Grandpere was different. He waited a long time and got to know her. He walked her home from school and carried her books and courted her. He serenaded her with his accordion, a song he made up. There’s a famous Cajun dance song called the “Evangeline Special.” But he thought it was too fast, so he created a sweet, slow one, Mamere told me. He called it the “Sweet Evangeline Waltz.”
“You’re pretty special, Mamere,” I say. “To have a song named after you.”
“I got you named after me, baby girl,” she says. “Nothin’ better than that.”
“Do things really change when you’re sixteen?” I ask. “I mean, is there something magical about that age? Other than being able to drive?”
She gets a kind of misty, kind of sad look in her eyes. “It’s a time to be careful, but not too careful. Reckless, but not too reckless. You realize that you have the power to do anything. It’s your choice. Maybe that’s what makes it magical. When you’re my age, you’re going to look back on this time as the happiest of your life.”
She hums a little tune. I rest my head on her shoulder, wondering when this magical life of mine is going to begin.
MY SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY starts with breakfast in bed: pain perdu — New Orleans French toast — with homemade marmalade and a cloud of uncertainty on the side. Something is nagging at me, like a pebble in my shoe. I would automatically think it was Mandy, but she’s not here — she went off to the diner with Mama first thing. Daddy’s been out shrimping all night and won’t be back until the evening. It’s only Mamere and me at home.
She’s sitting on the porch staring off toward the levee when I come out on my way to pick up my schedule for school, which starts Monday. “There’s a bad storm coming. Listen. No birds. That’s what happened before Camille.”
I vaguely remember a news report yesterday afternoon about yet another hurricane somewhere in Florida.
“Even the crickets. No crickets. Hear that?”
All I can hear are the eighteen-wheelers rumbling down Highway 23. “Sure, Mamere. Thanks for breakfast.” I kiss her good-bye, put in my earbuds, turn on my music, and walk off to school. Mamere has all these Cajun folk beliefs, like hens not laying eggs and cows not giving milk before a storm, and dogs howling when they see death coming down the road. There’s something to it, I know. I’ve noticed the pelicans disappearing before a big storm. But I’ve got too much other stuff on my mind to worry about it right now.
I think back to my conversation in the hammock. Maybe Kendra’s right. Maybe I really am ready for love. More than a sloppy kiss at a party or an awkward slow dance. Something real. An image drifts into my mind. Tru’s smile.
The image takes me so far away, I practically step out into the road without looking, an eighteen-wheeler whizzing by, its horn blasting me back to reality.
School has that first-day-back energy, even though we’re just picking up schedules and classes don’t start until Monday. There are people with new shoes, new haircuts, summer tans, braces finally removed. No one is in a uniform, and we can all see what we’d wear if we ever had the choice. I wave as I see Danielle, looking, as usual, like she’s wearing the clothes she slept in, a style I like but that my mother and sister judge her for. She’s carrying a balloon and something wrapped in tinfoil.
She runs up to me. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Evangeline. Happy birthday to you,” she sings in a goofy voice.
“Oh, thanks, you always know how to publicly embarrass me!” I say, unwrapping the tinfoil to find a giant cookie with a smiley face of chocolate icing.
“It’s from a roll of cookie dough from the freezer section of the grocery store,” she says. “I peeled off the wrapping all by myself.” We have an ongoing joke about my insistence on cooking from scratch and her reliance on food from boxes.
“I can tell that. Thank you! It’s beautiful. Mmm, just smell the preservatives!” I say. The balloon suddenly pops with a bang.
“I don’t think I got my twenty cents’ worth out of that balloon.” Danielle shrugs. “Sorry about that. Oh, and I almost forgot this.” She pulls something wrapped in newspaper from her purse. “Your present!”
I unwrap it, revealing a skein of cotton yarn.
“For your new hobby!”
I’ve taken up knitting to pass the downtime in the summer when I’m out shrimping with Daddy. “Just enough to make you som
ething for your birthday.” I pass her a gooey piece of cookie. “Everything OK?”
“OK,” she says. “She got up in time for the bus this morning.”
“That’s a good sign.” Desiree started a new job at the Home Depot outside Bellvoir, and Danielle has been holding her breath that it works out so they’ll have some steady income.
“Have you seen Evan LaSalle’s buzz cut?” she says, changing the subject. I get it. Sometimes she just wants to forget about it for a while.
We get in line in the gym to register, making small talk. Will Amber actually come talk to us? She completely dumped us at the beginning of the summer when she started going out with Taylor. Danielle and I don’t really belong to any group. We just ease in and out of the little clusters of people. Not outcasts, but not popular, like Mandy and her friends, who I can see from across the gym. Sort of in the middle, like Kaye Pham and Elly Reynolds, who are standing in front of us. There’s nothing particularly wrong about them, but nothing particularly right, either.
“I just had this weird feeling,” I overhear Kaye saying. “When he said he had boat trouble when we were at the Blessing. I just had this feeling he was with someone else.”
“Don’t be paranoid,” says Elly. “It’s a turnoff. You’re not going to get much further if you start acting needy. Did he say he’d call you?”
“No, he doesn’t have a phone. But he’s on JD’s soccer team. So I thought maybe I would get a ride up with Hip next time they’re having a game.”
“I’ll come with you,” Elly says. “That makes it seem less like you’re stalking him.”
“I’m not stalking him!” Kaye exclaims. “He could have said no when Hip suggested we meet.”
“I’m just kidding!” says Elly. “It’s going to be so cool when you get to vote for him on American Idol!”
A sick feeling trickles through me. Because I know who they are talking about: Tru. And he was with someone else. He was with me. I start to blush. Because I had been thinking for the past few days — more often than I’d like to admit — that maybe he liked me. Maybe there was something there. But he came down here to go out with Kaye Pham.
The conversation goes on, speculating on why he could have been gone for so long and whether he seemed as interested when he came back. I stand there in silent misery until they finally get their schedules and move away.
“What’s up?” says Danielle when we’ve got ours. “You look like you’re going to puke. Was it my cookie?”
“The guy I told you about the other day,” I say frantically. “From the Blessing? From St. Bernard? That’s who they were talking about. He’s going out with Kaye.”
“I thought you said he was cool.”
“He was. I thought he was.”
“Clearly you need to rethink that.”
“Why? There’s nothing really wrong with Kaye. I could sort of see how he’d like her.”
“She’s just so ordinary,” says Danielle.
“So am I.”
“Yeah, right,” says Danielle. “Superstar badass fishing champion. Fleet Queen.”
But that conversation becomes a black cloud hovering around me all day. So far, being sixteen is not off to a great start.
Daddy wears a serious expression as he sits down at the dinner table for my birthday dinner. “Just got off the phone with Cal,” he says. “They’re saying the hurricane that was supposed to hit the Panhandle is moving west. They’re projecting a Category Three.”
Mama looks annoyed, flips on the TV, and goes straight to the Weather Channel.
Projected to make landfall sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning as far west as the Mississippi-Louisiana border.
Mandy rolls her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
“This one’s no joke,” says Mamere. There’s a seriousness in her voice. The same way she sounded this morning when she was talking about the birds. When Mamere sounds like that, everyone listens. “We need to go.”
Mama does that thing she does when she thinks Mamere is overreacting. Her voice turns all high and sweet. “Mama, let’s wait and see. It’s Evangeline’s birthday. We don’t need to think about it until tomorrow.”
“Sitting on I-10 for eighteen hours Sunday, you’re gonna be wishin’ you thought about it tonight,” Mamere warns.
“I think Mamere’s right. I think we’re going to need to go,” Daddy says firmly. This is a surprise. Leaving means losing money. Losing money is what he always avoids. His face is grim. I know he’s serious.
We’re not leavers. We’re certainly not the type to leave early. I can’t believe we’re even talking about this. It’s my birthday. We haven’t had cake yet.
“If we’re gonna go, we should do it right,” Daddy continues. “We should get out of here by afternoon tomorrow if we’re going to beat the traffic.”
Mama sighs and frowns. “We’ll never find a place in Baton Rouge. Everything’ll be booked.”
Mamere tilts her head back like she always does when she knows she’s about to say something that Mama won’t like. It’s like she’s trying to get some distance between herself and the words that she knows Mama will hurl at her. “There’s no reason on earth we can’t stay by your cousin Kenny. Five bedrooms in that house.”
Mamere’s three sisters still live in and around St. Martinville — Tante Sadie, Tante Marie, and Tante Fifi. Most of their kids stayed in the area, but my mom’s cousin Kenny is a lawyer in Baton Rouge and we used to stay with him whenever we did evacuate. Mama hates it, though. She doesn’t like his wife and she feels poor in his house. She shakes her head. “I’m not showing up at that woman’s house so she can lord her money over me. I’d rather sleep in the car.”
“What about Fifi’s house, then? I’d like to see my sister.”
Tante Fifi has a little house by herself in St. Martinville. I’ve always loved to go there because I get to see the Evangeline Oak, this beautiful, noble, hundreds-of-years-old oak tree that’s supposed to be the place where the girl who inspired the poem “Evangeline” met her true love, Gabriel. We would go there when I was little, and Grandpere used to say, “You’re pretty special, your Mamere and you. You got a tree named after you.” I love St. Martinville, so if we have to go there, it wouldn’t be so bad. It’s only a few hours away. But Mama is digging in.
“No. If Baton Rouge evacuates, too, Kenny will end up at Fifi’s. Let’s just go to a hotel.”
“Hotels cost money,” says Mamere.
Mama glares at her. “I know that, Mama. But I’d rather drive all the way to Cel’s than end up packed in with Kenny and that wife of his.”
Mama’s sister, my aunt Cel, went to LSU and never came back to Bayou Perdu. She got a job in the accounting department of this fast-food chain in New Orleans, and when they relocated to Atlanta in the ’80s, she went, too.
Now she’s a bigwig vice president of something. She was married, but she and Uncle Jim got divorced a long time ago. Her daughter, Ami, lives in Washington, D.C. now.
The conversation goes back and forth. Whether to go. If we go, when do we go, where do we go? Is it worth it? Is it necessary? It’s an expense we can’t really afford right now.
“Wait a second,” says Mamere. “Aren’t we forgetting something?” She tilts her head toward me.
Mama goes in the kitchen and comes back a few minutes later with a glowing cake. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Evangeline. Happy birthday to you,” they sing. I huff out the candles, and there are a few half hearted claps.
Mamere slides the presents across the table and I open them half heartedly, too. A flip phone. I can’t believe it. Kendra has one, but Danielle doesn’t. Mandy has a phone, but she had to earn it working at the diner. I know it’s a stretch financially for my parents. I know exactly how many pounds of shrimp we had to sell to get that phone. My arms practically feel sore remembering hauling all those shrimp.
“You worked real hard this summer, baby,” Daddy says. “Yo
u deserve it.”
I get up and hug both of them. “Thank you,” I say. “This means a lot to me.” It makes me feel more like I’m on par with Mandy, who gives me a compact with a bunch of different kinds of eye shadow and blush in it.
“Just try it,” she says defensively. “That’s all I ask.”
It’s just like her to give me something she would like. But she did get me something. She’s trying, I guess. “I will,” I say. “Maybe just in the bathroom. With the door closed.”
Mamere has given me her copy of Evangeline, the family heirloom that I’ve always loved, with the beautiful gold-leaf letters on the front and the woodblock illustrations. “For a girl who’s got a poem named after her,” she says.
I grasp her hand. “Merci bien,” I say. “I’ve always wanted this.” I know it’s a signal that she thinks I’m really a grown-up now.
After dinner, I listen as Mama calls a million places between Mississippi and Florida looking for a hotel room. “None available? Thanks, bye. Dammit. Yes, do you have any rooms? Nothing. OK, good-bye. Unbelievable. The whole state of Alabama is already sold out.” Around eleven, she finally finds a hotel in some place called Bainbridge, Georgia, that still has rooms and free continental breakfast. It’s about five hours away if we beat the traffic. Double that time if we don’t. So if we leave tomorrow after we finish lunch service, we should be OK. Unless things change, we’re going. But we could wake up tomorrow and the hurricane could be headed to Texas. That happens all the time.
Before bed, I’m starting on a scarf with my new skein of yarn from Danielle when Mandy stands in my door in her sweatpants, musing. “Missing the first day of school is not bad,” she says. “What would be really bad is if this happened next weekend. It’s the senior ring dance and the Orange Queen court selection. If it’s bad and the electricity is still down then, they’ll have to postpone it.” She is deep in thought. I’m pretty sure she’s thinking about whether her tan will last that long or if the delay will mean she’s going to have to go up to the tanning salon in Bellvoir to refresh it.
Between Two Skies Page 3