The Best of Sisters in Crime (28 page)

“Oh,” Loubella
said then, just as her rear end touched her chair. “I forgot the cake. Would
you like some?”

“No, I just
couldn’t. Thank you.” Blanche listened to herself playacting that she wasn’t
unnerved.
Woman
, she thought,
butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.

“Sure you could.”
Loubella smiled. “Have some cake.”

Blanche wondered
if the other woman were mocking her little jelly rolls of fat. She really must
go on a diet, but then it always had been hard for her to deny herself anything
she wanted to put in her mouth.

“You’ve got to
have some of my birthday cake.”

“Your
birthday.
Why, of course it is. The Fourth. I’d
forgotten.”

And she had, but
she remembered now.

When they were
girls, even though Loubella was almost ten years younger than she, she’d never
missed Loubella’s birthday party. It was
the
event of the summer. Loubella’s grandmother, who was her entire
family, had taken her in when everyone else, for one reason or another, had
disappeared, would churn peach ice cream for the whole neighborhood, spread
tables with ham and chicken, once even saved to pay a three-piece band who’d
played for dancing in the street beneath Japanese lanterns until the last pair
of happy feet stopped. After that night Blanche had said to her mother that
Loubella was going to grow up thinking the entire country celebrated
her
birthday, not knowing it belonged to the
whole United States.

“That little
girl has no family but her Mamaw, Blanche, who gives her this one day.
Begrudging her that, child, you ought to be ashamed.” And Blanche had been. She’d
tried to make up for her jealousy by pretending to be the big sister Loubella
had never had.

She remembered
holding Loubella, a dark-haired little girl, a doll baby, balancing her on her
knees while she divided her hair into sections and braided her pigtails. She
taught her to swim at the edge of the river, along with a couple of other
little kids. She’d baptized them first, pouring water over their heads with a
handleless cup, making up the words as she went along.

“And the Baby
Jesus watch over you and carry your little soul straight to heaven without no
detours if you drown,” she’d said. Loubella’s brown eyes had grown wide like
saucers plopped into her face.

Yes, there’d
been a long time when she’d truly loved the girl Loubella, had mothered her and
smiled proudly at the mention of her name.

Now, from atop
her coffee cup, she slid a look toward the woman and felt a flash of regret,
then shame. How fragile friendship could be. How was it you spent years with
someone—your minds so intertwined you didn’t even need to pick up the phone but
could just transmit thoughts—laughed together, loved each other, and then
things changed? There was a misunderstanding, an angry word that grew into a
great wrong as you carried it around in your hand, blowing on it to give it
life until, like a flame, it had a will of its own. But it had been more than a
cross word, hadn’t it, that thing that had turned her love for Loubella to
hate?

It had begun one
July when Parnell, then Blanche’s husband and owner of River City, decided to
pick up where Loubella’s mamaw had left off and in a fit of flamboyance treated
his girls to a trip on a paddleboat all the way down the river to New Orleans.
He’d said that his girls didn’t have to work on the Fourth, but Blanche had
known that that was just his excuse to throw a party for Loubella.

Before that,
when Blanche had come back to Baton Rouge to marry Parnell and had found
Loubella in his stable of whores, it had made her sad for a bit, but then a
woman had to do what she had to do. For a while she and Loubella had carried on
together like they had when they were girls. They’d run into each other on the
back stairs, Loubella in a yellow silk wrapper that glowed like fireflies, and
then they’d sit right down on the steps, their legs tucked back against them
within their encircling arms, gossiping and giggling with no mind for the
passing hours, reaching their hands out and patting one another on a knee or a
shoulder, little butterflies of affection, easy, easy, old love.

But Parnell had
noticed, and he hadn’t liked it, not one bit.

“You don’t need
that whore teaching you tricks, Blanche,” he said. “Unless you planning on
turning pro.”

“Parnell! You
know Lou and I’ve been friends since we were girls!”

“I know what you
been. You think I didn’t grow up in this very same neighborhood? But Loubella
works
for me, woman. She’s my whore. Just ’cause
she don’t punch no time clock don’t mean she ain’t on salary. And the lady of
the house don’t fraternize with the help.”

Well. Blanche
hadn’t believed a word of that. She knew there was something more tiptoeing
around in Parnell’s big head. She also knew that he sampled the goods from time
to time, like a moonshiner sipping his own whiskey, and she guessed that
included Loubella too. But then, she enjoyed a taste of other sweetmeat her own
self now and again, so she wasn’t about to be calling the kettle black.

And every once
in a while, like naughty children ignoring all warnings, she and Loubella still
slipped off to have a good visit, and whatever quick and dirty passed between
her husband and her friend was no part of that.

But then there’d
been Loubella’s Fourth of July birthday and the paddleboat and—worse than
catching them in bed together, because what would that mean, after all, a
little roll in the hay between two people who trafficked in flesh—she’d seen
their eyes meet.

Again and again
throughout that afternoon, she’d watched that connection between them, as
simple and direct as plugging in a lamp. Their glances crossed and caught and
held, and Blanche had to turn her gaze away, for if Parnell had leaned over and
slowly licked Loubella’s naked eyeball, the act could not have been more
intimate. Everything else in the entire world, including her, oh yes, including
her, fell away. And Blanche, who had never had that kind of communion with
another human being in her whole life but recognized it when she saw it, hated
Loubella from that very afternoon to this.

So she’d
punished her, hadn’t she, she’d punished her good. Planted a load of dope in
her room, then called the cops to raid her own joint. It was hers by then, Aces
having already pulled the trigger that morning so long ago, pulled the trigger
that had blasted Parnell’s head and sent it rolling and tumbling like a child’s
ball down Front. She’d married Aces right after that, before they sent him up
for a little stay in Angola.

Now she looked
up at Loubella from the edge of her violet-sprigged coffee cup and all the
years fell away. There before her was the face of the little girl with birthday
candles shining in her eyes, the little girl she’d loved as her own. Parnell
had been dead for so many years, and he hadn’t been worth shaking a stick at,
anyway. What had all that been about? Blanche wondered what would happen if she
reached out and patted Loubella’s cheek and said, “I’m sorry I was so mean.”
Would Loubella understand that if she could do it all over again she’d do it
differently?

Loubella caught
her look and that old communion of spirits that ran between them straighter
than the string of a child’s tincan telephone told her what Blanche was
thinking.

She smiled and
her gold tooth twinkled. Blanche’s heart lurched. That tooth had always
reminded her of Parnell’s with his diamond, but no, no, forget Parnell. He was
what had brought her to this pass in the first place. Maybe
that
had been her problem all along, paying
attention to men, my God, there had been so many of them, when there were other
folks, plenty of other folks, her family, her children, all those women who
could have been her sisters, sitting right there in her face big as life—hell,
maybe they
were
life—and she had
looked right through them like they were water, past them to whatever man was
waggling his dick like it was a magic wand that would turn her into a fairy
princess with its touch.
Well, you been touched by them
wands plenty times, ain’t you, woman, and you ain’t no princess yet.
But here was Loubella smiling at her. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

“You gonna come
in the house and sample some of my cake or not?” Loubella was asking.

“Why, I’d be
proud to,” Blanche answered, rising from her chair and feeling like she was
floating. Something had been released in her, and she felt light and wispy as a
pink cloud. “And by the way, happy birthday, Miss Loubella.”

“Thank you, Miss
Blanche.” Loubella ducked her head as if she were suddenly shy. Why, yes,
Blanche thought. The little girl is still there. We can start over. It’s not
too late.

Blanche watched
Loubella bustling around her neat kitchen, and suddenly the two girls of long
ago had swapped places. Now Loubella was the momma, the momma Blanche had never
really been to anyone. For the small acts of mothering Blanche had practiced on
Loubella had not followed her into adulthood. Now that she thought about it,
she couldn’t remember ever plaiting her own daughters’ hair, though she must
have. And she’d certainly never taught Jesse to swim. Who had done all those
things—washed their clothes, cooked the countless meals her children must have
eaten—because indeed they had grown up. It all seemed like such a blur now,
those years of their childhood. She remembered a few snatches, but the pictures
in her mind were duplicates of the pictures she’d pasted in a photo album. The
kids standing in front of one of her new Cadillacs. All three of them lined up
on the porch of River City. Jesse in a new white suit for one of her weddings,
she couldn’t remember which.

But there were
no photographs of the three children sitting with Blanche reading or
storytelling or fixing a hem. Did their grandmother Lucretia have pictures like
that in her photo album? she wondered. Did people take pictures of a woman
serving dinner to her family?

Well, they ought
to. Not that she would ever be caught dead in one, but look now, here, at
Loubella putting food on the table in front of her. Those sturdy hands carefully
placing the little violet-sprigged dessert plate that matched the cup and
saucer, they were delivering more than a piece of cake, more like a gift of
love.

“Loubella!”
Blanche exclaimed suddenly, for her eye had finally caught the diamond sparkler
upon Loubella’s left hand, and her mind quickly jumped from its maternal
meditation back to the more familiar territory of earthy goods. “Good Lord have
mercy, where did you get that pretty thing?” And in an instant Blanche, with an
eye accustomed to weighing and assessing, had its value appraised as precisely
as if she’d examined it with a scale and a jeweler’s loupe.

“Isaac.”
Loubella smiled. “It’s Isaac’s birthday present to me.”

With that,
Blanche remembered why she’d come in the first place.

“Where
is
Isaac?” she asked, looking around the room as
if he might be hiding behind the sugar canister or underneath the table with
its plastic lace tablecloth.

“Oh, he slipped
out the back to get some Scotch. Said we ought to have a proper celebration and
I’d just run clean out. But I’ve got some bourbon. Could I sweeten your coffee
with a little nip?” And before Blanche could answer, Loubella had poured her a
generous dollop, filling her coffee cup to the brim.

“But I thought
you said he was here, inside. Didn’t you say that a little while ago?”

“He was. He’ll
be right back. Go ahead, Blanche, drink up.”

Blanche took a
sip and then another. The dark, sweet coffee and the alcohol warmed her blood
even hotter on this July delta night. She could feel it coursing right down to
her toes. And the warmth distracted her for a moment from the other questions
that had popped into her mind. Like, what did Isaac want? What was the deal he
had mentioned? Why had he given her Loubella’s address? And what was it between
them, anyway, his giving Loubella a diamond as if she were a decent woman?

Loubella
answered that last one even before Blanche threw it out.

“That Isaac, he
is the sweetest man. We’ve been keeping company, you know, for quite some time.”

“Well, I swear.
I never knew that.”

“Honey, there’s
lots of things you don’t know about Loubella. It’s not exactly as if we been in
touch.”

Blanche lowered
her gaze then. Here it comes. This wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d thought.

But in a moment
all was calm again. She’d mistaken a passing cloud for a storm gathering. And
before she knew it, Loubella was sweetening up her coffee again, and they were
leaned back in their chairs, Loubella tucking her feet up, her legs in the
circle of her arms, and it was like they were back on the service steps of
River City gossiping about folks like Parnell had never come between them, as
if his head had never rolled down Front.