Irregularities.
The word sat there on the screen with a hard little pulse to it.
I called immediately. A receptionist with a warm voice transferred me to a woman named Yvette, who spoke the way people in legal offices do when they know not to say too much over the phone.
“We’d prefer to discuss the matter in person, Ms. Pierre,” she said. “But yes, it concerns documents related to your grandmother’s estate. Monday morning, if possible.”
I booked the appointment, hung up, and stared at my own reflection in the dark edge of the monitor. My face looked the same. Brown skin. Tired eyes. Hair pulled back in a low bun. But something beneath it had changed. A thread had been tugged, and I could feel the whole fabric of the past four years starting to loosen.
That night I took my grandmother’s recipe card out of the kitchen drawer where I kept it tucked between takeout menus and old coupons. The card was worn soft at the corners and smelled faintly, impossibly, like nutmeg. Odessa’s handwriting curled across the top: Lemon Pound Cake, don’t skimp on the zest.
I sat at the table with that card in my hands and thought about her house in Tremé. The crooked porch. The narrow hallway that always held heat. The way she used to hum while stirring gumbo, low in her chest, like the song lived in her bones. I had spent whole Saturdays there. Colette almost never came.
What if there had been more to the estate than my mother admitted?
What if “not much to speak of” had only meant not much she wanted me to know?
When I finally went to bed, sleep came thin and restless. Somewhere around two in the morning I woke with the distinct feeling that a door had opened in another room of my life, one I had walked past for years without touching.
On Monday I would drive to New Orleans to find out what had been hidden.
By then, I still thought the worst thing my mother had done was call the police on me.
I had no idea she’d been hiding something much older, and far more expensive, than concern.
Part 3
I left for New Orleans before sunrise on Monday with a travel mug of coffee in the cup holder and a knot under my ribs that had been growing since Thursday.
