Acadian Waltz (2 page)

“Jacques
Mouton,” I shouted one more time as I slung my purse securely over my shoulder.
I made my way down the two four-by-four planks that served as a gangway until a
sudden motion from the chair caught my attention.

“Who’s there?” a
raspy voice called out from the deck chair.

I hopped off the
gangway and on to the deck of the boat. “Uncle Jack, its Nora.”

Peering out from
the side of the deck chair was a square, suntanned face with small, sky blue
eyes. He had sunken cheekbones, a long pointy noise, and silver whiskers
covering his chin and cheeks.

“Nora T?” He
jumped from his chair. He was dressed in a greasy pair of jeans, a grungy white
T-shirt, and no shoes. “What you doin’ out here so early, girl?”

“It’s after two,
Uncle Jack. How long have you been asleep?”

“After two?” He
pushed his blue cap back on his head, showing his sterling gray hair.

I motioned to the
ice chest. “How many beers have you had?”

“Enough to lose
track of the time.” He walked over and hugged me.

He smelled of
grease and sweat. His T-shirt clung to his back and I could detect the beer on
his breath as his lips brushed my cheek.

“I’ve told you
before, Uncle Jack, no more than two a day. It’s not good for your blood
pressure,” I scolded as I pulled away from his arms.

He nodded his
head and backed away from me. “I know, but it’s just too hard for me, child.
Old men can’t change their ways.”

“Old men had
better change their ways or they’ll be dead men.” I placed my purse down on the
boat deck, unzipped the top, and started going through it. “Go and sit in your
chair,” I ordered as I pulled out a blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope.
“Let’s just see how bad your pressure is today.”

Uncle Jack went
and sat dutifully in his deck chair, then held out his arm to me. “You don’t
have to come and take my pressure every Sunday, you know. I could go to that
free clinic in town.”

I rolled my eyes
at him. “You would never go to the clinic. You would just tell me you were
going.” I placed the cuff around his arm.

“You look more
like your mama every day,” he said as his eyes explored my face. “You have her
oval face, creamy skin, and her high cheekbones, but you got my blue eyes and
blond hair.”

“And my father’s
big mouth.” I placed the stethoscope to my ears and began inflating the blood
pressure cuff.

Uncle Jack sat
patiently waiting for me to finish before he spoke again.

“Your father was
a smart man, Nora T. You’re smart, just like him.”

I unwrapped the
cuff from about his arm. “Yeah, well, four packs of cigarettes a day wasn’t
that smart.” I sighed as I took in his blue eyes. “One forty-two over
ninety-five; borderline, but still higher than I’d like, Uncle Jack.”

“My pressure,
she’s fine.” He reached over and patted my arm. “Stop worryin’ ‘bout me.”

I rolled the
blood pressure cuff up with my stethoscope. “If I don’t worry, who will? Auntie
Elise has been gone almost twelve years now, and Nathan has….” I wanted to kick
myself for bringing up my dead cousin’s name.

He turned and
scoured the blue water of the lake behind him. “He’s been gone six years. Six
years since he drown in Katrina.” He shook his head, reliving the nightmares of
the past. “Seems like yesterday this was his boat. His problem, and now….” His
eyes found mine. “How’s your mama?” he asked.

I walked back to
my purse and put my equipment away. “Driving me mad. She wants grandchildren.
She says I owe her grandchildren.”

My uncle rubbed
the gray stubble on his face. “You do know that your mama is bracque…real
crazy, she is. She done been that way ever since she was a youngin’. Always
wantin’ the world, and tellin’ everybody how to get it for her. Don’t pay her
no mind.”

“Well, today she
really got to me.” I paused for a moment and looked out over the blue water of
Lake Pontchartrain. “Perhaps she’s right. I’m thirty now and I should think
about getting married,” I mumbled.

“What about
love, girl? Don’t you want to be in love before you marry someone?”

I faced my uncle
and shrugged. “Love would be nice.”

He zeroed his
blue eyes on me. “Nice? Child, love better be all you’re after, ’cause the rest
don’t work without it. Don’t be in a rush to marry, Nora T, if your heart ain’t
in it.” Uncle Jack laughed, his warm cackle that always entertained me as a
child. “You don’t want to end up like your mama, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” I
admitted with a smirk.

“So why you
listenin’ to her?” He paused and stared at me for a moment. “Anyways, I ain’t
known you to be serious about no beau.”

“Most men bore
me.”

“So you one of
those…those lesbots?” he queried.

“Lesbians,” I
corrected, shaking my head. “Mother asked me the same thing this morning. No,
I’m not a lesbian.”

“Now that’s a
damn shame!” a man’s velvety voice said sarcastically behind us.

I turned to see
the towering, muscular figure of a man, dressed in a casual pair of khaki
slacks with a blue knit polo shirt, make his way onto the boat deck. He had
wavy, black hair with a touch of gray around his temples, and deep brown eyes
with long black eyelashes. His suntanned, square face had a protruding brow
that only seemed to intensify the unsettling quality of his dark eyes, while
his thin, red lips appeared to be frozen in a perpetual smirk.

“Nora,” he said
in his smooth voice as he nodded to me.

“Jean Marc.
Didn’t think you would be out among the working stiffs on a Sunday,” I remarked
in a curt tone as the potent aroma of his woody cologne assaulted my nostrils.

He gave me a
thorough going-over with his disturbing eyes. “I always try to check on the
crews on Sundays. Make sure everyone is ready for a full week’s haul.”

“Hi there, Jean
Marc.” Uncle Jack moved forward and took the man’s thick hand. “Good to see you
back in town. How was your business trip, son? And how’s Ms. Marie doin’?”

“My trip was
fine, Jack, and Momma’s well.” Jean Marc shook my uncle’s hand. “She wanted me
to thank you for the crawfish pies you sent over last week. She really
appreciates how you and all the men have been looking out for her since my
father died.”

“That’s what we
do here in Manchac. We take care of our own.” My uncle smiled up at the man.
“How you doin’, Jean Marc?” he asked with a lilt of fatherly concern in his
voice.

Jean Marc placed
his hands in his pockets and stared down at the deck. “Things have been all
right, Jack. I’m just trying to keep the business going. I don’t know how my
father kept things afloat.”

“Yeah,” my uncle
offered with a nod of his head. “With them local shrimp farms and that crawfish
comin’ in from China, things been hard on the lake.” My uncle rubbed his head,
displacing his cap to the side. “But things been hard on the lake before, son.
Bound to get better.”

“Well, I’m
trying.” Jean Marc raised his brooding, dark eyes to me. “How you been, Nora?”

I stepped to my
uncle’s side. “Fine, Jean Marc. Just came out to check Uncle Jack’s blood
pressure.”

Uncle Jack
placed his arm about my shoulders. “She comes out every Sunday. She’s good to
me, she is.”

My irritation
escalated as Jean Marc’s eyes traveled down my body.

“I’m glad to
hear it,” he murmured. “You take care, Jack. I’ll be checking in with you again
on Thursday, once we get that new pump in for the fresh water holding tanks at
the warehouse. I’ll need you and LaSalle to help me put them in.” He gave me a
painful smile. “Nora,” he added and dipped his head politely. Then Jean Marc
quickly turned to go.

“God, I hate
that man,” I whispered as I watched him make his way down the gangway to the
dock.

“Shhh.” Uncle
Jack waved his hand at me. “Jean Marc Gaspard is good people. Kept me out here
shrimpin’ longer than any other company would.” He stopped and then tilted his
head to the side as he continued to study me with his curious blue eyes. “Why
you don’t like that man?”

“Because he’s an
asshole, Uncle Jack!”

“Well, then you
must know him better than me, ‘cause I never seen no asshole in that boy.” He
bent over and picked up a wrench from the deck by his feet. “His family may be
the best off in Manchac, but he’s good to his people here. Never been no highbrow
snob like your mama. When he went off to that college in Texas, he stayed away
a long time, but he never came back all high and mighty.” He paused and glanced
back down the dock where the figure of Jean Marc Gaspard was growing smaller.
“Now that his papa’s gone, he got lots to do, him bein’ Ms. Marie’s only
worthwhile son and all.”

“Where is Henri
these days?”

Uncle Jack
shrugged. “Who knows? Better away from here, that’s all I care. Never seen
twins more different than those Gaspard boys. That Henri’s been a peekon to his
mama and papa since he was a youngin’.”

I picked up my
purse and swung it over my shoulder. “Jean Marc is the one who has always been
a thorn in my side.”

“Since when?
Boy’s never been nothin’ but respectful to you. Been nice as pie to you all
your life, even when you was a peeshwank. He used to sit and watch over you. I
seems to remember you had a big crush on him. You even talked ’bout marryin’
him one day.”

“When was this?”
I questioned, acting surprised that the disagreeable Jean Marc Gaspard and I
were ever close.

“When your papa
used to bring you out here. As soon as you stepped from your papa’s car, you
went runnin’ to Jean Marc. Followed that boy all over the dock, you did.” Uncle
Jack pointed the wrench over at the dock next to the boat. “Jean Marc was
always hangin’ around helpin’ to fix engines and such. Anytime you came to
visit, he would volunteer to watch you so your papa and me could go fishin’. He
even taught you how to dance. You don’t remember that?”

I gave my uncle
a bewildered side-glance. “Dance?”

“The Acadian
Waltz. Your papa and me come back from fishin’ early one day and found you two
dancin’ on the dock with no music. Funniest damn thing I ever see.”

“I don’t
remember that,” I mumbled.

“‘Spect not. You
was barely out of diapers then. That boy always has taken a fancy to you, Nora
T. He liked you then, and if you ask me, he still likes you.”

I walked over to
the gangway made of two old boards. “He’s an ass. He’s always been short and
rude with me.”

My uncle cackled
as I walked down the gangway. “That’s the way his kind is,” he called behind
me. “They never know how to act ‘round a girl. ‘Specially a girl they fancy.”

“Fancy?” I tried
not to laugh as I peered down the dock. “The man looks at me with nothing but
disgust.”

“That ain’t what
I see.”

I turned back to
my uncle and frowned, wanting to change the subject. “No more than two beers a
day, Uncle Jack.” I waved my hand at him. “I’ll see you next week.”

Chapter 2

Over the course
of the next few weeks, Mother began arranging meetings for me with a heavily
screened line of suitors. An endless number of boring lunches with attorneys,
engineers, bankers, and accountants began to clog my calendar. They were either
divorced or never married, and they all looked at me with the eye of a butcher
trying to discern which cut of meat from my hearty loins would taste the best.
But a few of these casual lunchtime encounters led to dinner dates, where the
real task of weeding the worthy from the worthless took place.

In my rapid-fire
dating experience, perpetuated by my mother’s frenzied excitement for
grandchildren, I was dined from one end of the city to the other. Fed sumptuous
grilled oysters by a rather portly tax accountant from Shreveport, to catfish
fried in four-day-old oil and served on newspaper by a personal injury attorney
on the lookout for wife number three.

I was courteous
to each man, but I’m sure I lacked the bubbly charm they wished to see when
meeting someone with long blond hair, blue eyes, and a well-endowed figure.
Actually, most of my life had been filled with the subtle irony that my looks
never matched my inquisitive, quiet, and academic nature. Mother used to say I
was a librarian trapped in a stripper’s body.

God knows how
many mindless dates I had endured since my mother first impressed on me her
need for the patter of little feet. But one evening, the prospect of finding
Mr. Right for my mother suddenly took a turn for the better.

I was dining
with a witless diamond dealer from New York that Lou had been forced to set me
up with, when over the course of some poached salmon at a small bistro in the
French Quarter, my date began to grab at his throat and turn a rather unusual
shade of pink. Being a physical therapist, I went into full emergency mode,
called for the waiter to dial 911, and helped my date stay calm until the
rescue unit appeared.

An hour later, I
was waiting in the emergency room at University Hospital when I was approached
by a tall, slender, dark-haired man wearing a long white coat, and calling
himself Dr. John Blessing.

“Your boyfriend
had an allergic reaction to the shellfish stuffed into his salmon, Ms.….” He
looked me over with large gray eyes.

“Kehoe, Nora
Kehoe,” I stated as I stood from my chair to greet him. “And he’s not my
boyfriend. More like a blind date from hell.”

That made the
handsome Dr. Blessing laugh. “Yes, I, ah, have had a few of those myself.” He
glanced back down at the chart he was holding in his long hands. “Do you know
his family or anyone we can call?”

“I’m afraid we
never got that far, actually. I could call my stepfather in the morning. He set
us up. Maybe Lou will know.”

“Good idea.” Dr.
Blessing’s gray eyes held mine for a second longer than necessary. “In the
meantime, we will admit him overnight for observation; he can leave in the
morning if everything is all right.” He looked over my shoulder at the busy
waiting room behind me. “Perhaps you’d better head on home.” His eyes returned
to mine and I noticed the way the bright fluorescent lights overhead highlighted
the curve of his darkly shadowed jaw. “I’ll get security to walk you to your
car,” he offered.