Christmas in Dogtown (4 page)

~8~

The hairdryer’s buzz drowned out her ringtone, but Resa had it set to vibrate as well. The shaking danced
the phone
off the little
White
Castle
dressing table and onto the floor. By the time Resa scrambled for it, the call had gone to voice mail.

Jeanne’s voice was annoyingly chipper first thing in the morning. “Resa, where are you? I can see out the back window there are people already lined up at Madere’s and Emile isn’t answering his home phone or the store. He’s probably on his way, honey, but could you run over and open for him? Stop by tonight for dinner, why don’t you, and bring
Chandler
?”

Yeah, well, she had the impression Chan didn’t plan to go anywhere with her. The more she’d thought about his “I’m Dogtown” comment after she got home yesterday, the more ticked off she’d gotten. It felt a lot like an ultimatum:
If you aren’t Dogtown, you aren’t in my life. If you don’t want Dogtown, you don’t want me and I don’t want you.

Why did Dogtown have to be all or nothing? Resa stopped on her way out the door, surprised. She’d never thought about it, but that was the reason she’d tried so hard to get away. It wasn’t to escape her family or the meat business. It was Dogtown itself, or that mystical th
ing in the air here.

You couldn’t be
from
Dogtown and live somewhe
re else. You had to
be
Dogtown.

And why did it bother her so much that Chandler Caillou had written her off as
not
Dogtown?

Jeanne was too chipper early in the morning, and Resa was too damned serious.

She stuffed her phone in her jeans pocket, locked the trailer door behind her, and walked to Madere’s, using her key to let herself in the back.

Everything was neat, just as they’d left it yesterday when she helped close up after the disturbing kiss
in the truck
. That niggling wrongness tickled the back of Resa’s mind again, and she shoved it aside. Uncle Aim was just running late. He’d come breezing in any minute with a joke or a snatch of a Cajun ballad.

For the next three hours, she handled customers and in spare moments refilled the case from the big refrigerator in back. By noon, with no word from Uncle Aim, she gave herself permission to be officially concerned.

When her phone rang at 12:30 and his name showed up on the screen, she realized exactly how worried she’d been. The relief drained through her, turning her muscles shaky. She held the phone to her ear. “Where are you? Are you all right? You scared me.”

Uncle Aim’s voice echoed, tinny and distant. And serious. “Leave the store with your cousins, niece. Come to my house. Don’t tell anybody where you’re going, and do it now.”

Huh? “Why—”

“Come now, Theresa Ann Madere.”

“Wait…why…?” The connection broke.

Crap. Everybody in Dogtown was a freakin’ drama queen.

Resa lured her cousins Janelle and Darcy into Madere duty with a feigned headache and the promise that they could take home whatever smoked gar was left at the end of the day. She turned right at the crossroads bear
totem
and drove a winding set of backroads to her grandfather’s small woodframe house, set back from the road under a cluster of live oaks dripping Spanish moss.

Uncle Aim’s pickup sat in the drive, but he didn’t answer the door. Resa didn’t know whether to be pissed off or worried, so she settled for something in between.

“Uncle Aim!” She walked around the side yard and spotted movement from the densely forested, swampy thicket beyond. “Uncle Aim, is that you?”

If he thought she was wading into that muck, he was nuts. She had no desire to be Dogtown’s latest victim of Boars Gone
Wild.

A rustle of branches drew her farther into the thicket, and then she saw it. Except there were no bears in
South Louisiana
, were there?

She froze in place as it ambled out of the trees, swiping at a bush with a huge, clawed paw. Had Uncle Aim been killed by the bear? Had his accident finally happened?

Yet even as she asked the questions, she knew the answer. On some level, she’d always known, even if she’d chosen to disbelieve until someone shoved the truth in her face. This was her uncle, shoving. “Uncle Aim? Is that you?”

The bear sat back on its haunches and looked at her a moment before the air around it shimmered. Its fur and skin melted and reformed and changed in seconds until, instead of a bear, a white dog sat before her. Not a special, huge, magical white dog, but a mutt. It watched her with a steady intensity, no wagging tail or bark of recognition.

Yet she recognized it. Much as when she’d first entered the prep room at Madere’s, Rese’s mind buckled under an avalanche of memories. That dog had been around a lot when she was a kid. She and Chan
had
played with
it more than twenty years ago.

Resa and the dog stared at each other a long time before she turned her back and walked toward the house. “When you get ready to come in, I’m ready to listen.”

She was sitting in the living room, in her grandmother’s old blue armchair, when Uncle Aim came in the front door. He sat on the sofa facing her, his brown eyes somber. “I’m sorry I had to do it that way. There’s no time to ease you into it. We should have told you a long time ago. Your daddy wanted to but I kept telling him to wait until you were old enough to decide what you wanted. But time’s running out.”

Resa’s heart thumped as she acknowledged the doubts, questions, and fears she’d lived with her whole life—or at least her life in Dogtown. “Tell me now.”

“We are what the people around these parts call rougarou. We carry the genes of the shapeshifter.”

Resa nodded. The bear at the crossroads. The name of the community. She should be shocked, reeling, hysterical. Yet on some level, she’d known. She’d just been willing to ignore it until someone forced her to acknowledge it. “By ‘we’ you mean the Maderes?”

Uncle Aim leaned back against the sofa cushions and scratched distractedly at his beard. Resa bit back the urge to ask him about fleas. “The Maderes and the Caillous. Two parts of a whole. For seven generations, we’ve been here. Before the Grand Dérangement, we were together in
Canada
. Each generation produces a shapeshifter.”

“My father? Was he..?”

Uncle Aim shook his head. “The shapeshifter has to come from the union of a Madere and a Caillou—no other way. I was the firstborn of the last Madere-Caillou union. But there were no Caillou women in my generation, so I never married.”

Understanding slowly bloomed in her gut, and Resa had trouble breathing. “What happens if there are no more Madere-Caillou unions?”

“The rougarou dies out. We become like everyone else. We get sick and die like everyone else. Do you understand what I tell you, niece?”

Uncle Aim had been sick. Chan was sick.

“This is why everyone has pushed Chan and me together.”

“You and Chan are the first Madere-Caillou couple—the only one—of your generation.” Uncle Aim chuckled. “Oh, there was rejoicing in Dogtown when you were born, niece. After that whole string of boys, here finally came a pretty little curly-haired Madere girl, just six months behind Chandler Caillou.”

Resa couldn’t speak. “Is Chan going
to die?” Are
you
going to die?

“Eventually, but probably not right now. His daddy said he has a cold is all.” Emile Madere, sausagemaker and part-time shapeshifter, looked out the window, into the woods. “But we’re near the end of the cycle.
Six
ty years without a new union, and the magic dies.”

Chan’s words, the ones he’d spoken on that first day outside the
White
Castle
, came back to her.
Sometimes we’re born into situations
, he’d said.
We have to decide if we’re gonna be a part of it or if we’re gonna put an end to it
.

“He came back to be a part of it,” she whispered, fingering the end of her shoelace, where the plastic tip was coming o
ff. She’d have to buy new ones.

Damn it. They’d put it all on her. Whether it continued or it ended. A ten-foot gar named responsibility sat on her chest, and she had trouble drawing breath. Or maybe she was feeling trapped. Yeah, definitely that.

“Why did no one tell me? When does the cycle end?”

Uncle Aim sighed. “New Year’s Eve ends the cycle
, if no commitments are made
. You were so smart and determined to make a life in the city that your daddy and I agreed to see how things went for you. Thought if you found someone in
New Orleans
and were happy, maybe it was time to let the old ways die out.”

But she hadn’t found anyone—Jules had been a placeholder. She hadn’t even been all that happy. “Then why tell me now?”

A long silence ate up the air in the room. “I don’t want our traditions to end. Only the people of my generation know about it, and some of the young ones would exploit it—it’s why we don’t tell more than we need to.” His eyes were fierce. “I thought once
Chandler
came back he’d tell you, especially after you two got closer. But he wouldn’t. Stupid, romantic fool wants you to love him.”

Had that kiss on the levee been real, or manipulation
?
“He doesn’t love me.” He didn’t even know her.

“You sure about that? It’s a thing between Madere and Caillou, I was always told. Parts of a whole.”

Resa couldn’t look at him anymore. Just the shoelace. The sofa springs creaked as Uncle Aim got to his feet, and still she didn’t look up. “Better get back to the store. You know everything now. You do what you think is best. Maybe this year’s the time to let it go.”

The front door closed behind him with a soft click. Resa still couldn’t move.

~9~

Storm
clouds had threatened all day on Christmas Eve. Resa worked on auto-pilot at Madere’s, hauling out the last of the boudin for the special orders and sending customers home laden with boxes and bags. At noon, they closed for the holidays, with plans to open a few hours on New Year’s Eve for people to pick up party orders.

Resa spent the rest of the day in the
White
Castle
, stewing and ma
king
a few phone calls. She and Uncle Aim hadn’t said more than a few words to each other since the big revelation, and Resa hated the tension between them. She also resented the position she’d been put in. The whole future of the Madere-Caillou tradition had been set squarely on her shoulders and, by God, she should’ve had more than a few days to make a decision like that.

She had to accept her share of the blame—she’d been so adamant about never living in Dogtown, about how her life lay elsewhere, that no one had been willing to tell her the truth and risk killing her dreams. But they should have. Chan should have.

She’d done some research on the rougarou legends since her afternoon at Uncle Aim’s. Some people thought the “swamp beast” was a bear. Others, a dog. Parents used the threat of summoning the rougarou to scare their kids into behaving. Hunters told stories of seeing white dogs in the swamp just before someone died. Old-timers believed it was real; her generation thought it was an old fool’s tale.

Jeanne had cried when Resa confronted her, then begged her to keep it to herself. None of the cousins knew. The kids couldn’t find out. “I’ll support whatever you decide,” she’d finally said. Grudgingly. She wanted to be the grandmother of the next rougarou, which the firstborn of a Theresa-Chandler union would produce.
That
, Resa didn’t even want to think about.

Parts of a whole, Uncle Aim had said. Did
Chandler
love her? Could she love him? She didn’t yet, or at least she didn’t think so. Whether she could, whether she wanted to, what a future living with him in Dogtown might look like—those were the big questions she couldn’t answer.

Just before dusk, she pulled on a sweater and jeans, considered her tennis shoes with the unraveling laces before tossing them aside, and tugged on boots. Horrified at learning her daughter had sold her only winter coat, Jeanne had foisted a leather jacket on her and Resa pulled it on. An aromatic cloud of some middle-age-appropriate, matronly perfume wafted up as she zipped the front.

She parked at the edge of the lot at the little Paulina diner and walked the three blocks to
River Road
, where cars had already parked in long lines along the base of the levee and across the two-lane street. She climbed the embankment to the Madere-Caillou bonfire frame and sought Chan’s tall figure among the relatives of all ages already milling around in the semi-darkness.

“Merry Christmas, Theresa.”

Resa turned and looked up at steady, moss-green eyes and the quiet smile of a good man. One whose past and future was so tangled with hers that there was no untangling them without cutting the ties altogether. She understood that now. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Chan smiled—that same mixture of sadness and humor. “Because I don’t want you to stay just to keep it going. I don’t want you looking at me across the breakfast table in ten years, or five, or two, and feeling trapped. I don’t want you to wake up one morning hating me.”

She didn’t know if she could love him, but suspected she was well on her
way. She could never hate him.

Resa looked up at the bonfire frame, down the levee at the teepees lined up as far as she could see, everywhere but at Chan’s face. “I put my house in
New Orleans
on the market this mor
ning.”

He lifted her chin so she had no choice but to make eye contact. “Why?”

She wrapped her arms around him, and felt at peace when his slid around her waist and held her. Two parts of a whole. “Because a very wise man once told me that we’re born into situations and have to decide whether we want to be a part of them or end them. It reminded me of what I am.” What she’d always been.

“And what are you, Resa?”

Pulling away, she watched her cousin Mack hold a long fireplace lighter inside the base of the bonfire and set it aflame. Up and down the river, triangular bonfires sparked to life as far as she could see, a river of people with deep roots in this swampy soil, all waiting for Papa Noel to sail past in his boat as their fires illuminated his path through St. James Parish.

“I am Dogtown.”

The End