Little Gale Gumbo (13 page)

Josie smiled awkwardly at Josh.

“Well, at least I didn't pretend like I knew where Maine was,” Dahlia said, glaring at Matthew.

Josie buried her hands between her knees. “It's freezing in here.”

“It's winter,” said Matthew. “Winter's cold.”

“We don't have winter in New Orleans,” Josie said. “We have carnival.”

“What's carnival?” asked Josh.

“Oh, it's so exciting,” Josie practically gasped. “It lasts a really long time, and at the end there's Mardi Gras and parades, and you get to eat lots of king cake!”

“King cake?”

“You've never had a king cake?” Josie looked at both boys, incredulous. “Well, it's like a big cinnamon roll with lots of colored sugar on top. And there's a baby hidden inside. A little plastic baby. And the person who gets the slice with the baby in it gets good luck.”

“
And
has to buy the next king cake,” Dahlia added.

“Well, jeez,” said Josh, moving on to his meat loaf, “that doesn't sound so lucky to me.”

“It is,” insisted Josie, adding proudly, “and I
always
get the baby. Don't I, Dahl? Every year.”

“Me and Matt are on the debate team,” Josh said. “It's a lot of fun. You guys should join.”

“Oh, not me,” said Josie. “I hate standing up in front of people and having to talk. I get nauseous just thinking about it.”

Dahlia grinned. “Matty's on the debate team?
That
I have to see.”

“Come to our meet next week,” Josh offered brightly. “We're debating Scarborough.”

“That sounds like fun,” Josie said. “Doesn't that sound like fun, Dahl?”

“A blast.” Dahlia stood up, feeling Matthew's glaring eyes still on her. “I'm getting more ketchup, y'all.”

There were several tables between theirs and the condiment station, and Dahlia took her time moving through them, careful to listen for the whispering in her wake. At the row of squeeze bottles, she picked up one, found it empty and tried another. When that one too felt light, she groaned and slammed it back down. “Son of a bitch.”

“It's in there. You just have to give it a good shake.”

Dahlia stepped back to watch a dark-haired young man in jeans and a tan chamois shirt pick up the bottle, give a single thump to the bottom with the flat of his palm and hand it back to her.

“You're gonna need all that to get the meat loaf down,” he said. “Trust me.”

Dahlia took the bottle with a shaky hand, noticing the way his hair feathered over his ears and curled around the nape of his neck.

“Are lunches always this bad here?” she asked.

“They're usually worse, if you can believe it,” he said. “At least around the holidays they drown everything in so much gravy you don't actually have to see what you're eating.”

Dahlia smiled. “My momma says gravy's a bad cook's cheap perfume.”

He laughed, revealing a pair of dimples so deep Dahlia swore the hairs on her neck straightened.

Their eyes met and held.

“I like that,” he said. “Your mom sounds like a smart lady.”

“She is.”

Dahlia wished he'd say something else,
anything
else, just so she'd have an excuse to keep looking at him. But then a voice drew his attention back to the tables. He nodded to someone over her shoulder.

“I should get back,” he said. “See you around.”

“See you,” Dahlia said, watching him disappear into the thickening crowd, try as she did to watch where he ended up.

When she returned to their table, Josh Moody had gone and Matthew was still glowering at his food.

“We thought you'd left,” Josie said, poking holes in her meat loaf with her fork.

“I was just making friends.” Dahlia squeezed ketchup over her remaining fries, glancing at her sister's plate. “Jesus, Joze, stop torturing the poor thing. Either eat it or let it die in peace.”

“Making friends, huh?” Josie said pointedly. “That's not what it looked like.”

“So who is he, Matty?” Dahlia asked, glancing over her shoulder.

“Who's who?”

“The guy at the ketchup stand.”

“I didn't see him,” Matthew answered glumly. “And don't call me Matty anymore. I mean it.”

Dahlia smiled. “Whoever he is, he's a total fox. And there was definitely something between us.”

“He's dating Janet Miller,” Matthew said. “Jack's been dating her for almost a year now.”

“Jack, huh?” Dahlia grinned. “I thought you didn't see him.”

Matthew stopped, caught. He stood up. “I'm heading to class.”

Josie scrambled to follow him. Dahlia took the long way around the cafeteria to drop off her tray, hoping to catch another glimpse of Jack, but he'd already gone.

“So how was your first day?” Camille asked when they arrived home.

Josie collapsed into a chair at the table, pulling her jacket around her, still frozen from the ferry ride back. “Fine,” she said quietly.

Camille cast Dahlia a suspicious look as she peeled off her coat. “Just fine?”

Dahlia shrugged, coming beside her mother at the stove and stealing a chunk of corn bread. “It was school. The food tastes like crap, the teachers have their heads up their asses, and the kids gave us dirty looks.”

“Dahlia Rose,” Camille scolded wearily. “And stop eating my corn bread, young lady. Dinner'll be in an hour.”

Dahlia tugged the comb from her hair and joined Josie at the table, hauling one foot up on the chair and balancing the comb on her knee.

“It's only the first day,” Camille said brightly, still studying Josie's sullen profile as she stirred a pot of red beans. “It can take a long time to get to know people. For both sides. Surely Matthew has some friends there he can introduce you to.”

“A few,” Dahlia said. “But he didn't seem very interested in introductions. He hung around us all day like a bodyguard.”

Camille smiled. “He's protective of you. I think that's nice.”

Josie's pout lifted briefly, her mother's observation filling her with an unexpected joy. Maybe there was some hope in the day after all.

“Better dress warmly for bed tonight.” Camille wiped her hands on the hem of her apron. “Ben says it smells like snow.”

“What the hell does snow smell like?” Dahlia mumbled through a mouthful of corn bread.

But Josie was already on her feet and down the stairs, pressing through the front door and standing on the porch, her nose in the air, taking long, deep breaths, determined to own the answer to this small island secret.

As if the simple knowledge of the smell of snow would be all it took to earn her a way into the elite island world for good.

 

Four hours later, the bedcovers pulled to her chin, Josie was no closer to being an islander. “They hate us.”

Dahlia rolled over and squinted into the darkness, barely making out the bump of her sister's reclining body on the other side of the bedroom.

“Who?” she asked.

Josie sniffled. “Everybody. All day at school and not a single person talked to us. No thanks to you.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You know,” Josie said. “Why do you always have to push people so much? So what if they don't know where New Orleans is? Big deal.”

“Oh, who cares if they like us or not?” Dahlia reached out and drew circles on the windowpane beside her bed where bursts of ice flakes rimmed the glass. “I certainly don't.”

“You don't have to care,” said Josie, “but I do. I want friends.”

“And I don't?”

“You want
boy
friends.”

Dahlia grinned at the ceiling. “You mean like Matthew?”

Josie sat upright, panicked. “You don't like him that way. I can tell you don't.”

“How would you know? I barely even know myself what I think about him.”

It was a lie and Josie knew it. She'd seen the way Dahlia acted around boys who intrigued her, and Dahlia wasn't intrigued by Matthew. Amused, maybe even interested, but not intrigued. Not like she'd been seeing that handsome Jack Somebody at the ketchup stand. Nothing like that.

Dahlia drew a lazy star on the cold glass. “Did you know that Matthew's mother left him when he was three years old?”

“Who told you that?”

“Matthew did.”

“He did not.”

“He did too. This afternoon on the boat, when you were in the bathroom.” Dahlia crossed her arms under her head. “He said her name was Leslie and that she met Ben at the beach here when she was on vacation with her family, and that she got pregnant, so they had to get married. He said she never wanted to be here, so she just split. Crazy, huh?”

“Yeah. Crazy.” Josie frowned into the darkness, deeply wounded that Matthew would share such personal information with Dahlia and not her. Maybe it wasn't true, she thought. Maybe Matthew had meant only to try to shock Dahlia. As if that was even possible.

“You didn't tell him about Daddy, did you?” Josie asked suddenly.

“Of course not. I can't very well pretend the asshole is dead if I talk about him, now, can I?”

“Don't say things like that,” Josie pleaded. “It's bad luck.”

“Only for him.”

“Oh, forget it.” Josie snuggled deeper under her covers. “I don't care what Matthew told you. It doesn't matter. He wouldn't like the things you like.”

“How would you know?” said Dahlia. “You're too young to know anything about what boys like.”

“I am not. And you saw Momma's cards last night. They said my love was already here. On this island. The cards didn't say anything about your love.”

Dahlia groaned. “Those cards are such horseshit. They say what you want them to say.”

“Fine. Don't believe them. But don't expect them to give you what you want, either.”

“I don't need cards or spells to get me what I want.” Dahlia rolled toward the window. She pressed her lips against the cold glass, drawing back to find the crooked oval her breath had left. “I'm not like you and Momma,” she whispered. “I have plans.”

Josie stared up at the ceiling, biting at her cheek. She wished her heart would slow down. She wondered whether a person could die from nerves. Tomorrow she'd ask Momma if she could start burning salt on the stove. That would slow the gossip. At least for a little while.

“You are right about one thing, Joze,” Dahlia said after a while. “They don't like us here—and I don't need a deck of cards to tell me that either. We're not like these people and we never will be.”

“But we have to be,” Josie said softly, feeling hot tears flood her eyes. “Because if we don't fit in, then we have to go back.” She wiped at her cheeks with the edge of her blanket. “And we can't go back, Dahl. We can't ever go back.”

 

Camille was in the kitchen, humming to Dinah Washington and dropping the last dollops of praline syrup onto waxed paper to harden, when she heard a gentle rapping on the apartment door. She opened it to find Ben in the hallway, holding out a stack of quilts.

“Here are the extra blankets I promised you. Sorry I'm so late with them.”

“You're not late at all,” Camille said, taking the quilts and holding them against her. “Has it started snowing yet?”

“Not yet, but it will soon. The quilts might have a little bit of creosote on them. I've been fighting with the flue, as you can see.” Ben gestured to his pants, the knees and thighs brushed with the same black streaks that covered his forehead. He reached self-consciously for his hair, trying to smooth back the thick waves. “I'm not usually this much of a mess,” he said. “The barber in town has been out with pneumonia, so I'm afraid all of us island men are a bit shaggy right now.”

“Well, I'd be glad to cut it for you, if you'd like,” Camille said. “I worked at a salon. I used to cut our friends Lionel's and Roman's hair all the time.”

Ben shook his head, blushing at the idea. “Oh, no, I couldn't possibly . . .”

“Of course you could,” Camille said, stepping back and waving him in. “Think of it as a thank-you for the blankets.”

“You mean . . . now?”

“Why not now?” she asked. “I just finished a batch of pralines, and I can never go to sleep before they cool.”

Ben glanced behind her.

“It's okay,” she said. “The girls are asleep.”