“You knew?” I finally breathed out.
Emory’s eyebrows pulled together, his eyes narrowed.
“Not until after she left. She wrote and told me,” Old Emory said. “And then she…”
He fanned the picture. The old eyes seemed so much older, worn down and thin. Instead of the picture of her headstone, I slid a few more pictures across, all of her in the prime of her dancing career. After a moment, when our eyes connected, it was like he had been staring at the stars, and somehow the hands of time had been turned back.
Turning to Emory, he cleared his throat and said, “You are a Nemours?”
“I am a Snow,” Emory said.
Old Emory nodded. “You are the spitting image of me when I was your age. I had a bit more meat on the bones though. You are built like her people.”
“Oui.”
“Are you wondering why I didn’t claim your father as my own?”
“Oui,” Emory said, the word nothing but a push of breath in the air.
Old Emory opened his hands. “I thought he would be well taken care of. I didn’t want to rip him from the only home he had ever known. I didn’t know if I could stand to look at him, knowing she wasn’t coming back.”
“He was well taken care of,” Emory said so softly that I had to strain to hear him. “He lived a prosperous life.”
“You?” Old Emory said.
Emory’s shoulders lifted and then sagged, a heavy breath blowing from his mouth. “I do not know.”
Then he started to cry. His thin shoulders shook with years of restrained sadness. I went to go to him, but Brando stopped me. Old Emory rose from his seat and wrapped his arms around his grandson, muttering things to him.You have a home.
“Come, Ballerina Girl,” Brando said, leading me back inside of the house. “Let’s go for a walk.”
* * *
Before we got too far, we stopped at our house on Snow. Brando ran in and found a pair of old sandals for me, and then we strolled.
We walked toward Front Street, toward my parents’ dance studio. Downtown Natchitoches was a quaint, French-inspired town with an array of small shops lining the main road. It was a peaceful place to be on a lazy Sunday, window-shopping and people watching. Brando and I stopped and got ice cream cones and two sticks of Roman candy for later.
“The town is erecting a statue for you, Ballerina Girl. And a sign.” Brando said this so casually, like he was telling me what I already knew we were having for dinner.
I choked on my chocolate ice cream, wheezing and making hand gestures. He thumped me on the back until I could breathe.
Waving my ice cream cone around, I spluttered, “What? Why?”
“The town is proud of you.”
“When did you find this out?”
“Not long ago. Marjorie, she contacted your mother because she was trying to get in touch with me.”
After the debacle with Nemours and my mother, I made sure that what the rat didn’t control, as far as business, Brando did.
He had become my gatekeeper. As my husband, he had the right to make any medical decisions, as well. Just like I had the right to make his. Whatever one of us had was completely in the other’s hands. After Brando had retired from the Coast Guard, I had learned that during his enlistment period, he had left me in charge of his medical care should something happen to him.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Your visit.” He licked his strawberry ice cream. “Took me by surprise.”
I cleared my throat, trying to get rid of the tickle. “When are they doing this?”
