“No headstone for me.” I shake my head. “I want a Viking funeral.”
“A what?” Her nose wrinkles in the most adorable way.
“A Viking funeral. I want you guys to take my body and put it in Luc’s pirogue. Then set me on fire and push me out into the bayou. Whatever the flames don’t eat, the alligators will.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Course I am. Never liked the idea of people coming to visit the place where my corpse is rotting away beneath the ground or inside some tomb. When I’m gone, I want to begone. Nothing left of me but good times and good memories.”
She shakes her head. “But you’re not a Viking.”
“Not true.” I lift a finger. “Just last year I sent off a sample of my saliva to one of those DNA ancestry places, and the results confirmed I’m 36 percent Scandinavian.”
“Guess that accounts for your height and blond hair,” she muses before shoving her hands back into the box.
The last items she pulls out are two dozen photographs. Luc thought it would be fun to use the disposable camera his mother put in his Christmas stocking to document “a day in our lives.” He chose a day in late spring. We picked Maggie up early that morning, packed a picnic lunch, and drove Smurf to the swamp house.
On top of the stack is a photo of Luc, a lot skinnier and pimplier than he is now, lying on the boards of the front porch and dangling a raw chicken breast over the side while an openmouthed alligator waits in the bayou below to catch it. There’s another of Maggie, swatting flies and fanning herself. She’s wearing big, dime-store sunglasses and a pink tank top that emphasizes the sun-kissed lengths of her arms. And then there’s one of me. I look tan and fit, except for the dark circle under my left eye and the row of six stitches cutting through my right eyebrow.
“Were we ever that young?” Maggie muses.
I blow out a breath. “Doesn’t seem possible, does it?”
The photo Luc took of Maggie and me kissing has a lump forming in my throat. She shifts uncomfortably and flips through the remainder of the stack. When she’s done, she places the photos back into the cigar box, closes the lid, and sighs. “This was wonderful. Thank you both.”
“It’s yours, Maggie May.” Luc hitches his chin toward the box.
“You mean I get to keep it?”
“Everything but the Twinkie,” I tell her, knowing it’ll make her laugh.
We sit in companionable silence and watch the rays of the setting sun paint the sky in hot pink and periwinkle. A gust of wind pushes at the surface of the lake and sets the wind chimes singing.
“Why didn’t we ever come here when we were in high school?” Maggie says. “We always hung out at Audubon Park or Louis Armstrong Park. But this place is pretty as a picture.”
“It’s pretty as a picturenow. But for years after Katrina, it was a mess.” I leave out the part about this being the spot where Luc and I would meet when I couldn’t take spending another minute at home.
“But the Singing Oak was here back then, right?” she asks.
“The tree was here. The artist didn’t install the wind chimes until later.” And I can still remember the odd feeling that came over me when Luc’s mom emailed him the article about the art installation and we realized it wasourtree.
It was almost like fate. NotX marks the spot, butbig-ass black wind chimes mark the spot.
When Yard has satisfied himself that his tennis ball has been sufficiently mauled, he flops onto his side. Maggie scratches his belly with the toe of her shoe. “The music it makes is pretty,” she says. “But melancholy.”
“The artist chose chimes tuned to the pentatonic scale,” Luc says. “That’s why it sounds the way it does. And see that biggest one there?” He points to a huge black tube hanging from a branch. “It’s fourteen feet long.”
“I’m ashamed I’ve never been to see it before today,” Maggie admits. “Seems like something everybody who lives in New Orleans should make the effort to do.”
Luc shrugs. “When you live in a place your whole life, you tend to see less than the average tourist. I mean, ever been to the Tomb of the Unknown Slave or the Voodoo Museum?”
“No.” She shakes her head.
“Me neither,” he says.
“We should go,” I decide, realizing this could perfectly fit in withThe Plan.
“Now?” Maggie laughs.
