“So you’ve noticed the…ahem…changes in him?” I give her the side-eye. “He’s grown into quite a piece of eye candy, hasn’t he?”
“Yes,” she agrees with an adamant nod, “he certainly has.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be encouragingmeto try things out with him,” I say. “Maybe I should be encouragingyou.” Although, the thought makes my back teeth ache.
“Oh, believe me, if he looked at me like he looks at you, I’d be all over him. Back in high school, the way his eyes followed you around a room was enough to make all the girls swoon. Nothing has changed.”
I squirm in my seat, feeling like such a fool for not seeing what everyone else saw.
“You…uh…you weren’t exactly his biggest cheerleader back in high school, if I recall. And you haven’t been all that welcoming to him since he came back,” I point out. “So what’s changed?”
She makes a face of regret. “I wasn’t the most confident girl on the planet back then. I was always worried about what people thought of me. I suppose because I never really felt like I belonged at Braxton Academy. We didn’t have the family name or the pedigree that most everyone there had. We were public-school kids who only got in because our great-aunt knew the right folks and paid our way. I was young and stupid and scared that the scandal surrounding Luc would somehow rub off on you, which, in turn, would rub off on me. When I think back on it now, it’s ridiculous.”
“But you seemed so at home there,” I declare. “You made friends so quickly.”
“I made friends because I was good at paying compliments and keeping my head down.”
“And now?” I ask, bowled over by her revelations. Is nothing what I thought it was? Can we ever believe our own eyes and hearts and minds? I’m beginning to have my doubts. “Do you still worry what people think of you?”
“Insomuch as I want to be respected for being a good person and doing good things,” she says. “But I stopped keeping my head down years ago. Luc was right when he said we get better with age. Smarter too.”
She’s quiet for a couple of seconds, then she adds, “As for my lackluster enthusiasm since he came back? Let’s blame that on my not being sure he was here to stay. I didn’t trust him not to ditch you for Cash should Cash decide to up and split one more time. And I hated the thought of you being hurt again by either of them. But over the months, that concern has lessened. And the simple truth of it is, he’s a good man, Maggie. Brave, kind, loyal. And he’s been in love with you since he was sixteen years old. So now I’m firmly Team Luc. I think you should give him a chance. What have you got to lose?”
“Oh, you know, only everything that’s great about the two of us if we try and it doesn’t work out. Only Cash’s friendship if he doesn’t approve.”
“If this friendship y’all share is real, then nothing will end it,” she says with confidence. “True friends and true love are a lot alike. They both tend to stick.”
Chapter Eighty
______________________________________
Cash
Life changes you.
Thing is, you don’t notice when it’s happening. It’s only in retrospect that you see the difference between who you are now and who you were then.
Not long ago, I would’ve celebrated Rick’s death the way New Orleanians celebrate Mardi Gras. With booze and lots of singing and dancing. But now? All I can do is look out over the dark bayou and think… What a waste. What a sad, senseless waste of a life.
Richard Armstrong, my far-from-illustrious sperm donor, has shuffled off this mortal coil. Ding, dong, the bastard’s dead.
Heard the news from Broussard right around the time Luc and I were calling it a day. When the DA first told me Rick was gone, I expected something dramatic. Rick was always a larger-than-life character, so I figured he’d lost his life in a blaze of glory. Shanked in the shower by a fellow prisoner who’d been on the bad end of one of his shady deals. Or hung himself from a water pipe by his shoelaces because he couldn’t stand the thought of a couple decades behind bars.
In the end, however, it was simple. Almost peaceful, if the accounts from the other inmates are to be believed.
Happened at dinnertime in the prison cafeteria. One minute, Rick was sitting down at a table with his tray piled high with food. The next, he let out a breathy sigh and slumped forward into his mashed potatoes. Dead in an instant of a massive coronary—or at least that’s the theory Broussard is working on, pending an autopsy.
Luc was listening to my end of the conversation and easily surmised what’d happened. I told him to head on home. Said I was fine.
He was having none of it. He had me pack a bag and loaded me into Smurf, insisting I spend the night with him. And then on the drive out to the swamp, he called Maggie and told her to meet us.
“I don’t give a shit if you don’t care if he’s gone,” he said when I protested for the twentieth time that I didn’t need to be fussed over since, after all, it was onlyRick.“Your father is dead, and the occasion deserves to be properly observed.”
Apparently, in Luc’s book,properly observingRick’s death consisted of a meal, which I didn’t eat much of, and a case of beer, which I’m steadily working my way through.
By the way, I’m wise to his game when it comes to the beer. Instead of coming out and telling me to lay off the whiskey, he keeps finding reasons to substitute it for beer since beer has less alcohol and a greater water content. In the grand scheme of alcoholic beverages, he figures beer is the lesser of two evils.
I’m fine to play along. To a point.
