The Fontenot Home
DRESS?
Bathing Suit & Dancing Shoes
We’ll have a buffet dinner, fireworks, and dancing under the stars. We’re so proud and happy for our Annette!
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Annette
“AMERICAN FLAG CAKE,” SAIDLouis. “Sparklers, Party in the USA playlist…what else?” Louis held a pen aloft, his MacBook Air balanced on his lap. When they had furnished the house, Louis had insisted on Ranch Luxe style, creating a living room reminiscent of the Driskill Hotel Bar, complete with cowhide furniture, a giant longhorn steer head mounted over the fireplace, and antique guns displayed as art.
Louis even hired Barvo Walker, famed sculptor of the Widow Maker statue in the Driskill (depicting life-sized cowboys getting tangled in their stirrups and falling to their deaths), to create an enormous bronze statue of Louis’s beloved childhood pony, Red.
Annette had been unsure about the living room, but too busy with a new baby to protest. Now, she avoided the room whenever possible. Even Red had a maniacal gleam to his eye when the light hit him wrong.
“This party is too much,” she said now.
“For my American citizen wife?” said Louis. “Who loves barbecue even more than a real Texan? Can’t have too much,Annette. I’ve got a call in to Aaron Franklin to see if he’ll cater.”
Annette swallowed a sour taste—she was just as much a “real” Texan as Louis. “I think Aaron is a bit busy,” she said. “Didn’t Obama go to Franklin’s recently?”
“Can’t hurt to put a call in, right?”
Gazing at her pudgy husband, Annette felt a wave of affection soothe her irritation. Louis was a quarter inch shorter than she was, but he loved her in high stiletto heels anyway. The way Louis allowed the world to delight him was a marvel to Annette, though sometimes his willful ignorance could grate.
Annette and Louis had met at the University of Texas. He was an oil heir from Midland, she an undocumented basketball superstar. It had been different in the nineties for border kids, especially gifted athletes. UT hadn’t even mentioned Annette’s status when they recruited her: She’d turned down full rides at small northeastern colleges because she wanted Div I, and she’d wanted to stay home. Or near home, anyway—Laredo was a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Austin.
The first time Louis introduced himself was after a game. Annette was on her way to the locker room and he’d stepped in front of her. “I’m going to marry you,” he said.
Annette had sidestepped him—laughing, bewildered.
But Louis was sweet and serious. “I mean it,” he’d said. “I’m Louis. Can I take you to dinner tonight?”
“Annette!” her assistant coach called.
Annette said, “I have to go.”
“Mars Restaurant, eight o’clock?” he’d said. “It’s on San Antonio Street.”
“I…” she said
“I’ll be there until you come,” said Louis.
“Tonight’s not good,” she said.
“I can wait,” said Louis.
Annette shook her head and jogged to catch up to her teammates. There was no time for anything but basketball. Annette had been the first person in her family to go to college and she wasn’t going to screw it up for some guy, even a sweetheart who had somehow custom-ordered a jersey with her number on it.
Louis came to every game of the season, screamed every time she made a basket, began sending roses to her dorm room on Saturdays. Every bouquet had the same card: “Mars, 8p.m., tonight?”
After the season ended, the roses kept coming, but Annette drove her beat-up Honda Pilot to Laredo every weekend to help in her father’s boot shop. One weekend, she intercepted the floral delivery guy on her way to the parking lot, so she brought the roses with her, dumping them on her parents’ kitchen counter when she got home late at night.
Her mother was waiting for her in the morning with a fresh cup of coffee and a hundred questions. Perhaps Annette had known when she brought the flowers home that she needed guidance. “He sends them every week!” she told her mother, as Maya arranged the bouquet in a ceramic vase.
Annette’s childhood home was large—her father made beautiful boots and had done well financially. He’d bought the house on Bordeaux Drive with cash, adding on every time he had two cents to rub together. Her uncles and later her brothers helped out with the construction; Annette’s mother was a gifted decorator who loved nothing more than a day spent shopping across the border or at her favorite store, Vega’s Interiores Mejicanos. The house was filled with hand-carved tables and chairs (the dining room table was inlaidwith horses) and Mexican hanging lamps and chandeliers that cast beautiful patterns on the orange and raspberry sherbet–colored walls.
