Page 3 of Once Upon A Christmas Song

“Mmmmm-hmmm.”

“I mean, how could a country band be bad?”

“Tomorrow,” she said, one eye closed because the yodeling was just a bit off-key and had, I suspected, run straight up her spinal column to her brain, “you will invite the very nice booking agent who dropped off her card last week, to lunch.”

“I’m cooking my lobster gumbo,” Georgine informed me, taking a seat on the barstool beside me. “That way we’ll impress her.”

“We have to do something,” Xola agreed, sliding in next to Simone, gesturing at the emptiness that was our club at the moment. “Because people cannot dance and drink and sin while being reminded of God.”

She wasn’t wrong.

“Now listen,” Simone began. “I love church, and as you know, I sing in the choir every Sunday morning, but this? This ain’t it.”

No argument there.

TWO

After closing that night, Simone had come into my office as I was contemplating my next step. I was sitting in my fancy chair behind my enormous U-shaped desk, which I loved because it was the first thing I’d bought when my business was on solid ground. Before that I had an unsteady card table and plastic drawers.

She crossed the room and sank into one of the two overstuffed brown leather Chesterfield chairs on the other side of the desk, facing me.

“So,” she began, “I think we need to talk.”

I squinted at her.

“We need to be honest about our girl.”

That was what she called La Belle Vie. Our girl. I’d always liked it. And no, we weren’t partners, though I’d offered her part of the business on more than one occasion. She told me that when she was ready, when she saved the money to buy me out of half my investment, then she would accept half. Not until then. She was not looking for a handout, and yes, she knew I loved her. What was most important, she told me, was that she wanted us to be equals in all parts of the business, especially money. And though I didn’t think it was necessary—it was as much her blood, sweat, and tears as mine—she had laid down the law. This was not about friendship; this was business. I was looking forward to the day when she said that yes, she was ready and here was her partner buy-in. Having her take on half of everything would relieve a lot of the pressure of taking care of both the business and the people.

“In what way?” I asked.

She was silent for a moment and then finally said, “We could change who we are.”

“How do you mean?”

Her smile was soft, and I could see it written all over her face, how much she loved and cared for me. “You know how. Unlike a lot of other clubs, we have good traffic during the day.”

I groaned. She meant food traffic. People coming in simply to eat.

“We do,” she insisted. “Opening every day at two, that was a great change you made. This way we capture the late lunch crowd and then the people getting off work for happy hour, and for the last six months, we’ve been swamped for dinner every night.”

“We’re not a restaurant,” I reminded her.

“And yet, the last four Friday and Saturday nights, we’ve had a two-hour waiting list.”

That surprised me. “We did?” I saw the crowds, but I was always moving, doing something, checking, helping, and I missed things.

She nodded. “You’re very lucky Georgine loves working here.”

I knew that.

“But she’s also very fortunate that you saw her potential,” Simone reasoned. “I certainly didn’t see it, and you know kids freak me out.”

My chuckle was soft.

She lifted her hands in the air. “You were smart to hire a young single mother and let her bring her kid to work with her. No one else would have done that.”

When I’d first talked to Georgine Joseph about the job three years ago, she said her husband had recently left her, and that she’d moved in with her mother, who could pick up her three-year-old daughter, Camille, at five when she got off work, but not before. That meant, if I wanted Georgine, she had to bring her kid to work from noon, when she started prepping for our two p.m. opening, until around five thirty, depending on traffic from the LSU College of Science, where her mother taught developmental genetics.