Page 46 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“You were in a meeting you scheduled yourself, at a time you picked yourself, and you still skipped the pill instead of stepping out for thirty seconds to take it.” She sat on the edge of the couch, angled toward me now instead of the television. There was something in the set of her shoulders that told me she wasn’t finished, not quite, even though the words that came next were gentler than the ones before. “I’m not doing this because I think you’re helpless, Winston. I’m doing it because I know you, and left to your own devices, you will let that hip heal wrong out of pure spite just to prove you don’t need nobody managing you. And then you’ll walk crooked the rest of your life and blame the doctor.”

“That is an extremely specific and extremely unfair character assessment.”

“It’s an accurate one, which is worse.”

I picked up the tea because there wasn’t a good comeback for that, and because it did smell decent, and because some small, private part of me—the part I don’t let out in board meetings or in front of my sons—was glad she was sitting there watching me do it instead of leaving the tray and walking off like she’d been doing most nights over the past few weeks. Ever since the business with Priest and the concrete hole came out, ever since she found out what her sons had done to each other and what I’d done on top of it. That silence of hers had lasted longer than I liked to admit.

A woman like Odette doesn’t yell for weeks on end. She goes quiet, and quiet from Odette is worse than any shouting, because shouting burns out and quiet just sits there, patient, letting you know exactly how much you disappointed her without ever having to say the word.

I drank the tea. Ginger, honey, something else underneath it I couldn’t place—some root or another she probably got from her sister down in Houma, because Odette believed in home remedies the way some folks believe in scripture, total and unshakable, evidence be damned.

“This is good,” I said, and I meant it.

“I know it is. I’ve been making it for you since before you knew what a colonoscopy was.”

“Don’t need to bring that up while I’m eating.”

She nodded at the plate. “Eat.”

I ate. Turkey, provolone, and a little mustard. There is something about a woman feeding you the exact way she’d fed you for three decades that settles a man in a manner no amount of business success ever has. I’d closed deals worth more money than most men see in a lifetime, and none of it ever sat in my chest the particular way that sandwich did on a plate she’d carried in on a tray she didn’t have to bring out.

On the television, The Feud had moved to Fast Money, and the woman up there was hollering out answers with her eyes squeezed shut like the guessing hurt her physically.

“Things people do in the shower,” the host said.

“Sing!” she screamed.

“She said sing,” Odette repeated, delighted, like this was the funniest thing that had happened in a week. “That’s on there. Look at her go.”

“I sing in the shower,” I said.

Odette turned and looked at me with an expression I hadn’t seen in longer than I wanted to admit—genuine, unguarded amusement, the kind that crinkled the corners of her eyes and made her look, for a second, twenty years younger and thirty years less tired.

“You do not.”

“I do.”

“Winston Landry, in thirty-some years of marriage, I have never once heard you sing in the shower.”

“That’s because I do it quiet. I’m not trying to wake the whole ward.”

“What do you sing?”

“None of your business.”

“Now you gotta tell me. You brought it up.”

“I did not bring it up. The woman on the television brought it up. I was simply confirming a fact about myself.”

“Mm-hmm.” She was full-on grinning now, and I found myself grinning back despite my better judgment. There is a particular gravity to a woman’s laughter when you’ve spent weeks watching her keep her face carefully, deliberately blank around you. Having that gravity turned back on you feels like standing in sunlight after a long stretch of overcast.

“Sam Cooke,” I finally admitted, because there was no graceful way out of it, and because some tiny reckless part of me wanted to give her something.

“Sam Cooke.” She said it like she was testing the shape of it in her mouth. “You sing Sam Cooke in the shower.”

“’A Change Is Gonna Come.’ Mostly. Sometimes ‘Cupid,’ if I’m in a lighter mood.”

“You singing ‘Cupid’ in the shower is the funniest thing I’ve learned about you since we got married, and I learned you shot a man in Biloxi over a card game.”