The humidity down here in Vermilion Parish has a way of sticking to your skin by seven in the morning, long before the sun even clears the cypress line. I was out on the back porch wiping down the cypress table with a damp cloth when the screen door banged shut behind me. Arthur did not even wait for me to turn around before he dropped the manila folder right onto the wet wood.
The slap of heavy cardstock against the table was loud enough to scare a bluejay out of the oak tree by the fence.
“I signed the initial copies,” Arthur said. His voice sounded flat, like a man reading off a grocery list of things we were out of. “My lawyer has the rest. You can stay through the weekend to pack your clothes, but I want the truck back in the driveway by Monday noon.”
I did not scream and I did not throw my coffee cup. I just stood there with the damp rag in my hand, watching a single sweat bee crawl across the green trim of the table. Arthur had his car keys already jingling in his left hand, that same nervous habit he picked up twenty years ago whenever he was fixing to lie about where he spent his Tuesday nights. Three years of driving dialysis patients three days a week teaches you how to recognize a man who has already checked out of his own life.
“You picked a fine week for it, Arthur,” I told him, my voice lower than I meant it to be. “Helen is still in that room at Lafayette General.”
“Helen made her bed,” he muttered, turning his back and walking down the wooden steps without looking at me once. “And so did you.”
The parish road was quiet as I backed my old station wagon out of the gravel drive fifteen minutes later. I kept thinking about the way Arthur left his coffee mug half-full on the counter, a grey skin forming over the top of the dark roast. Some people leave a house like they are stepping out to check the mail, while others pack their bags for a three-week trip just to go down to the hardware store. Arthur always was a packer.
The waiting room at Lafayette General smelled like floor bleach and stale vending machine crackers.
I had spent forty-eight hours straight in that straight-backed plastic chair while the nurses monitored Helen’s blood pressure dropping by fractions of a mercury column. Helen was my stepmother by law, but she was the only mother who ever remembered my birthday without Arthur having to remind her with a Post-it note on the refrigerator.
My phone started buzzing against my knee right around eleven. It was Mia, Helen’s biological daughter, calling from her condo over in Baton Rouge where she spent most of her time trying to figure out how to look like she came from old money instead of a shrimp boat captain’s earnings.
“Is she gone yet?” Mia asked before I even had the receiver fully pressed to my ear. There was no hello, just the sound of a blender running in her kitchen.
“She is resting, Mia,” I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose where my glasses had left two red dents. “The doctor said her kidneys are shutting down. You need to come down here today.”
“I have a hair appointment at two that I cannot move,” Mia sighed, loud enough for me to hear her smack her gum. “Call me when she’s dead. I have papers to sign with the broker anyway.”
The line clicked dead before I could tell her that Helen was trying to say her name through an oxygen mask. I sat there in that grey chair for two hours listening to the rhythmic beep of the heart monitor slowing down by three beats every ten minutes. The nurse on duty, a kind woman named Brenda whose people lived over near Abbeville, came in and squeezed my shoulder without saying a word. Brenda knew about Arthur walking out because small towns do not keep secrets longer than it takes a diesel truck to cross a county bridge.
“She was a good woman, June,” Brenda whispered, adjusting the blue blanket over Helen’s thin legs. “Don’t let them take her peace at the end.”
Helen passed away at 4:12 on a Thursday afternoon while the rain was just starting to hammer against the tall hospital windows. We buried her two days later in the small churchyard behind St. Jude’s, right under the low-hanging branches of a live oak that was dripping with Spanish moss. Only four people stood by the open grave: me, the minister, the funeral director, and Mia, who spent the entire twenty-minute service checking her reflection in the dark screen of her iPhone.
The reading of the will took place on Tuesday morning in a cramped office on the second floor of the courthouse in downtown Lafayette. The lawyer, a man named Mr. Boudreaux who had known Helen since she ran the local bakery back in the seventies, looked tired as he shuffled through three thick folders of yellowed paper. Mia sat across the polished mahogany table wearing a black linen dress that cost more than my first car, tapping her red acrylic nails against the arm of her chair.
“As per the final stipulations of Helen Marie LeBlanc’s handwritten addendum dated four years prior,” Mr. Boudreaux said, clearing his throat twice, “the primary estate including the home on Bayou Road, the savings account totaling ninety-four thousand dollars, and all remaining assets are to be transferred in full to her biological daughter, Mia Renee LeBlanc.”
Mia let out a sharp, ugly little snort that passed for a laugh in that quiet room. She didn’t even try to hide the smirk spreading across her face, her eyes bright with the triumph of someone who had just won a lottery she didn’t buy a ticket for.
“I told you she wasn’t leaving you a dime, June,” Mia said, standing up and smoothing down the front of her expensive dress. “She raised me, not you. You were just the hired help who stuck around to change her sheets.”
Mr. Boudreaux didn’t look up from his papers, but his hand stopped moving across the legal pad. He slowly slid one final, thin envelope across the corner of the desk toward my side. It wasn’t even sealed; the flap was just tucked inside itself.
“And as for the remaining personal effects,” Mr. Boudreaux said quietly, “the twenty-four potted Boston ferns and assorted houseplants currently kept on the back porch of the Bayou Road property are assigned to June Marie Thibodeaux, to be removed within forty-eight hours.”
“Take your weeds and get out of my way,” Mia laughed, turning on her heel and walking out the heavy oak doors without another glance.
I didn’t care about the house or the money. I had my station wagon, my sewing machine, and a small savings account from thirty years of part-time work at the library that Arthur didn’t even know existed. I spent the rest of that Tuesday loading twenty-four heavy ceramic pots into the back of my car, each one filled with the ferns and peace lilies Helen and I had grown together from small cuttings back when Arthur and I first moved into that house. My hands were stained with black potting soil and my lower back was throbbing by the time I pulled into the gravel driveway of my sister’s place outside of Rayne.
The house was dark except for the amber porch light bouncing off the corrugated tin roof. My sister Martha had the coffee pot going within five minutes, and we sat at her oilcloth-covered kitchen table while I told her about the Will, the cemetery, and the way Mia looked at me like I was a piece of trash left on the side of the highway.
“Let her have her big house,” Martha said, pushing a mug of chicory coffee across to me. “Greed is a heavy coat to wear in July, June. It’ll smother her before the year is out.”
I went to bed around ten, listening to the ceiling fan wobble in the small guest room. My mind felt strangely empty, like an old attic after you finally haul all the heavy furniture down to the curb. I didn’t cry once. I just stared at the shadows of the window screen moving across the white plaster ceiling until my eyes got heavy.
The phone on the nightstand started screaming at 4:14 in the morning.
I sat up so fast my head spun, the little digital numbers glowing red against the dark room. Nobody calls at four in the morning unless the hospital is on the line or someone’s house is on fire. I reached out and clicked the talk button, pressing the plastic against my ear.
“June?”
The voice wasn’t the crisp, sharp sound of Mia I had heard in the lawyer’s office. It was high, thin, and cracked right down the middle like dry timber. She was breathing so hard she sounded like she had just run ten miles through a swamp.
“Mia? What is wrong?” I asked, sitting up straight against the headboard.
“You have to come back,” she choked out, a loud sob breaking right through the middle of the sentence. “You have to come back here right now.”
“I am living out of boxes at my sister’s, Mia. If you need a ride to the beauty parlor, you’ll have to call a cab.”
“The safe behind the library wall,” Mia gasped, her voice hitching into a wet, desperate wail that sounded like a frightened child. “The lawyer lied to me.”
“Mr. Boudreaux doesn’t lie, Mia. He reads what is written.”
“He didn’t read the whole thing,” she cried, and I could hear the sound of breaking glass in the background over the phone line, like a vase hitting a tile floor. “She left the house to me, but the bank owns the mortgage and the title was never transferred.”
I sat there in the dark room, the hum of the refrigerator coming from the kitchen down the hall, and listened to the silence stretch out for three long seconds before she spoke again.
“June, please. I’m sitting on the floor.”
