The rain down here in Terrebonne Parish doesn’t just fall. It sets in like a low fog that you can taste in the back of your throat, smelling of brackish water and diesel fuel from the shrimping boats tied up along Bayou Black.
That was the smell clinging to my jacket five weeks ago when I carried my three-year-old, Clara, up the three cypress steps to Mama’s front porch while little Toby clutched the hem of my jeans.
My purse held exactly twelve dollars and fifty cents. The pink slip from the canning plant where I had worked three years folding cartons had been sitting on my kitchen table for forty-eight hours before the landlord taped the final notice over it.
I didn’t think I would ever have to go back to that house. Mama and I had spent four years jawing at each other over politics, church, and the way I lived my life, and I swore on my grandmother’s Bible that the next time I walked up those steps, I would be driving my own truck and carrying a pie.
Instead, I was just tired. My shoulders were burning from carrying a duffel bag full of diapers and toddler clothes for six blocks after the bus let us off three miles short of her lane because of high water over the culverts.
When the front door swung open, I expected her to cross her arms and start telling me about how I should have saved my money or married someone steadier than Toby’s dad, who had vanished back toward Shreveport two summers ago.
Mama looked different, though. Her skin had that gray, skim-milk look that didn’t come from just being seventy-one years old.
She had an apron on over her cotton house-dress, and her hands were twisting the hem so hard her knuckles looked like peeled pecans.
Before I could even tell her about the plant closing or ask if we could sleep on the sunroom cot for a few days, she looked past my shoulder at the gray water pooling in the gravel driveway.
“My boyfriend won’t let you stay,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound like her. It sounded thin, like dry corn husks rubbing together in a November wind. “I’m sorry.”
I just stood there on the damp mat. The porch light flickered once, buzzing like an old cicada.
“Mama, it’s just for a week,” I whispered, feeling Clara’s small hot face pressed into the crook of my neck where she was falling asleep. “Just until I can clear out the locker at the plant and get my last check.”
“I said no,” she repeated, and her chin didn’t quiver once, which scared me worse than if she had started crying. “He doesn’t want you here. You need to go on.”
“Mama,” I said again, my voice cracking right down the middle.
“I’m sorry.”
And then she pushed the heavy oak door shut. The latch clicked home with a clean, hard snap that sounded like a pistol shot in the quiet damp of the bayou evening.
I didn’t yell. I didn’t pound on the wood. I turned around, walked back down those three wet cypress steps, and led my babies four miles through the drizzle to the basement of St. Jude’s, where a volunteer named Sister Agnes let us sleep on blue yoga mats under gray wool blankets that smelled of mothballs and bleach.
For the next month, I didn’t call. I didn’t drive past her lane. I spent my days standing in line at the county assistance office on Main Street, listening to young clerks with clean fingernails tell me that the waiting list for public housing was eleven months long.
I learned how to stretch a jar of peanut butter across five days and how to wash toddler socks in a plastic bucket with bar soap. Every time I looked at Clara’s small ribs or Toby’s damp shoes, a cold, hard knot of hatred would settle right behind my ribs. I told myself that Mama had chosen some old man she’d met at the bingo hall over her own flesh and blood.
Then came the telephone call from the parish coroner.
It was a Tuesday night around ten o’clock. The small electric heater in our temporary family shelter unit was clicking on and off every four minutes, making the room smell like hot dust.
A deputy sheriff named Landry told me Mama had gone out behind her shed to check on her tomato plants right around dusk and simply hadn’t come back in when the sun went down. The neighbor found her sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket near the garden hose, her head tilted back toward the pecan trees as if she were looking for a hawk in the branches.
They said it was her ticker. Just gave out all at once, quiet-like.
I didn’t cry at the county morgue when I had to sign the papers to release her body to the funeral home on Second Street. I felt hollowed out, like an old stump that had been burned from the inside by a lightning strike three years ago and finally just crumbled when the wind hit it right.
I brought the kids back to the shelter unit, settled them into their cots with a stale graham cracker each, and sat down on the edge of my narrow mattress to stare at the water stains on the acoustic tile ceiling.
At 11:45 PM, someone knocked on the metal door of unit twelve.
I thought it was the night supervisor coming to tell me about curfew or a paperwork mix-up with the breakfast vouchers. When I pulled the door open three inches, the yellow hall light hit a pair of worn-out brown work boots I knew better than my own face.
It was Lyle. Mama’s boyfriend of four years.
He was sixty-five, a retired dredge boat mechanic with grease permanently ground into the creases around his thumbs, but tonight he looked like he had been dragged behind a tractor through a brier patch. His eyes were swollen red, and his lower lip was tucked between his teeth as if he were trying not to howl.
“Lyle?” I said, and my hand tightened on the metal door edge. “What are you doing here? If you’re here to talk about the headstone or the plot, I don’t have the money yet. You tell the church, “
“I didn’t come about the plot, June,” he said, and his voice was so thick he could barely push the words past his tongue. He reached into the deep pocket of his canvas hunting jacket and pulled out a bulky manila envelope tied around with yellow baker’s twine. “She told me not to give this to you until she was six feet under. But she died five weeks faster than the doctor in Houma said she would.”
I didn’t take the envelope. I just looked at the way his thumb was shaking where it pressed against the thick brown paper.
“What is that?” I asked.
“She lied to you, June,” Lyle whispered, taking a ragged breath that sounded like a dry pump handle. “That night you came to the porch with the kids. She didn’t turn you away because I didn’t want you there. I didn’t even know you were at the lane until after you’d caught the bus back toward town.”
The room seemed to shrink until the gray cinderblock walls were pressing right against my shoulders.
“She told me to my face that you wouldn’t let us stay,” I said, and the words tasted like old iron in my mouth.
“I know what she told you,” Lyle said, his voice breaking as he wiped his nose with the back of his massive, greasy hand. “Let me in, June. Sit down and read the girl’s handwriting. Then you can decide if you want to spit on me or not.”
I stepped back, letting the heavy metal door swing wide.
He didn’t sit on the cot. He just laid the thick manila envelope on the small laminate table beside my plastic water cup, set two heavy brass keys down beside it with a dull clink, and turned around without looking back.
“The back door is unlocked,” he said over his shoulder as he walked down the cinderblock hallway toward the exit. “She had the locks changed the morning after you left.”
I stood by that table for a long time with the smell of hot dust and cold linoleum in my nose. My fingers felt stiff as fence wire when I reached out and untied the yellow baker’s twine.
Inside was a stack of folded papers that smelled faintly of the rose-water sachet Mama always kept tucked into the pocket of her Sunday cardigan.
The first paper was a letter written on her yellow legal pad in that neat, slanted cursive she had learned back at the parochial school in Thibodaux in 1968.
*Dear June,*
*If you are reading this, the ticker finally stopped, and I’m probably down at the churchyard waiting for the preacher to say something nice about me that I don’t deserve. First off, I’m sorry I had to look you in the eye and make you hate me that night.*
*You didn’t see the man sitting in the old Buick parked down by the pump house, but he had been parked there three days running. That’s the fellow from the finance company who bought up the second mortgage on this house when the bank foreclosed on my tractor loan two years back. He told me plain as day that if I brought children onto this property while the title was in dispute, he’d file an emergency injunction with the parish judge to have the place condemned for black mold and structural rot within forty-eight hours.*
*If he had done that while you were standing on my porch, the sheriff would have had to get involved, and social services would have had Clara and Toby in a foster home by morning before you could find a dry floor in this parish.*
*I knew you were too proud to go to the shelter if you thought you had a roof over your head here. I had to make it hurt so bad you’d walk away and find the county help you needed. Lyle begged me to let you in through the cellar, but I wouldn’t let him. I couldn’t risk him losing his pension or getting dragged into the court mess either.*
*The house is clear now. I paid the lawyer in Houma to settle the title out of the insurance payout from my brother’s passing last winter. The deed is in your name in the back of this envelope, along with four thousand dollars in postal money orders I hid in the sugar canister so that finance man wouldn’t sniff them out.*
*Take care of my grandbabies, June. And try to forgive an old woman who was better at being stubborn than she was at being a mother.*
*Love, Mama.*
I sat down on the edge of the narrow cot because my knees simply wouldn’t hold me another second.
The heater clicked off, and the room went dead silent except for the sound of Toby breathing softly in his sleep across the room.
I picked up the brass keys Lyle had left on the table. They were still cold from the night air outside, heavy and square in the palm of my hand.
I didn’t cry then either. I just held that yellow legal pad against my chest until the ink blurred together in the dim light, smelling the rose water and the bayou mud and the truth of a woman who loved her blood more than she loved her own good name.
The next morning, we didn’t wait for the shelter breakfast. I packed our two duffel bags, bundled the kids into the back of a neighbor’s pickup truck that Lyle had sent idling by the curb at six o’clock, and we drove back down the gravel road toward the house on the bayou.
The pecan trees were dropping their first green hulls onto the tin roof, making a sharp, hollow tapping sound in the morning sun.
I walked up those three cypress steps, slid the heavy brass key into the front door lock, and turned it until it clicked. Clara and Toby ran straight past me into the kitchen to look for the old gray cat sleeping by the stove.
I stood on the front porch for a minute, looking out over the brown water and the tall reeds bending in the river breeze, holding Mama’s letter in my hand while the sun finally broke through the gray clouds overhead.
