The ground in Bayou Teche stayed gray and damp all through December, and the wind off the marsh smelled like rotting willows and cold mud. We had lived in that old cypress house for twenty-four years, right up on the blacktop where the sugarcane trucks rattled past day and night.
Mark sat at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table with his coffee cup held between both hands, looking like the weight of the parish was sitting right on his shoulders.
The sugarcane harvest had been poor that fall, or so he told me every single night when he came home with grease under his fingernails and mud caked on the sides of his boots.
He didn’t look up when I cleared the breakfast plates. He just stared at the salt shaker like it held the secrets to the universe.
“Della,” he said, and his voice sounded thin, raspy like dry corn husks rubbing together in a November blow. “We got to talk about Christmas.”
I stopped with the dish towel half-wrapped around a blue Willow plate. “We talked about it, Mark. I’ve got the ham in the deep freeze and the girls are coming down from Lafayette with their little ones.”
“We can’t do it this year,” he said, finally looking up at me with those pale blue eyes that always made me want to give him whatever he asked for. “The equipment loan at the bank came due.
If I don’t cover the difference by New Year’s, we lose the truck and the flatboat. We have to cancel. No gifts, no big dinner, nothing. Just you and me keeping our heads down.”
I felt that old familiar pinch in my chest, the one I always got whenever money got tight enough to make the floorboards creak. We had been through lean years before, back when the girls were small and we lived off grits and catfish for three weeks straight.
“All right,” I told him, smoothing the dish towel down over my apron. “I’ll call the girls. We’ll tell them to stay home.”
“Thank you, Dell,” he whispered, standing up and reaching out to squeeze my shoulder before he grabbed his canvas jacket off the peg by the back door. “I knew you’d understand. I’m just trying to keep a roof over our heads.”
The next two days dragged like a slow leak in a tire.
The house was quiet, too quiet, without the smell of gingerbread or the sound of wrapping paper crinkling on the sideboard. I spent most of Thursday afternoon scrubbing the grout behind the stove just to have something to do with my hands while the rain tapped against the windowpanes.
It was late Friday afternoon when my phone gave that little muted buzz on the kitchen counter. I picked it up thinking it was one of the girls checking in, but it was just the credit card app notification blinking at the top of the screen. I only checked the shared account once in a blue moon, mostly to keep track of the feed store bill or the truck parts Mark had to order from Baton Rouge.
My thumb hovered over the screen for a second before I tapped it open.
There it was, sitting right near the top of the recent ledger like a red-hot ember. $3,800.00.
The merchant name was listed plain as day: Maison de Bijoux, Lafayette. The date on it was Thursday morning, right around the time Mark told me he was down at the co-op arguing with the manager about fertilizer prices.
I just stood there in the middle of the kitchen because my brain kind of stopped working for a second. Three thousand eight hundred dollars. That wasn’t a part for the tractor. That wasn’t a load of diesel. That was more than we spent on groceries in four months, sitting there on a piece of plastic he swore we barely had enough credit left to use for gas.
I didn’t yell. I didn’t throw my phone against the wall. I just walked over to the back window and looked out at the dead petunia pots on the porch while my hands started shaking so bad I had to grip the wooden window frame to keep steady.
Christmas morning dawned gray and heavy, the kind of fog that rolls off the swamp and sits right on top of the chimney pots so the smoke can’t get out. Mark was up before dawn, pacing the hallway in his gray wool socks, coughing that dry cough he always got when the damp got into his chest.
There was nothing under the tree. Not even a pair of fuzzy socks or a box of peanut brittle. Just the bare pine needles dropping onto the braided rug because I hadn’t had the heart to water the thing since Tuesday.
“Morning, Dell,” Mark said, walking into the kitchen and rubbing the back of his neck. He looked wired, like a stray dog that had been cornered in a barn. “Coffee smells good.”
“It’s just chicory,” I said, handing him the blue mug without looking at his face. “You want an egg?”
“Nah,” he said, setting the mug down hard enough to splash a dark ring of coffee onto the laminate. “I can’t eat right now. My stomach’s been acting up all morning with that loan meeting hanging over my head.”
“Right,” I said, leaning my hip against the counter.
He didn’t stay at the table for more than two minutes before he stood up and started buttoning his heavy canvas coat. He kept his eyes fixed on the linoleum floor near the back door, adjusting his collar twice like he couldn’t get it to sit right against his neck.
“Look,” he said, clearing his throat and jingling the keys in his pocket. “I got to run one quick errand down to the south parish yard. The night watchman called about a gate latch coming loose in the freeze. I won’t be long, maybe an hour or two.”
“On Christmas morning?” I asked, and my voice sounded hollow even to my own ears.
“Someone’s got to check it, Dell, or the insurance won’t cover if something gets hauled off,” he said, turning the doorknob with a sharp click. “I’ll be back before noon. Don’t wait up for lunch.”
The door clicked shut behind him. I didn’t move for three full minutes. I watched through the small square window in the door as he climbed into his old Ford pickup, backed out past the chinaberry tree, and kicked up a shower of wet gravel as he headed down toward the highway.
My heart felt like it had dropped down into my stomach, cold and heavy as a lead sinker. I didn’t even bother taking off my apron. I just walked out to the porch, got into my little red Civic, and turned the key before the engine had even half-warmed up.
I kept about four car lengths back all the way down the blacktop, my tires hissing against the wet asphalt while the fog swallowed his tailights every time he took a curve too fast. He didn’t turn toward the parish yards. He kept going straight past the old sawmill, right into the edge of town where the brick apartment complexes sat behind rows of stunted live oaks.
He pulled his truck up alongside the curb of a yellow-brick building with iron balconies that needed a fresh coat of black paint. I parked three spots back behind a rusted-out station wagon, killed my lights, and sat there with the motor idling while the heater fan blew a weak, lukewarm breath against my shins.
Mark got out of the truck, his shoulders hunched against the mist, holding a small brown paper bag under his arm like he was carrying a bottle of whiskey or a pie. He walked up the concrete steps of number twelve, didn’t even bother to knock twice, and pushed the door open with his shoulder.
The door swung wide before he could even turn around.
A young woman stood there in the doorway, wearing a pale blue sweater and gray trousers that looked brand-new. Her hair was dark and pulled back into a messy clip, and she looked young, maybe twenty-eight at the most, with those wide, soft eyes women have when they haven’t had a full night’s sleep in six months.
She didn’t just greet him. She threw her arms right around his neck and buried her face in his jacket while Mark dropped the paper bag onto the small wooden bench by the threshold and wrapped both arms around her waist, pulling her close against him like she was the only thing keeping him upright in this world.
And right there against the hollow of her throat, catching the pale winter light that filtered through the glass transom above the door, was the heavy gold chain and the diamond cluster pendant from the window display at Maison de Bijoux in Lafayette.
Three thousand eight hundred dollars.
My hands gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned the color of lard. I put the car in park, pushed the door open, and my boots hit the wet concrete before my brain even gave me permission to move my legs.
I walked across that parking lot like I was walking through deep water, my coat flapping around my knees, my breath turning into white puffs in the cold air. They didn’t hear me coming over the sound of the highway traffic half a mile off.
Mark was leaning down to kiss the top of her head when she looked up past his shoulder and her eyes locked right onto mine. Her whole face went slack, the color draining out of her cheeks until she looked like chalk.
“Mark,” she whispered, her hands still resting against his chest.
He spun around so fast he nearly tripped over the welcome mat. When he saw me standing there ten feet away on the porch, his mouth opened and closed twice like a catfish hauled up onto the dock, but not a single sound came out.
“Dell,” he choked out finally, his hands coming up halfway like he wanted to push me back down the steps. “Dell, what in the hell are you doing here?”
“You said you had a gate latch to fix,” I said, and my voice sounded smaller than I wanted it to, dry and flat like paper rubbing against paper. “Must be a mighty fancy gate.”
“Look, I can explain,” he stammered, taking a half-step toward me while the young woman shrank back into the doorway, her hands flying up to cover her mouth. “It’s not what you think. It’s just… things got complicated.”
“Complicated,” I repeated, looking past his shoulder into the warm, cluttered little living room behind them.
The room smelled of sour milk and baby powder, sweet and heavy in the small space. A plastic bouncy seat sat right in the middle of the braided rug with a pink rattle on the tray. And hanging right on the wall above the sofa, framed in cheap walnut wood with a white mat, was a studio portrait of Mark sitting in a green velvet chair, holding a tiny red-faced baby wrapped in a yellow receiving blanket against his chest.
I looked from the photograph back to the young woman, then down at the gold necklace resting against her sweater, and finally up into Mark’s terrified, gray face.
“She’s my daughter, Dell,” he whispered, his voice cracking right down the middle as he looked back at the apartment door. “Chloe. And that’s little Emma. She’s six months old.”
“Six months,” I said, and the numbers clicked together in my head with the cold, hard snap of a steel trap. “That was right when you said the combine needed a new transmission and we had to skip our anniversary trip to Natchez.”
“I was trapped,” he muttered, his shoulders dropping down like someone had cut the strings holding him up. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. The business was going under, and then…”
“Then you found a new life,” I said, cutting him off right there on the porch. “And you asked me to cancel Christmas so you could pay the rent on her nursery.”
Chloe started crying then, soft little hiccuping sounds from the back of her throat, her fingers clutching at the collar of her sweater right where that expensive little diamond sat catching the pale morning light. “He told me you guys were getting a divorce,” she choked out, looking at me with red, terrified eyes. “He said you were living in separate rooms and the papers were already drawn up. He swore you knew.”
“He didn’t draw up any papers,” I told her, and I didn’t feel a shred of anger toward her just then, only a cold, hollow pity that made my teeth ache. “He just wanted a quiet house when he wasn’t busy running back and forth across the parish.”
Mark reached out, his hand trembling as he tried to catch my sleeve. “Dell, please. Let’s just go home. We can talk about this in the truck. Don’t do this here.”
I pulled my arm back like his fingers were made of hot coals. I looked down at him, really looked at him, and realized I hadn’t known the man standing in front of me for ten years, maybe longer. He was just a stranger who had been sleeping in my spare room and eating my cooking while he built another family with someone young enough to be our daughter.
“There’s nothing to talk about, Mark,” I said, turning my back on him and walking down the concrete steps toward my Civic. “You can stay right here with your family. Your things will be on the front porch by sundown.”
“Dell!” he shouted behind me, his voice bouncing off the brick walls of the courtyard, but I didn’t look back.
I drove home with the heater turned all the way up, but I couldn’t stop shivering. The parish roads were empty, the houses along the bayou sitting quiet and dark behind their Christmas wreaths while the gray fog finally started to lift off the water.
When I pulled into the drive of the old cypress house, the place looked smaller than it had yesterday, like an empty shell left behind by a crab. I walked up the steps, unlocked the front door, and stepped into the cold hallway where his canvas jacket usually hung on the wooden peg.
The hook was empty.
I went straight to the kitchen, opened the drawer by the sink, and pulled out the shared credit card statement I had printed out before I left. I folded it twice, neatly down the middle, and slid it into a plain manila envelope with his name written across the front in block letters.
Then I walked over to the sideboard, took the plastic credit card out of my leather wallet, and dropped it right into the center of the envelope on top of the paper.
The house was so quiet I could hear the antique Seth Thomas clock ticking away on the mantelpiece in the parlor, steady and slow, counting off the seconds like nothing had happened at all. I walked over to the front window, pulled the heavy lace curtain back just an inch, and sat down in my old wicker rocking chair with a cold cup of chicory coffee sitting on the table beside me.
There was no fire in the hearth and no ham in the oven, but for the first time in twenty-four years, the air in the room felt entirely my own.
