Read Online Black Fridays by Michael Sears - Free Book Online Page B

nine hours I had spent at Weld was the longest time we had been apart all week. He was why I had kept Stockman waiting—getting him settled in New York had been a bigger priority for me than saving Weld Securities from zealous regulators.
    Not that it had been easy.
    A week before, I was dripping sweat outside the Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans, waiting for Enterprise to bring me my Dodge Charger—I had splurged the extra two dollars for the full-sized car. It was high hurricane season, with both temperature and humidity hovering around one hundred, yet the Saturday-morning flight had been almost sold out.
Laissez les bons temps rouler
.
    Three hours later, I made the turn onto Hoptree Lane and pulled up into the white oyster-shell driveway of Mamma Oubre. The house sat back from the road with a single, ancient live oak dominating the front yard. Spanish moss hung motionless in the still, humid air. I had stopped for a quick lunch and the shrimp and Tabasco were grinding away in my gut—or maybe it was just my system telling me I was afraid of what I was going to find.
    When I opened the car door, the humidity swept in, coating the windows with fog and nearly suffocating me. It was like trying to breathe soup. I wiped off my sunglasses and got out of the car. Mamma came out the front door and stood on the porch. I felt like she had been watching and waiting for me. She looked like she was having a hard time deciding whether to welcome me or warn me off.
    The welcome won. In her part of the world, it almost always wins.
    “Well, isn’t this a nice surprise? Young Jason, all the way from New York City.” Mamma was only five years older than I, but she had become a grandmother at forty-seven. I guessed I would be “Young Jason” for another twenty or thirty years.
    “Is Angie here?”
    Mamma made a slight frown—directness in approach was one step away from rudeness. But she must have forgiven me, either because she was still fond of me or because she recognized that most northerners suffered from the same affliction and it was sinful to think badly of the disabled.
    “Come up here and give me a decent hello. I want a hug and a chaste kiss on the cheek before I let you interrogate me.”
    I did as I was told. We sat under a gently turning overhead fan, on a pair of very tired white wicker chairs, and drank sweet tea—a concoction that seems to lose all of its flavor north of the Mason-Dixon line. On Mamma’s porch that day, it became an elixir. She asked after my father’s health and made me promise to give him her best regards. She renewed her vow to visit New York one day—a vow I had long since learned to ignore. She reminded me that despite her minister’s admonitions about the theater being sinful, she had a much more modern view and would one day dearly love to see a Broadway play.
    “Maybe
Hairspray
. I did so love the movie.”
    I did my best to be charming—it was really all she wanted of me, as though a bit of pleasant conversation could keep reality at bay. I liked her, despite myself, and I was content to let the antediluvian moment play out. She had married in high school—to a bum whose sole contribution to family harmony was his departure. A year later, as his daughter began kindergarten, he had died in an oil-rig accident. Insurance refused to pay because of the flask in his back pocket, and a blood alcohol level well over the state maximum for operating heavy machinery. Mamma raised two children—Angie and her brother, Tino—on a school cafeteria cook’s salary. Her church, her children, and her spirit kept her going.
    “I know you haven’t come all this way just to keep me company. You may ask me about Angie now, but I really don’t know how much I can tell you. She comes by on most weekends, and takes Jason for an hour or so, but she doesn’t really stay to visit. She has some friends down to Morgan City, I know.”
    Amid this whirl of hints, misdirection, and polite