POV: Cal
The Broussard family had been eating breakfast at the same table since Cal was four years old — a round pedestal table in his parents' kitchen on Rue Pelican that had survived two floods, one kitchen fire, and thirty-one years of his father's opinions — and Sunday morning breakfast was not optional.
This had never been stated as a rule. It didn't need to be.
Cal pulled up at seven-fifteen, which was early enough to help his mother with the biscuits and late enough that his father would already be in his chair with his coffee and his newspaper, reading the same local paper he'd been reading since the eighties with the focused displeasure of a man who found the news personally offensive but couldn't stop checking.
Beau's truck was already there. Of course it was.
The kitchen smelled of andouille and strong coffee and his mother's hand lotion, which was gardenia-scented and had been the smell of Sunday mornings for his entire life. Renée Broussard was at the stove in her church clothes — she went to the early service, always had — working a cast iron skillet with the efficiency of a woman who had been feeding people since she was a teenager and saw no reason to slow down. She was sixty-one and moved like fifty and thought like someone who had been watching human nature long enough to find it mostly predictable and occasionally surprising.
"There he is," she said, without turning around.
"Morning, Mama." He kissed her cheek and reached past her to pour coffee.
"Beau says you're starting the Mabry repairs tomorrow."
"That's right."
"Savannah's there?"
"Got there yesterday, from what I understand."
His mother turned a piece of andouille with the kind of precision that meant she was thinking about something other than andouille. "How is she?"
"I don't know, Mama. I saw her for twenty minutes."
"How did she seem?"
Cal leaned against the counter and drank his coffee and considered the question with more care than he wanted to. How had she seemed. She had seemed like someone doing a very competent impression of a person who was fine, which was different from being fine, but he was not going to say that to his mother at seven-fifteen on a Sunday because his mother would hold that observation and turn it over and find every implication inside it, which was her particular gift and his particular inconvenience.
"She seemed like herself," he said, which was true and also said nothing.
His mother made a sound that suggested she knew exactly what he was doing.
He took his coffee to the table.
His father, Eugène Broussard — who had been called Gene by everyone except his own mother, who had been called Chief by the crews he'd run for thirty years, and who was now seventy-two and retired and conducting his retirement with the same authority he'd conducted everything else — looked up from the paper. He had Cal's build, or Cal had his, broad and deliberate, and the same habit of stillness. People sometimes found it unnerving, the Broussard stillness. Like something large considering its options.
"Thought you'd sleep in," his father said.
"I never sleep in."
"You should occasionally." He turned a page. "Man who never sleeps in is either guilty of something or afraid of something."
"Or has a subfloor to sister on a Monday morning."
"That too." His father set the paper down and picked up his coffee and looked at his oldest son with the directness that had made lesser men uncomfortable on job sites for three decades. "Mabry house."
"Yes sir."
"You talked to the girl yet?"
"Briefly."
"She know about the Tate situation?"
Cal set his mug down. "Not yet."
His father was quiet for a moment. Beau appeared from the hallway, still in socks, and slid into his chair with the boneless ease of a man who had not yet fully committed to being vertical. He reached for the biscuit plate. Their mother appeared from the stove with the andouille and a bowl of grits and set them on the table and sat and they said grace — his father leading it, short and sincere, the way he'd always done it, no performance — and then they ate.
"The Tate situation," Beau said, through a biscuit.
"Don't," Cal said.
"I'm just saying."
"I know what you're saying."
"You're going to have to tell her."
"I know that."
"Sooner or later she's going to find out that Reverend Tate has been telling half the town that Miss Cora promised him —"
"Beau." His father said it quietly, and Beau closed his mouth with the efficiency of long practice.
The table was quiet for a moment. Outside, the neighborhood was waking up — a dog, a car, the distant sound of someone's lawnmower making one last pre-cold-front argument.
The situation with Reverend Tate was not, legally, a situation. Cal had talked to an attorney friend in Baton Rouge about it two months ago, when he'd first heard what Tate was saying around town. A verbal promise made to a third party was not enforceable. Cora Mabry's estate would pass as the will and the power of attorney dictated, which meant Luanne's decision, which meant Savannah's decision. The house was Savannah's to sell.
But Calder's Bend was not a courtroom.
And Reverend Harlan Tate had buried half this town's parents, including Cal's own grandmother, and had been Cora Mabry's friend for forty years, and had been quietly telling people since Cora moved to Meadow Pines that Cora had told him she wanted the house to stay in the community — to go to someone who would keep it, not flip it, not tear it down for a subdivision lot.
Whether Cora had actually said that, or whether Tate had heard what he hoped to hear and built a structure on it, Cal didn't know. He hadn't been in the room. What he knew was that when Savannah Mabry listed that house and accepted an offer from an outside developer — which was the likely scenario, because developers were the ones with cash and speed and no sentiment — there were going to be people in Calder's Bend who felt that something had been violated, and some of those people were going to say so, and they were going to say it to her face, because that was how this town worked.
He should tell her. He knew he should tell her.
He had been telling himself he'd tell her once the work was underway, once they'd established something workable between them, once it didn't feel like dropping a complication on someone who'd just arrived and hadn't had time to find her footing.
He was aware this reasoning had a self-serving quality he wasn't proud of.
"The foundation on the northeast corner," his father said, returning to the paper in a way that wasn't quite returning to the paper. "How bad?"
"Two of the piers need replacement. The sill plate on that corner has some rot. It's manageable — two, three days of work once I get under there and see the full picture."
"But it adds to the timeline."
"Possibly."
"And the cost."
"The estate covers repairs up to the listing value. Luanne authorized the scope."
His father nodded. He picked up the paper, then set it back down. "She was a good woman, Cora Mabry."
"Yes sir, she was."
"Deserves to have her house done right."
"That's the plan."
His father looked at him over the top of his coffee cup, and in that look was the specific communication that passed between them sometimes, the kind that didn't need words because they were too similar in the places that mattered — the look that said I see what you're doing and I see why you're doing it and I'm not going to make it easy for you to lie to yourself about it.
Cal held it and then went back to his grits.
He spent Sunday afternoon in the shop.
This was also not a decision so much as a condition — when something was unresolved in his mind, his hands needed to be occupied. He was refinishing a section of heart pine flooring he'd salvaged from a demolition job in Breaux Bridge, running the belt sander in long even passes, the smell of old wood and linseed oil filling the space. The shop was his, fully — he'd built the workbenches himself, organized the tool wall the way a person organized the inside of their own thinking, everything with a place and a reason for the place.
He thought about Deanna.
He didn't often think about Deanna, not actively — she existed in his history the way a healed break existed in a bone, as a change in structure rather than an ongoing pain. But he thought about her now because the situation required honesty, and honesty with himself meant not pretending that the decisions he made about Savannah Mabry were entirely rational.
Deanna had been from here. Had grown up three streets over, had known his family her whole life, had married him at twenty-six with what he'd believed was full knowledge of who he was and what his life in Calder's Bend looked like. What he'd learned, over six years of marriage, was that there was a difference between knowing something and accepting it. She'd known he wouldn't leave. She'd spent six years believing she could change that, and when she couldn't, she'd left instead.
He didn't blame her. He'd told himself that enough times that it was mostly true.
What the divorce had left him with, besides the house and the shop and the practice, was a very clear-eyed understanding of what he was and wasn't willing to do. He was not going to ask someone to stay somewhere they didn't want to stay. He was not going to be the reason someone felt trapped. And he was not going to let himself open a door that was going to close in three weeks when the repairs were done and the house was listed and Savannah Mabry drove back to Nashville with her rental car and her camera bag and whatever she was carrying that she hadn't fully put down.
That was the agreement he made with himself, there in the shop, running the sander in long even passes over the heart pine.
It was a reasonable agreement.
He finished the section he was working and turned the sander off and stood in the quiet of the shop with sawdust in the air and thought about twenty minutes in a half-repaired bedroom that morning — the way she'd appeared in the doorway in her socks, the precise quality of her attention, the mug of Cora's chicory coffee extended toward him without preamble or performance, placed within reach at exactly the right height, as if she'd read the geometry of the room without thinking about it.
He thought about the way she'd said you know the house.
Not you're the most available contractor or Luanne says you're qualified. You know the house. As if that were the thing that mattered. As if knowing something — really knowing it, down to its pier-and-beam bones — was a value she recognized and respected.
He picked up the Clifton from the workbench where he'd set it. He'd been reading it in pieces all weekend, the way he always read it, not front to back but wherever it fell open. It fell open now to won't you celebrate with me — the one he'd read so many times the page had softened at the edges.
what did i know / what did i know / of life's bare knuckle gift
He stood there a minute. The shop settled around him, wood and oil and quiet.
He put the book in his jacket pocket. He would go home. He would sleep. He would be at the Mabry house at eight tomorrow morning and he would do the work he was contracted to do, and he would be professional and correct and he would find the right moment to tell her about Reverend Tate, and he would not stand in doorways watching her try not to feel things, and he would not think about the way she took her coffee or where she placed a mug or the specific and inconvenient fact that she was the only woman in ten years who had looked at him long enough, steadily enough, that he'd had to think about whether to look back.
He turned off the shop light.
He sat in his truck for a moment before starting it, in the dark of the parking lot, the Clifton on the seat beside him.
What did I know.
He started the truck and drove home and did not, for the record, sleep particularly well.