Page 54 of The Big Easy & Other Lies
“Of course I can,” she said, her voice suddenly soft and creepy. “Where will you sleep if I kick you out? On the streets? In some foster home?”
I considered this, her worst threat. She might do it. She was impulsive like that. But I didn’t care. I’d figure something out, but I wouldn’t crawl back upstairs and drown in garbage for her stupid scavenger hunt.
“Kick me out,” I said. “But if you do, I’m making a phone call to the health department. Then you lose everything. You think they’re going to pat you on the head and tell you to hire a housekeeper? This place is a hazard, Delphine. The kind that gets condemned. And you’re going to lose it the same way you lost Pawpaw Landry’s mill.”
She slapped me, a stinging blow across my cheek that knocked my head back. I stumbled, and grabbed for the banister to keep my balance, but I landed on the bottom stair, too shocked for the pain to register yet. In ten years, it was the first time she’d ever struck me.
“I’d have that mill if your father hadn’t killed Remy,” she said, stepping closer to loom over me. “And you prove every day that you are as selfish and evil as Drake Simoneaux was.”
I pulled myself to my feet, my hand covering my cheek. “I’ll find your owl for you. But if you don’t want me to call the health department, then you’ll back off. I’m sick of being at your mercy. You don’t have any, no matter what my mother thought.” A shadow flickered through her eyes, but she said nothing. “And here’s one more thing. If I want to graduate from LaSalle and get out of here, then I have to finish my capstone project. And that takes fabric. A lot. I’m using what I find in the stacks. I bet Pawpaw Landry would be ashamed you let it rot like that.” And since I could see it hurt, I added, “He’d be ashamed of this house. He’d be ashamed ofyou.” Her hand flew up again, but I caught her wrist and held it, even though my hand shook. “Don’t touch me again. I’ll only take what I need of the material. You leave me alone and you’ll live in this pit undisturbed.” Livvie would be proud of me for sticking up for myself, but I wondered if I would pay too high of a price for doing it.
Delphine jerked her arm away and spat at my feet. “I always knew this was in you.” She reeled and hobbled back to the den.
“This is what you made me,” I said, softly to her retreating back. If she heard, she didn’t show it.
* * *
I’d mostly been looking for the owl painting in Remy’s room for the last week, but there wasn’t any fabric there, so I switched to the downstairs spare bedroom. The owl wasn’t my priority anymore, but I’d keep my word and watch for it. I dreaded running across more rat nests and pet remains, but I had a better chance of finding material in here I could use.
If I were only trying to find the Audubon, opening the door to this room would have discouraged me completely. The mess was overwhelming: a huge jumble of old clothes, broken appliances, newspapers, magazines, and paperwork. However, since there was a chance I could salvage stuff for my capstone, I took a deep breath and waded in.
A pall hung over the search. The sick feeling I’d woken with had quieted but not disappeared, even after a shower and a yogurt breakfast. I needed to get in a different head space, one free of Delphine. I pulled up a jazz playlist. Rhett’s influence, definitely.
What was he doing? Replaying those two kisses on an endless loop like I was? Probably not. Those weren’t exactly Westley-and-Buttercup kisses. He’d probably had a hundred more real kisses with other girls, the spectacular kind you see at the end of epic movies. Open-mouthed, hungry. The kind you never, ever want to watch with your great aunt in the recliner next to you.
But I liked our two kisses. They were mine, and I hoarded them as fiercely as Delphine did her junk. I replayed them to the jazz pouring through my earbuds, and my fingers flew faster through the fabric. Within minutes I lucked out with a few yards of gray flannel in good condition. It wouldn’t work for Urban Renewal, but I could use it elsewhere. Like for a winter jacket, neglected orphan that I was.
After another hour, the kiss memory had taken on the glow of a soft-focus lens shot, Rhett’s head lowering to mine, my lips rising to meet his. It was ridiculous and delicious, but embellishing the moment made my work so much easier. I’d already sorted through the whole stack. Most of it was mold-stained and unusable, but I’d found a cream-on-cream damask which nearly hummed beneath my fingertips. It was an old-fashioned fabric, usually used in home décor for throw pillows and furniture upholstery, but it had potential.
The next two hours sucked, saved from pure torture by kiss replays and the music in my ears. Even working as fast as I could, I’d created an area barely six feet square of examined boxes. Great. That only left about two hundred fifty square feet to go.
I groaned. Until work tonight, there wasn’t anything else to do besides stare at my phone and will Rhett to call. I checked it every few minutes in case the beep of an incoming text message got lost in the jazz riffs.
Next box. Clothes. Two huge bags of K-Mart clearance items shoved in until the sides of the box bulged out, every piece with its price tag still attached. The first shirt I pulled out was in a size Delphine hadn’t seen in at least a decade as she shrunk and withered. Hm. I couldn’t repurpose this polyester floral monstrosity into anything good, but maybe there was something else in there...
* * *
Three more hours dragged past, but at the end of it, I had uncovered one more fabric pile with one full bolt of black broadcloth and two sizable remnants, one a forest green broadcloth and the other a traditional black and white houndstooth. So far all the fabric piles had yielded plain weaves, no prints besides the houndstooth and damask.
It was better than nothing, which is what I could afford if I wanted to keep my anemic savings intact. But cottons would be so difficult to turn into high-end concept pieces. I wished I knew more about hand-painting and manipulating fabrics to make more interesting textiles, but that was what design school was for: to learn that stuff. For now, I’d have to be creative with accessories and styling the outfits to add interest to the homely fabrics. I thought of Rhett’s Lucky Dog necklace suggestion and smiled. Maybe notthatcreative.
I’d also kept a few things from Delphine’s K-Mart bags. A housecoat of lightly quilted pale pink polyester begged for a makeover into a modified puffy vest, and a cheap cotton striped blouse might soon experience life as a shirt dress.
I had cleared another section of floor, slightly larger than the first. It was a small dent, and as I looked around, discouragement hovered like that Charlie Brown character who always had a scribble over his head.
The past week had given me all kinds of reasons to relate to Mom’s fairy tale Trista. Wicked witches, escaping to hang out with handsome strangers, dressing in something besides our usual rags, accepting the help of wily friends. But this moment, as I stood back and let the reality of Delphine’s hoarding hit, despair flooded me like an oily slick, persistent and inescapable. Five hours had yielded a corner of...not even order. I was like Trista this way too, with her bucket of tears, scrubbing away at a stone floor that was never free of dirt.
The feeling dragged me to the floor. I turned off my music and let the earbuds pool in my lap, staring at the box in front of me because that was all I had the energy to do. It showed the faded letters of the Kellogg’s Corporation. A silverfish crept up the slight slope of one cursive L. It moved forward in tiny spurts and stops, its dun-colored wings barely visible against the cardboard. Had it explored enough of this mess to know where to find what I needed?
I didn’t know how long I’d been watching it when my phone rang and scared me.Rhett, said the caller ID.
“Hello?” I tried to sound normal. My stomach tightened right back to the point it had been before he’d leaned down for the first kiss.
“Hi.” He laughed, and it had a nervous edge. “I, uh, just wanted to say thanks again for inviting me last night.”
“Thanks for coming,” I said. My whole face warmed at the phraselast night.
“I was thinking,” he said, and I hoped it was about kissing me. “You said you were doing that frilly skirt and that black dress you drew for your exhibition in November, right?”
