Page 6 of Broken Bayou
“There’s a drought.”
I shake my head. “Well, that’s ... terrible.”
“And there’s a schoolteacher missing. Her parents think she drove her car into that bayou.”
“What? That’s horrible.”
I approach the corner of Main and Bridge Streets. A flashing stoplight sits at the corner. That’s new. I roll to a stop even though it onlyflashes yellow. The guy behind me revs his engine. Late-model truck, no muffler. Then he lays on the horn.
“What in the world is that?” Mama says.
“Some asshole behind me.” I yell out the open window, “Go around!” There are still no cars in sight. He’d have no problem passing. I motion again.
The old truck revs a second time, then starts to ease past my window. His windows are down, and his eyes stay on me as he rolls by. He looks rough. Thin, unshaven face marked with scars. I make sure my doors are locked, but he doesn’t stop. He turns left on Bridge Street and disappears. Once he’s gone, I release my breath. I’m not in danger, I tell myself. The fear I’m feeling is from an internal source, not external. I don’t need to shift blame to a random guy driving an old pickup.
“That place is gonna come back to haunt us,” Mama says.
I scan the intersection. Ned’s Pharmacy sits on the corner to my right, next to Ace’s Hardware and Farm Supplies. Not Ace Hardware. Ace’s. You’d be hard pressed to find a business in this town without the owner’s name in front of it. The two stores are part of the same white clapboard structure with a deep overhanging eave and small wooden steps leading up to the doors. Steps, no ramps, which is surprising, considering the median age in this town has to be north of seventy. Young people don’t stay in small towns anymore. Then I notice another storefront next to Ace’s. An antique store. I squint through the setting sun at it. It seems familiar, even though I don’t remember an antique store ever being there.
“Nothing’s coming back to haunt us,” I say. I ease north of Bridge Street, past an overgrown parking lot with an abandoned, rotten shell I remember as a Dairy King. “Screw Dairy Queen. We got the DairyKinghere,” Mama always said.
“I’m tired, Mama. I gotta go.”
She coughs and clears her throat again. “Love you, sweet girl.”
That’s when I hit the brakes. Krystal Lynn is not alove youkind of lady. “Mama, what’s wrong?”
There’s no answer. I check my phone. She’s hung up, but my screen is full of missed emails, messages, and voicemails. A text from Amy asking if I’m okay; a voicemail from a reporter wanting a comment. The buzzards are circling indeed. Even Harper Beaumont has chimed in. She messaged me that she hopes I get the mental care I so obviously need. As if. That’smylane, dammit. My fingers itch to reply to Harper. Something smart and snarky. But I understand once you are in the hole, quit digging. I’m just the new bull’s-eye for them to shoot at. To be fair, though, I did hand them the gun.
I start moving again, and the last building on the corner catches my eye. A small redbrick box with a sign readingNAN’SCAFÉover the door. But it’s not the sign or the building that has my full attention. It’s the parking lot. Specifically, the two news vans sitting off by themselves in it. I may not be from this town, but I know enough to understand four news vans is not the norm here. Would four news vans be here for one missing person?
The sun is lower through the front windshield but still as hot. Just because it sets doesn’t mean relief is coming. I remember that. Just like I remember the building I glimpse as I start driving again. Taylor’s Marketplace and Bait Shop. There was a little silver bell above the door. The smell of stale tobacco and burgers frying coated the interior. I had a part-time job there every summer thanks to a sweet woman named Ermine Taylor. She taught me about making money and saving money. And she paid me in cash, always slipping a few extra bills in for “fun money,” she’d say with a wink.
The white paint around the large transom windows and on the clapboard exterior looks fresh. The covered porch looks new, too, and the double-hung doors are painted pale pink, not green like when I was here last. Its two-story facade looks like a square wedding cake with the adornments on the front instead of the top.
I see Mama inside in her red cowboy hat and red cowboy boots. Her cowgirl phase. Her throaty laugh as she poured peanuts into my sister’s Coca-Cola bottle while purring to Ermine Taylor about how therewere no good-looking men in this town. Mabry clutching my hand, laughing as I pretended to smoke my candy cigarette. That memory is quickly replaced by another that recalls a name I’ve so far kept out of my head. But seeing this old place brings it charging back.
Ms. Ermine and her husband, Mr. Billy, taught me to use the register the summer I turned fourteen. I was ringing up a customer when a long-legged creature with tanned arms and a lean body sauntered in and promptly ignored me, making me wish for the first time that I liked makeup as much as my mother.
“Travis Arceneaux,” I whisper.
His name on my lips conjures up images of late nights on the levee and long hot days on Shadow Bluff’s front porch. But teenage infatuation isn’t all it conjures up. I shut out the next thought as if I’ve slammed a door. The ability to compartmentalize is a gift every therapist should embrace. A way to keep the negative aspects of the job from seeping into everyday life—the patients you can’t help, the frustrations, the trauma of children. It may also be the only thing that can get me through being back in this town.
I refocus on the road and slow down even more. If I don’t, I’ll miss the narrow unpaved path I’m looking for. When I spoke to the lawyer Mr. LaSalle yesterday, he sounded a bit perplexed that I’d be traveling to Broken Bayou for some very old boxes. He offered to ship them, but I declined, explaining I had a few days off work and really wanted to revisit the town where I’d spent my summers. That’s when he told me the Aunts donated their home and land to the local preservation society, and that group was in the process of taking ownership, but he was sure they wouldn’t mind if I stayed there while in town. I agreed before I realized what I was agreeing to, and now that I’m this close, and after the events at the Sack and Save, I wonder if I should’ve chosen a hotel in Baton Rouge instead.
A telephone pole with a Missing poster stapled onto it marks my turn. The eyes of a young woman watch me from the torn paper. Is this the missing schoolteacher Mama spoke of? I try to place her, maybesomeone from this town, from my past, but I can’t. Like with Johnette, I don’t recognize her. So much of this town stayed sharp and in focus, while other parts dulled and faded like that picture. There’s a number to call with information, and I hope for her sake, and her family’s, she’s not in that bayou. But the news vans I saw earlier might indicate otherwise.
I turn and crawl down the narrow dead-end lane, through a tunnel of live oaks. Twenty years have passed, yet it still looks the same, overgrown and remote. The closer I get to the end of the road, the more shallow my breathing becomes, like I’m somehow going up in elevation instead of driving below sea level.
I stop at an open gate at the dead end. The same gate Mama charged in her cutoffs and boots, flying over itthe cowgirl way, as she called it. Hands high on the top rung and flipping her body over like the Kilgore Rangerette she never was. Always reminding Mabry and me she would have been if her mama hadn’t been so drunk that she’d been unable to drive Krystal Lynn to the tryouts.
I glance at my phone, swipe it open. I want to call Mabry, tell her where I am, but she won’t answer. She was so angry the last time we spoke that she promised we’d never talk again. I figured it was an empty threat. A way to scare me. But she kept her promise.
I decide to text instead.
Guess who? You’ll never believe where I am.
I inhale a slow breath and release it even slower; then I pull through the gate.
