Held Over

VER ETT hung pink over the end of the block, missing its second R two years running, in the flat August light where nobody needed a sign lit at all. It was on early, which meant Elouise had thrown the switch at four instead of six again. Marielle had done the math on it in June, the first week she was back — four hundred dollars, one transformer, a man out of Chalmette who would come on a Tuesday — and had not said it out loud to anybody, the same way she had not said a certain name out loud since June, because in this family you did not walk in after twelve years gone and start pricing the neon, and you surely did not start pricing a man.

The front door was propped. In warm weather it was propped from doors at half five until the first set, but there was no set on a Monday and nothing about the hour that looked like service; the liquor truck had come at three and the fan was still in the hall pushing the room's air out at the sidewalk in slow warm shoves. She came in past it and let the smell take her the way it did every single time, which was annoying: scorched butter and lemon off the pass, lemon oil on the bar, black pepper, and under all of it the sweet chemical ghost of the pink cream Elouise bought in bulk for the brass rail. Twelve years of hotel ballrooms and load-in docks and a nine-hundred-seat room on Washington Avenue with a sound system worth more than this whole building, and one lungful of a dark supper club on Dauphine Street undid her in the doorway like she was nine years old with homework on a prep table.

Odile was over the register the way she had been since 1985, in a photograph taken seventeen years before it went up. Thirty-one years old in it, green dress, hair rolled, arms crossed, not smiling at anybody then and not about to start.

"I see you," Marielle told her, and went on back.

The tables were shoved end to end down at the far side of the bar, the small one against the big one under the photograph, the way family meal had been laid at four-thirty since before Marielle could see over the rail. Red beans, because Monday. Ronell had done them with the smoked neck bones and had put the pot straight on a folded towel on the bar instead of dishing them, and Anthony was eating standing up with his hip against the ice well the way he always did, because a man who has spent nine hours in front of a dish machine does not want to sit in a chair and be talked to. Tobias had a bar towel through his belt loop and a stack of the good glasses in front of him and was polishing them one-handed while he ate, which Elouise had told him about twice.

"Sit down," Chantelle said, without looking up. "You're standing there doing the room."

"I'm not doing the room."

"You're counting it."

She had been counting it. Forty seats, and eleven of them turned wrong to the stand, and table eleven with nothing on it and nobody near it, six months after February and still walked past like a wet patch on a floor.

Marielle sat down. Elouise pushed a bowl at her and then the hot sauce, and then reached over and put the back of her hand against Marielle's cheek for a second, which was as close as her great-aunt ever came to saying anything.

"You eating?"

"I'm eating, Aunt El."

"You were skinny when you got here and you're skinnier now."

"That's a lie and it's a nice one, so thank you."

Miss Ora came in at ten of five for her container, because on a dark Monday the ones with habits came anyway, and Elouise had been sending her home with Monday beans since Miss Ora's husband died. She stopped four feet inside the door with her purse over her forearm and put a hand up, palm out, like a woman stopping traffic.

"Lord," Miss Ora said. "There he is."

Nobody at the table asked who.

"That is Rousseau's whole face," she said, coming on. "That's his face on you, baby. Around the eyes and the whole — " she made a small circular gesture at her own jaw, generous, delighted, like she was giving out a compliment and had every reason to think it was one. "You know I knew you when you were up under this bar."

"Yes ma'am."

"And your daddy still at the end of that bar every Thursday like the Lord put him there."

"Yes ma'am, that's him."

Mr. Alcide came in behind her for the ice he was not supposed to have and said it too, in his own way, which was to look at Marielle for a while and then say, "Rousseau's girl," to Chantelle rather than to Marielle, as though confirming something on a form. Then he took his bag of ice and went. Tobias, who had heard all of it, went on polishing his glasses and did not look up, and Marielle thought, not for the first time, that the boy was going to be somebody's best employee for the next forty years.

She ate her beans. She had been back since June and she had been hearing it since June, and the thing about it was that it was true. She did have his face. She had his face and his hands and his head for numbers, and she had spent fourteen years spending the difference — the two she had stayed in this room after the chalkboard, not speaking about any of it, and the twelve since the morning she took the Houston job.

When the table cleared, Chantelle stayed.

She had the stillness on her that she had not put down since May — deep brown skin with the warm red under it, locs pinned up, absolutely no motion anywhere in her, the specific stillness of a woman who had won a building in open court in front of her own uncle and had not slept right since. She reached under the bar and put an envelope on the wood between them and turned it around with two fingers so it faced Marielle.

"You want to see it, or you want me to tell it?"

"Tell it, then let me see it."

"Two hundred and fourteen thousand," Chantelle said. "That's the note. It hasn't moved since spring, because I've been paying interest and payroll and the fish order. It's a balloon and it matures the fifteenth of October." She set two fingers on the envelope, flat. "I went and sat with the man at the bank week before last. He'll renew it three years if I put forty thousand of principal against it before maturity. If I don't, they call it." She turned her hand over. "Ten of it is sitting in a savings book at that same bank. I have been putting it by since February and I have not touched it for payroll or the fish order or anything else, and it does not go against the note until the day I hand it over, which is why the note has not moved. So it is thirty I have to find."

"And if they call it."

"Then I sell it to the nice quiet man from the hotel group who has already offered twice, and I'll have won it in court so I could hand it over in a conference room."

Marielle didn't say anything, because there wasn't anything, and because Chantelle would have heard the shape of a comfort coming and hated it.

"Forty seats," she said instead.

"What's a full Saturday clearing right now, after food cost and the two extra on the floor?"

"About what it cleared in 1998."

"That's not a number, Chantelle."

"No," her cousin said, "it isn't," and for the first time all afternoon something moved in her face, which was almost a smile and definitely wasn't happiness. "That's the other thing. Since February the room is not full. Peach comes in on the first note every Wednesday like he has for thirty-one years and we do all right on Wednesday, and Thursday, Friday, Saturday I've been papering with a trio out of the Marigny that nobody has ever once come here to hear. We have a music room with no music in it. And I can run a kitchen. I have run this kitchen since I was twenty-six. I cannot book a band, El cannot book a band, and my grandmother is not available."

She slid the envelope the last two inches.

"So the music is yours," Chantelle said. "That's what I'm doing. I'm giving you the music side. Wednesday through Saturday, the stand, the money for it, and the calendar."

Marielle put her hand flat on the envelope and did not pick it up yet. There was a warmth coming up through her chest that she had absolutely no intention of showing anybody at this bar, and there was something colder under it, which she also had no intention of showing.

"You're giving it to me because the note's due."

"Yes."

"Not because anybody's decided anything about me."

"Marielle." Chantelle looked at her, level. "I'm giving it to you because you are the only Verrett who has ever done this for a living, and because I have got fifty-nine days and I do not have the luxury of getting to how anybody feels about your daddy. If it makes you feel better, nobody in this family trusts anybody. It's not personal to you."

"That does make me feel better."

"I thought it might."

Marielle took a pencil out of the jar by the register — Odile's jar, still full of pencils sharpened by a woman who had been dead since February — and turned the liquor invoice over and started working on the back of it, out loud, because that was how she had always done it and Houston had never broken her of it.

"Forty seats. Turn them once on a Wednesday, once and a half Friday and Saturday if the band is right and people stand at the bar. Call it three thousand a week toward the note off a full house four nights, and I am being generous to myself to call it that. First Wednesday in September — that's the second — and from there to the fifteenth of October is six weeks and change. Six weeks of full rooms is eighteen, on top of your ten." She wrote it. She looked at it a while. "That's twenty-eight thousand. On a perfect run. Every night full, nobody's compressor dies, and the fish order holds."

"Forty's the number."

"I know what the number is, I'm telling you what the room does. Twenty-eight is twelve thousand short and that is the good version. And it is with the band paid, which is the part nobody ever writes down. Grandmother paid the band first. In cash. On Thursdays."

"And the bank last," Elouise said, from the pass, where she had been standing for some time with a ledger under her arm and a pen behind her Sunday head. "Sixty-four years."

"So I've got six hundred a night for a band." Marielle underlined it. "Twenty-four hundred a week. Run it the full ten weeks, September through the first Saturday in November, and that is twenty-four thousand dollars, and for that money in this city, at four nights a week, standing on a forty-seat stand, I need a name. Not a good band. A name. Somebody people will come out on a Wednesday in September for, and go tell four people about." She began writing them down, the way she had written down a hundred lists like it for rooms that could pay ten times this. "Boo Renaud won't leave the cruise ships. The Tillman brothers have got the casino through New Year's and they'd want three thousand a night to break it. Cheryl Ann Boisseau, if she's off the road, but she won't do four nights, she's fifty-six years old and her knee — "

She stopped.

She stopped because she had come to the end of the list the way she had known she would come to the end of the list, since June, since the first week she was back, since about four minutes after Miss Ora put her hand up at the door and said there he is; and she looked at the invoice and the twenty-four thousand and the fifteenth of October and did not say the name, because if she did not say it out loud then it was not a plan yet, it was only arithmetic, and arithmetic could be re-run.

The ice machine cycled in the back hall, loud, on the same schedule it had kept since 2011.

"Say it," Elouise said.

"Aunt El — "

"Girl." Elouise came down off the pass and put the ledger on the bar and did not open it. "You want me to say it for you? I'll say it. I'm seventy-three years old, I have said worse in this kitchen." She looked at Marielle with her sister's exact flat eyes. "Desmond Rideau."

Nobody moved. Anthony had gone. Tobias had eleven glasses left and did not pick one up.

"He's in town," Elouise said. "He's been in town since June, at that hotel bar off of Canal with the carpet, playing to people waiting on a table. His mother told me at the store."

"He won't come back here," Marielle said.

"No," Elouise agreed comfortably. "He surely won't."

"And somebody would have to tell Peach."

"Somebody would."

Chantelle had not said anything at all. She was looking at Marielle with the stillness on her, doing the same arithmetic from the other end, and when she spoke it was in her inside voice, which in this family was the voice you used for the violent part.

"Can you get him?"

Marielle folded the invoice in half along the crease, and then in half again, and put it in her back pocket with the twenty-four thousand dollars and the fifteenth of October and the name she had not said folded up inside it.

"No," she said.

She went out past the register and told the woman in the green dress goodnight, and stood on the corner a minute in the heat with the pink light coming down on her, and did what she had been raised to do and trained twelve years to do and could not stop doing if you paid her: she started working out what it would cost.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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