Married on Purpose

Chantelle Verrett checked the walk-in temperature before she checked anything else in her life, and she checked it now, on her phone, in the conference room at Marchand & Boudreaux on the eleventh floor of a building on Poydras Street that smelled like carpet glue and somebody's lunch. She had been in that room four times in nine years, always about money, and she had never once sat down in it without doing this first.

Thirty-nine degrees. Fine. The compressor had held overnight, which meant the sixty pounds of shrimp Tobias had signed for on Tuesday would still be sixty pounds of shrimp at four o'clock, and Wednesday would go up the way Wednesday always went up. She turned the phone face down on the table and folded her hands on top of it.

Her uncle Rousseau took the chair across from her instead of beside her, which told her something, and unbuttoned his jacket to sit, which told her something else. It was a good jacket. It was always a good jacket. He had driven in from Metairie in it and he would drive back out to Metairie in it and somewhere in between he would come by the club and stand at the bar with his elbow on the brass and say her grandmother's name to two people who had loved her.

"Chantelle," he said.

"Uncle."

"You look tired, baby."

"It's Wednesday," she said, which was an answer if you knew the room. Wednesday the band played. Wednesday had never gone dark, not in sixty-four years, not the week her grandmother buried her husband and not the February just gone, when they had done the service on the day of the funeral with Peach playing the low slow stuff and forty seats full of people who had known Odile Verrett since she wore her hair in two plaits. Chantelle had worked that room herself. She had carried plates. She had counted the drawer at one in the morning and stood on the sidewalk in her coat with the keys in her fist, and then she had gone upstairs and slept four hours and done the liquor order.

Ansel Marchand came in with a folder and a court file and a young woman who set a legal pad in front of him and left. Marchand was seventy-one and built like a heron, and he had been her grandmother's lawyer before Cordell had been anybody's, and he sat down the way old men sit down, in stages.

"Miss Chantelle," he said. "Mr. Verrett. Thank you both for coming down. This won't take long."

Cordell came in last and closed the door and did not sit at the head of the table or beside his partner. He took the chair at the far corner with a yellow pad and a pen he did not uncap, and he nodded to her once, and that was all. Dark suit, no tie. The grey at his temple had come in more since Christmas. He had a way of sitting still that other people did not have — no fidget, no throat-clearing, both feet flat — and she had known him since she was seventeen and had still not worked out what it was covering.

Professional, she thought. He's been in a hundred of these.

"The succession was opened Monday," Marchand said. "Second of March. Judge Pichon's section. The testament is olographic, which means your mother wrote it out in her own hand and signed it, Mr. Verrett, and we've had the handwriting proved, and it's a valid testament under our law. I filed it. Cordell didn't draft it and hasn't touched it, and I want that said out loud at the top of the meeting because it will matter to somebody someday."

"Nobody here thinks Odile got talked into anything," Rousseau said pleasantly. "You'd have had better luck talking a river uphill."

"No," Marchand agreed. "You would not."

He opened the folder. Chantelle watched his hands. There was a copy in front of her too, face down, and she did not turn it over, because her grandmother had been very clear about the difference between reading ahead and being read to, and because she wanted to hear it in Marchand's mouth first.

"There are some bequests," he said. "The Buick to Elouise, which I'm told is a joke and I'm not going to try to get to the bottom of."

"It's a joke," Chantelle said.

"The insurance to the church and the burial society, which is already handled. The furniture in the house on Touro to Mr. Verrett, specifically named. And then the corner."

The corner. That was what her grandmother had called it, all her life, never the club and never the business, the way you'd say the corner and everybody on four blocks knew which one. The two-storey brick at the end with the brass rail along the bar and the apartment over the bandstand and the forty seats and the kitchen that flooded twice a decade. Chantelle had done her homework on a prep table in that kitchen. She had learned fractions off a liquor invoice.

Marchand read it out. He read slowly, in the flat voice lawyers use so as not to be caught putting weight anywhere, and she heard the first part of the sentence — the property at the corner, and the business conducted therein, and everything in it — and something in her chest sat down, because there it was, the thing she had not let herself want in a room with witnesses.

Then he kept reading.

"— to whichever of my heirs is married at the time, or becomes married within ninety days of the opening of my succession; and if none is, then to the residue of my estate."

The air conditioning came on somewhere above the ceiling tiles.

Chantelle did not move her hands. She was aware of them, folded, on top of her phone. She was aware of the little pulse in the side of her neck. What she did, because it was what she had always done, what she had been doing since she was seventeen years old and standing at a register with a pencil, was the arithmetic.

Second of March. Ninety days from the second of March. March had twenty-nine left in it, April thirty, that was fifty-nine, May thirty-one, that was ninety on the thirty-first. A Sunday. The last day of May was a Sunday, she knew that without counting, because she had already built the spring schedule around Memorial Day weekend and the Sunday after it. Ninety days landed on a Sunday supper, piano only, no full band.

She had run the number before Marchand finished the sentence, and the second number came right behind it, the way it always did: two hundred fourteen thousand dollars still owed on the note, payable whether anybody was married or not.

Across the table, her uncle exhaled.

It was not a big sound. It was the sound a man makes when the cards come around and he has been sitting there all night with nothing, and Chantelle heard it and understood it completely, and understood too that he had not meant her to. He looked at the ceiling for a second like a man being handed something he'd have to carry, and then he arranged his face.

"Well," Rousseau said. "Mama."

"There's a residue clause," Marchand said. "If the condition fails, the corner falls into the residue, and the residue is to be liquidated and divided. That is the whole of it."

"Divided how," Chantelle said. Her voice came out even. She was almost interested to hear it.

"Between the two of you, by representation. It's not the part your grandmother spent any time on."

"No," Chantelle said. "She wouldn't have."

She turned her copy over, finally, and looked at the handwriting. That was the thing that got under. Not the clause — the hand. Odile Verrett's e's had always leaned back like they were thinking about it. She had written the whole of it out at the kitchen table on Touro, probably in the afternoon, probably with the television on with no sound the way she liked it, and she had written married and then she had gone on and written the next word without stopping, and there was no scratch-out anywhere on the page.

"When did she write this," Chantelle said.

"It's dated the ninth of October," Marchand said. "She brought it in herself. She sat where your uncle's sitting."

October. Chantelle counted again, because counting was the only thing that had ever held still for her. October to February was four months. Four months in which her grandmother had come to the club twice a week and sat at table eleven and complained about the roux and had said nothing.

At the far corner of the table, Cordell Boudreaux had not moved at all.

She glanced at him — a quarter second, no more — and got what she always got: the stillness, the flat courtroom quiet, both feet on the floor. His pen was still capped. He had not written one word on the yellow pad, and Chantelle noticed that and filed it under nothing to write down, because what else would it be. He was Marchand's partner. He had been the family's lawyer for eleven years. He had probably sat in on the reading of a hundred testaments and learned to keep his face out of it, and if he was being careful this morning it was because there were two heirs in the room and one of them had just been handed a clock.

"Can it be attacked," Rousseau said. Nobody in the room mistook it for idle. "Hypothetically. A condition like that."

"It can be opposed," Marchand said. "Anything can be opposed. Whether it should be is a different conversation, and it isn't one I'm going to have with either of you across the same table, so I'll say this once to you both: you each need your own lawyer now, and it isn't this firm, and I'd like that done this week."

"Ansel." Rousseau spread his hands, wounded, warm. "It's family."

"That's why."

Chantelle straightened the copy of the testament so its edge ran parallel with the edge of the table. She did it without thinking. Then she made herself stop and put both hands in her lap.

Ninety days. Married in ninety days. She was thirty-eight years old and she had been on one date in fourteen months, with a man who sold restaurant equipment and talked through the second set, and she had spent the whole of that evening watching the door because Tobias was new on ice.

"Miss Chantelle," Marchand said. "Do you want to ask me anything."

She thought about it honestly for a second, which was more than most people gave a question like that.

"Does the note change," she said. "Any of this touch the note?"

"No. The bank doesn't care who owns it. The bank cares that it gets paid."

"Then no," she said. "Thank you. That was the one that mattered."

She stood up. She put her phone in her bag and the copy of the testament in her bag after it, squared, and she buttoned her coat, and she shook Ansel Marchand's hand and thanked him for coming in on a morning he didn't have to. She thanked the young woman in the hall who had not done anything except carry a legal pad. She let her uncle kiss the side of her head and tell her that nobody was going to do anything hasty, baby, and she said no, of course not, and meant absolutely nothing by it.

Cordell walked her to the elevator. She had not asked him to.

"Chantelle."

"I'm all right."

"I didn't ask if you were all right."

She pushed the button. The panel over the doors said the car was on eleven, which meant it was right there, which meant she had about four seconds, and she found she was grateful for that in a way she'd have to look at later.

"You're going to tell me to get a lawyer," she said. "Ansel already did it."

"Get a good one. Not one who does closings." A beat. "There are things you can do inside ninety days that are worse than doing nothing."

"Are there things I can do that are better?"

He didn't answer straight away. That was the other thing about him — he left a silence sitting there instead of filling it, and every time, every single time, she was the one who ended up putting something in it.

"I'm working on it," he said.

The doors opened. She got in and turned around, and he was standing with his hands at his sides in the carpeted hall, not moving, watching her go down. Professional, she thought again, and pulled her coat closed.

On the sidewalk on Poydras the air was March-warm and smelled like the river and a fryer somewhere. She stood at the corner with her keys in her fist and made herself do the day in order, out loud, under her breath, because that was how you got through one: produce order in at eleven, ice, Peach at seven-thirty, forty seats, count the drawer.

Then she got in the truck, and she sat there with her hands on the wheel for longer than she would ever have admitted to anybody, doing the arithmetic again, hoping it came out different.

It did not. It was ninety days.

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

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