She knew the story, but he repeated it to her anyway: how Louis Lécuyer had come to the Deep South from Quebec, searching for a warmer, more profitable life. He’d met Nanette Raintree during a brief stay in Georgia. She’d been working as a seamstress for a tailor, and Louis had stopped in to have his favorite coat mended.
“You have the prettiest little fingers,” Mercy recalled his grandfather’s first words to his grandmother. “Have dinner with me,chéri.”
Louis had faced the fragility of his dreams in Louisiana: there would be no riches and fine houses for his family. But he’d made friends with the swamp, and he’d opened a small store on the waterfront, one that he would eventually sell to Lew’s father, passed down to Lew.
There were photos of Larry and Evie, younger and unlined, and of other family friends, all of whom Mercy had lost touch with after his father’s passing.
And then, at the bottom of the stack, a photo Ava had been hoping to stumble across. A pretty blonde woman in a flowered cotton dress, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of the tar paper house, a blanket-wrapped baby in her arms. An old photo, older than the shots of Mercy as a teenager. A strained, unhappy look on the woman’s face. Tuft of black hair on the baby’s head.
“Your mother,” Ava guessed, and his expression proved her right: a reflection of the woman in the photo, detached, displeased.
He made a sound in the back of his throat. “Dee.” He nodded. “Poor Daddy. He thought all a whore really needed to turn her around was love. He was wrong.”
Ava sat back on her hands, a little stunned.
As if sensing it, Mercy glanced up at her. “I mean a real whore. For money.” His smile was mocking. “I’m probably lucky I wasn’t born with HIV.”
She groped for something to say.
He glanced away from her, toward the photo in her hand. “Anyhow, she’s got it now. She’s dying, Larry said. That’s why Evie wanted to go walking and get you out of the house, so he could tell me I need to go see her, one last time, before it’s too late.”
Ava swallowed. “How long do they think she has?”
“A couple weeks. A couple days. Who knows. Her organs are shutting down.”
“We should go see her, then.”
“We?”
“Yeah. I’m coming with you.”
“Nope,” he said, pushing up onto his hands and getting to his feet. “Absolutely not.”
“Mercy.”
Her tone brought him up short halfway back to the couch. He turned to her as Audioslave droned in the background. His brows lifted.
“Mercy,” she repeated, “I’m not asking you to unpack all your baggage. I’ve never asked you that, because I know you don’t want to. But your mother’s dying, and when you go to see her, I’m going with you. Because I’m not the kid you protect anymore. I’m your wife, and I’m going to support you.”
He folded his arms. “And that’s just how it is?”
“Yeah, it is.”
He walked back to her slowly, socked feet quiet across the carpet. His stride looked like a predatory stalk. “How do you think you’re gonna get there?”
She felt a smile flickering at the corners of her mouth. “The same way you get there.”
“Hm. That’ll be kinda hard considering you’ll be tied to the shower curtain rod when I leave.”
“Gosh, I married the sweetest man.”
He snorted as he lowered to the rug in front of her, crouched so she only had to tip her head back a little to meet his eyes. “You knew what you were getting into.”
“So did you,” she shot back. Then, softening. “What are you so afraid I’ll think?”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. “You don’t understand how badly I hate that woman. I don’t want you to see…that side of my blood.”
“Why not?” she pressed, gently.
