Page 6 of Meet Me in the Garden

“Maybe a chain of them.”

They go on this way, Adele gaining back her confidence the longer they talk. I’ll have to help Maman now if I want to go to Hattie’s and the garden.

“Good luck,” Adele says when I head to the door.

“I feel like I’m walking into a trap.”

“You two make it sound like she’s a monster,” Claire says.

“She is,” I say, and slip out before Claire can scold me.

Spread along Maman’s dining table are boxes of silver. I don’t know what this is, why she’s called me over here. I wait, bracing, but she doesn’t say a word. I use baking soda, a bowl of water, a soft cloth. Spoon by spoon I think: She sent him away. He got sick and he died. Over and over, until two dozen soup spoons are shining, and then all the dessert spoons, too. Maman and I still silent. Movement in their kitchen. Jean Pierre, opening the cabinets.

I push the teaspoons away, leave them unfinished.

On my way out, I stop in the entry by Papa’s favorite paintings. To the left: a pink sunset over an ocean horizon. To the right: birds in flight against a blue sky. I press my lips to the canvases, one and then the other, like kissing both his cheeks.

I go straight from Maman’s house to Hattie. Cooler here in her sewing room, easier to breathe. She fixes us hot milky tea in cups with saucers. Hand-stitches lace to the top of a blouse. I lie on the love seat next to her, paging through magazines, wondering how many girls in New Orleans lead secret lives like we do.

Later, she’s behind her sewing machine, and I draw her in my sketchbook. Her look of concentration. Broad shoulders and bare face, lashes full, hiding her eyes. I want to wake up with her in the mornings and fall asleep in her bed. I want to watch her brush her hair. It’s a good drawing, my best in a while. There’s love in it. I show it to her. She sets her sewingdown, takes the sketchbook from me. Studies it for a long time. If I don’t do something, I’ll be gone in less than three months. I need to tell her. We need to talk about it. We need to figure out a plan.

“It’s so good,” she says. “Really. Too good for you to keep. We have to cut it out.”

“But what if I want to look at it later, when I’m alone?”

She shakes her head. “Imagine the questions your sisters would ask if they found a drawing of me.”

“They’re talking about going to Los Angeles. Soon after the New Year.” There. Out in the open now. Pulse in my ears as I wait for what she’ll say.

She takes a blade from her desk, slices the drawing out. “People talk about all kinds of things,” she says. “Doesn’t mean they’re really going to do them.”

I can’t tell if she loves me. It makes me weak-kneed, the thought that maybe she doesn’t.

I go to the garden. Delphine isn’t here yet. I sit on the bench and draw the Angel’s trumpets, hanging upside down in clusters, fluting out and curving upward. When I’m finished, I draw the tops of my shoes—rounded toes, broguing along the wing tip—against the flowered ground cover. Finish that drawing, too. I run my finger over what’s left of the page Hattie cut out.

When it’s clear Delphine’s not coming, I walk the streets of the Marigny and wonder which house is his. A building with peach shutters. A building with green shutters. One with a stone balcony. One with urns of purple flowers flanking a doorway. No matter how I try to believe that he loves her, that they’re happy, I can’t ease the ache at the back of my skull.

In mid-November, my sisters pack enough for three men’s lunches instead of the usual two. Hot jambalaya with andouille, cold potato salad, iced tea sweetened with sugar. “They’ve brought Lionel on to help,” Claireexplains, buckling the straps around the picnic basket. And then, low so Adele doesn’t hear: “I’m praying he doesn’t bring trouble with him.”

I ride the streetcar to the warehouse district.

Instead of the usual blare of machinery, it’s quiet when I get to the door. I ease it open, find the first table assembled, the men gathered around it. Until now, the work has all been done in parts. Each piece of the table rough cut, shaped, run through the machine, sanded and contoured and hand-carved and sanded again, eight times over for the batch of smaller tables. Next will come twelve tables to seat four to six diners, and two banquet tables after that.

Lionel is tightening a clamp, Bernard and Al are on their knees, wiping excess glue from the place where the tabletop meets the pedestal. I wait until they all step back to let them know that I’m here. They’re flushed with effort. “Got to get it right the first time, every time,” Bernard tells me.

“It’s a beautiful table.”

“Wait until you see her all polished.”

I hand him the picnic basket and head back to the courtyard. Lionel follows me. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you about something,” he says. He stands a few inches taller than I do, his face a medium brown, a youthful roundness to it. A small scar near his temple is all that’s left of his latest encounter with the police. “I was on Magazine Street the other night. Just about did a double take in front of that place on the corner. ItisDelphine, right? In the window?”

“The photographer saw her looking,” I say. “He invited her in to have her picture taken.”

He rubs his chin, thoughtful. “Photo’s nice. She looks good in it. The whole thing struck me as very interesting.”

“But?”

“Also dangerous.”