Page 1 of Rhodes

ONE

Rhodes

The Condition Report: Before any New Orleans restoration begins, someone walks the building and writes down what is actually there. It almost never matches what the people who love the house have been telling each other about it.

Deuce has been locked onto the same table of girls for ten minutes, and now he needs the rest of us to look. Deuce can't enjoy a thing quietly any more than he can run a play without talking about it for three days.

"Corner table. The one in green." He tips his beer at them. He's a wall of a human being who catches for the Loyola baseball team and thinks with his dick. "Tell me that's not the best-looking girl in this bar."

I've been texting with my brother, Ridge, about some dumb fucking meeting he wants me to come to tomorrow evening. It's something about capital fund allocation that he wants all six of us to decide on, which I couldn't care less about. And I know whatever it is has already been decided anyway. It's all a formality.

He vacillates between insisting I play an active role in my family's logistics business and focusing on being a college student. Tonight, it seems, he wants me to be a Stone Intermodal executive. That's almost hilarious because I know they won't listen to anything I say anyway.

I put it on the bar face down because, whatever the case, I can deal with it tomorrow.

"Sure, Deuce."

The Boot's loud tonight. It's a Thursday, but it almost feels like a Friday. This is how it is early-semester. Nobody’s got anything due yet, and everyone's excited to be back at school.

"They're not even ours," Nash says. He's got that mournful thing going he gets three beers in. "That's a Tulane table for sure. They don't cross Freret for us."

"That's exactly why God made walking," Deuce says. "Rhodes. Back me up. Green dress."

I glance over barely. I look enough to clock a table of girls, and notice one of them mid-laugh with her back half to us. Her blonde hair nearly touches her ass, tipped back like that. Some guy is leaning in, trying his luck and not getting anywhere.

It's a nice view, I will give him that.

There's a line where the dress stops holding her and starts highlighting her perfect figure, right at the back of her thighs. I shift on the stool and give my jeans a little room, because that's the kind of night it is.

"Yeah, alright," I say, already looking back at my beer. "I'd tap that."

My eyes stay trained on that perfectly round ass. Then she turns around. I look up at her face, and I nearly choke on my beer.

Everything that went south while I was looking at the back of her has nowhere to go now. My fist closes on the bottle.

That isn't just any girl. I've known those blue eyes since she was born. It's the rest of the face I'm not ready for, the way the roundness has come off her cheeks in the last two years and left her with Lizzy's straight nose and flat, unimpressed way of looking at a man while he's still talking

There’s a framed picture at their family property off the coast of Charleston, Oak Moss, of me holding her on the couch beside my dad when she was an infant, and I was still in diapers.

The last time I saw her, I was watching her come apart in the second row of St. Michael's church in Charleston three weeks ago with my hand flat on her brother's shaking back.

Tallulah Maybank.

"Oh, no," I say.

"What?" Deuce says. "You've already tapped that ass, haven't you? Goddammit, Rhodes. Is there any woman in this city you haven't fucked?"

"Fuck, no! She's practically my sister. Dude, get your mind out of the fucking gutter."

"You know her, but do you know her?"

"Shut up, Deuce."

She's clocked me now, and her face moves through the same three stages mine just did, only faster. She says something to the two guys nearly falling over themselves for her attention. One of them whispers something in her ear. The other drops a hand toward the small of her back.

Who are these Neanderthals?

She steps out from under them without so much as looking back and starts across the room straight at me.