The damp air off the bayou always smelled like rotting cypress roots and diesel fuel, especially on humid afternoons when the shrimp boats came back in. Evelyn never liked the smell. She used to sit on her screened porch with a white linen handkerchief pressed against her nose, watching me sweep the front steps like I was doing it wrong. She lived three houses down from us on Bayou Pierre road for twelve years, and in all that time, she never once called me by my right name.
It was always girl or the first one, as if my parents hadn’t given me a proper birth certificate back in Lafourche Parish. When she finally passed away in the back bedroom of her damp little house after a three-week bout with pneumonia, I didn’t wear black. I wore a navy blue cotton dress with small white anchors on it, because it was comfortable and because I didn’t see the point in pretending to mourn a woman who treated my existence like a bad smell. Mark cried, of course. He was her only boy, and she had spent forty years carving him into the kind of son who brought her groceries every Tuesday and never brought up his father, who had walked out toward New Orleans back when Mark was six and never looked back.
The church basement smelled like weak instant coffee and stale peanut butter crackers after the service.
About forty people from the parish drifted through, shaking Mark’s hand and patting my shoulder with that heavy, damp sympathy folks in south Louisiana save for funerals and hurricane recovery. I stood by the folding table holding a styrofoam cup of lukewarm water, watching the ceiling fan wobble on its bent bracket. Mark came up behind me, his shoes squelching a little on the damp carpet where someone had spilled half a thermos of sweet tea. He looked tired in that gray suit his mother had picked out for his thirty-fifth birthday, the shoulders a little too broad for him. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small black velvet box, the kind that usually holds a cheap pair of earrings from the Rexall down on Main Street. He didn’t look at me when he handed it over. His knuckles were white against the velvet.
She asked me to give you this on her funeral day, Mark said.
His voice dropped down into that flat, wooden register he used whenever we talked about money or his mother.
I took the box. It was heavier than it looked, weighted with something solid that didn’t rattle. I didn’t open it right there in the basement under the grease-stained acoustic tiles. I waited until we got back to our small brick house on the ridge, the one Evelyn had helped us put a down payment on back in ninety-eight, though she never let us forget whose name was really holding the mortgage note in her head. I sat at the laminate kitchen table while the ceiling fan hummed overhead, clicking the metal clasp on the side of the velvet box. Inside wasn’t jewelry. It was an iron key, about three inches long with a notched bit that looked handmade, and a small square of cream-colored paper folded in half. Her handwriting was small and cramped, the ink dark blue like she used a fountain pen nobody else touched anymore.
The note had just three numbers written on it in the middle of the heavy paper: 4-12-88. Below that, she had scrawled eight words that didn’t make any sense at all. Check the floorboards under the cedar wardrobe upstairs.
I stared at those numbers for a long time. April twelfth, nineteen eighty-eight. That was three months before Mark and I even met at the crawfish boil down by the landing, back when I was working the register at the hardware store and he still had that old Ford pickup with the rusted-out passenger floorboard. I looked up at the ceiling, listening to the heavy thud of Mark’s work boots pacing back and forth in the master bedroom above the kitchen. He had been up there for twenty minutes, and he hadn’t come down to help me put the leftover ham away in the icebox. That wasn’t like him. Usually, Mark was the one who fussed over the leftovers, wrapping everything in aluminum foil with neat little folded edges like he worked in a hotel kitchen.
I didn’t tell him about the key. I tucked it deep down into the pocket of my housecoat and walked up the stairs, each wooden step groaning under my weight the way they always did when the humidity swelled the timber. Mark was standing by our bedroom window looking out toward the bayou, his hands jammed deep into his pockets. He didn’t turn around when the floorboards creaked behind him.
Everything okay down there, Clara? he asked. His voice sounded thin, like he was trying too hard to sound like he was just talking about the weather.
I’m fine, Mark, I said. I walked right past him toward the spare room, the one we used for storage ever since his mother stopped coming over for Sunday pot roast three years ago.
The cedar wardrobe was heavy, the kind of old cypress piece Evelyn had inherited from her aunt down in Houma. It took all my weight to drag it four inches across the pine floorboards, the bottom scraping a long gray line into the wax. Underneath where the left front leg had rested, there was a loose section of tongue-and-groove flooring. Evelyn had cut it herself, or had some carpenter do it with a fine-toothed saw so the grain matched the surrounding planks almost perfectly. I knelt down on my knees, ignoring the sharp ache in my joints that always told me when a front was blowing in from the Gulf, and slid the iron key into the small gap.
The board lifted with a dry, splintering pop. Inside the cavity, nestled between the joists where the house was framed over the damp crawlspace, was a gray tin box and a thick stack of blue deposit slips tied together with butcher’s twine.
My hands were shaking so hard I dropped the first slip when I pulled it out. It was a bank receipt from the First National of Thibodaux, dated April twelfth, nineteen eighty-eight. The deposit amount was forty-three thousand two hundred and eighty dollars. In cash. Below that were dozens of other slips, stretching across twelve years, all bearing Evelyn’s neat, sharp signature and account numbers I had never seen on our joint taxes.
Mark was standing in the doorway of the spare room. He wasn’t pacing anymore. He was just standing there with his hands flat against the doorframe, his face the color of skim milk.
You shouldn’t have looked in there, Clara, he said. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded tired, like a man who had been running uphill for twenty years and finally forgot how to lift his feet.
I looked down at the slips in my lap, then up at him. The numbers weren’t random. They matched every time Mark told me he had to work late on the rigs, every time he said his truck broke down outside of Morgan City, every time our savings account mysteriously dipped right when we needed a new water heater or a set of tires for the tractor.
She knew, didn’t she? I said. My own voice sounded like it belonged to someone else, small and flat against the plaster walls.
She knew about the girl in Houma, Mark whispered, and for the first time in twenty-five years, he didn’t look at me like I was the one who had ruined his life. She knew before we even got married. She made him pay her every month to keep her mouth shut, and when she got too old to go to the bank herself, she made Mark do the cash drops every Tuesday morning under the floorboards of her own guest room.
I sat there on the floor with the cold iron key in my palm and the stack of blue paper smelling faintly of mildew and old cedar. Mark didn’t move from the doorway. He just watched me with those same gray eyes his mother had, waiting for me to scream or throw the tin box at his head the way people do in the movies. But I didn’t scream. I just folded the top slip back down and laid it across my knee, listening to the cicadas starting up in the weeds outside the back window as the sun went down behind the swamp.
