I signed for the letter with a hand that did not shake, standing in the laundry room doorway with a plate of rice dressing growing cold in my other hand. Mr. Antoine tipped his cap and stepped aside, and I read the first page right there, under the little window, with the band playing in the yard. It was on the letterhead of the United States Attorney, Western District of Louisiana. Notice of referral for investigation. Alleged forgery and bank fraud in connection with a home equity loan. Victim: Odette Marie Fontenot. Subject: Rene Alcide Fontenot. I looked up at my son, and he looked at the floor.
I had gone to see my nephew Thursday night, the lawyer in Lafayette, and I had shown him the paper from the teller. He said, “Tante, this is a federal crime. Somebody signed your name to a loan against a house.” I had wanted to say, not my boy. But I had read the form, and I had seen the word housekeeper, and I knew who had written it. Rene had never been able to spell the word. He wrote it with one P, the way he did in the third grade. I had saved that school paper. It was in my Bible. I had held both pages side by side.
Rene went the color of the paper. The band had stopped playing, and forty guests had turned toward the house. The man in the polo shirt, the boss of Brandi, put down his bottle and quietly backed toward the gate. Brandi herself came across the patio with her sandals slapping, her sunglasses on top of her head. “Odette, what is that?” she said sharply. “Give it to me.” I held it against my apron. “Brandi, I think you know,” I said. “Because it was your idea. The housekeeper part was yours. Rene would never have thought of that. It is too clever for him.”
A certified letter delivered at a crawfish boil gave one mother the weekend to bring her son back to the kitchen in Crowley.
I gave my terms right there in the laundry room, with the dryer humming behind me. I would not pursue the charges if the loan was repaid in full and the lien lifted by the end of the month. Rene would sell the pool. Every dollar would go to the bank. He would also sit with my nephew and sign a sworn statement about who did what. Brandi would pay for the notary who stamped the forged page. And no one would ever again tell Odette Fontenot to eat standing up next to a dryer, in the house of her own son, while people laughed in the yard.
Rene sank onto the folding stool next to the washer. His big shoulders sagged. “Mama, I did not forge it,” he said, thickly. “Brandi did. But I let her. I knew the whole time, and I let her.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “She said you had enough. She said you would never miss it. I wanted so badly for her to be proud of me.” I put the plate down on the dryer and placed a hand on his bent head. “Rene, I would have given you the money,” I said. “All you had to do was ask me, to my face, like a man.”
Brandi did not take it as well. She stood in the middle of the patio, with her chin up and her jaw working, and tried to laugh. “Odette, this is ridiculous,” she said. “It is a family loan. Nobody is going to prosecute a family loan.” Mr. Antoine, who had been standing quietly by the door with his hands behind his back like a soldier at parade rest, cleared his throat. “Miss Brandi, I carried that letter for the government,” he said. “It says what it says.” Behind her, a woman from the church choir shook her head very slowly, and the crowd, which had come to eat crawfish, drifted toward the street.
The guests left in groups of three and four, murmuring. The band packed its accordions without a word. The two hundred pounds of crawfish lay in their steaming pans like a feast for nobody, until Mr. Antoine looked at me and said, “Miss Odette, it would be a sin to waste it.” We carried the pans to the church hall. Within an hour, sixty people from the parish had gathered, and the whole lot of us sat down together in the long room with paper plates and cold sodas, and I was given the seat at the head of the table, and I ate with my back straight.
The money consequences moved fast. Rene sold the pool and the patio furniture to a neighbor within the week and brought the cashier check to the bank himself, with his head down. The lien was lifted on the twenty eighth. Brandi packed her car and went to her mother in Baton Rouge, and I heard later that her boss at the company had asked her to resign. The notary lost her stamp. My nephew filed the paperwork to close the file, and a very polite man from the office of the United States Attorney telephoned me to say that the matter had been resolved.
In the name of my husband, Alcide, who passed three years ago and who built our house with his own hands and always said that my seasoning could buy the parish, I started the Coffee Can Fund. It pays for legal help and safe lodging for older women in Acadia and Vermilion parishes whose own families have taken their homes and their wages. In the first year, we helped nineteen women. A grandmother of eighty, in an apron stained with flour, sat in the office with her rosary in her lap and said, “Everybody told me I should be grateful.”
On the first Sunday of the next month, I cooked rice dressing in the kitchen of the church hall, in the cast iron pot of my grandmother, for two hundred people. Rene stood at the next burner in a clean apron, stirring the livers and onions with a long spoon, and he did not say a word. Neither did I. When the line formed, he carried the plates to the tables, one in each hand. An old woman patted his arm. Later, he found me washing the pots and handed me a coffee can. Inside it, written in his hand, was a single line. “I would like to learn the recipe.”