Lance reached for the folder, but I held it behind my back like a woman guarding a casserole, and I said in my kindest voice, “Odette, honey, why do you not read that third page yourself.” His mother crossed the pavilion with her pocketbook swinging, took the folder from my hand, and opened it on the picnic table among the gumbo bowls and the paper plates. She read the page for a very long time. I am Gloria Thibodeaux, seventy years old, and I watched the color leave the face of a proud woman who had just called me the help.
The third page was a second mortgage application on Odette small house on Tams Street, three hundred thousand dollars, with her name typed in the borrower line and a signature underneath that was almost hers. Lance had put in a cell phone number that was not hers. Beneath the application was a stapled sheet, a list of seven names, my sister Charmaine and me and Odette and four others, and a total in red ink that came to more than a million dollars. The heading, in Lance hand, said, Family Investors.
The whole pavilion had gone silent, and even the children stopped chasing one another around the picnic tables, and a pot lid rattled once on the stove and was still. Charmaine, my sister, stared at her husband with her hand at her throat. Behind her, the cousins stood with their plates in the air. A radio was playing zydeco by the water cooler and nobody moved to turn it off. Odette folded the page once, very slowly, and she said, in a voice I will remember for the rest of my life, “Lance Robert Fontenot, I raised you better than this. I scrubbed floors for the people in that book.”
A folder found in a parked truck gave one cleaning company founder the length of a family reunion to bring her brother in law back to the truth in Baton Rouge.
I gave my terms under the pavilion roof with the rain beginning on the tin. “Lance, I am not interested in revenge. Here is what we will do. You will give this entire folder to Odette, and you will tell every name on that list the truth, in your own voice, this week. My attorney will handle the rest, and she is the best in Baton Rouge. Charmaine will go home with me tonight, and she will not be introducing me again as anything but her sister. And the forty thousand dollars you asked me for? I will lend it, to Odette, to pay the lawyers.”
Lance sagged against a pillar and took off his sunglasses, and the confidence of a thousand cocktail parties went out of his face. “Gloria, there are no investments,” he said. “There never were. I took money from a cousin in 2019 to cover a loss on a boat, and I paid him back with money from the next family member. Every new name kept the last one quiet.” He rubbed his eyes. “I have lived in that spiral for six years. I wanted the dentist money Charmaine had, and the house, and the status. I only ever wanted to be somebody.”
But a cornered man will do anything. Lance lunged across the pavilion, snatched the folder out of his mother hands, and ran out into the rain toward his truck, with the pages flapping like a white bird. He had gone fifteen steps when the first of my Thibodeaux uncles, eighty years old and built like a cypress stump, stepped out from the barbecue pit with a long iron fork. Two of the cousins, both off duty police officers, ran in from either side. And the crowd of aunts moved together under their umbrellas, a bright, solid wall.
Lance stopped on the wet grass with the folder pressed to his chest, and rain ran down his face, and the zydeco went on playing from the pavilion. Uncle Alphonse leaned on his barbecue fork and spoke in a French rich drawl that carried across the park. “Boy, you can run from a lot of things in Louisiana, but you cannot run from your own family reunion.” The aunts closed in under their umbrellas. Lance turned slowly around. He walked back across the lawn and laid the folder in my sister outstretched hands.
The consequences were thorough and fair. My attorney, a sharp woman named Denise Boudreaux, traced every dollar through six years of accounts, and the district attorney took the case. Lance accepted a plea that required him to repay the families from the sale of his house and his boat, and he signed over the pension of his mother for nothing. Charmaine moved into my guest room for a season, and then into a small apartment of her own, where she took a job at the front desk of Gloria Clean Team. She never again said, she cleans houses.
In the name of my mother Odile, who passed in 2016, I started the Odile Thibodeaux Fund. It pays for start up grants for women who want to open their own cleaning and catering businesses and for scholarships for the children of hospital housekeepers, in East Baton Rouge, Livingston and Ascension parishes. In the first year we funded twenty six new businesses and sent fourteen students to college. One was a fifty year old woman from Denham Springs who bought her first commercial vacuum with the grant, and who lifted it over her head in the parking lot, laughing.
On the first Saturday in October, a year later, I stood under the same pavilion on Highland Road, wearing a bright green Gloria Clean Team shirt, with six hundred employees in matching shirts filling the park and a long line of crawfish pots steaming in the sun. Charmaine stood at the microphone in a green shirt of her own, and she tapped it twice. “I want to introduce my sister,” she said, and her voice shook. “She built this. She is Gloria Thibodeaux, the founder, and the best woman I know.”