Headlights swung into the gravel lot, an old white pickup with a Thibodaux Properties sticker on the door, and Aunt Colette stopped counting the register, because Mr. Thibodaux was coming for the rent, and the rent had been going to the wrong person since 2020.
For years Uncle Remy called me a line cook from Houma and told everyone Grandmother left him the restaurant. This time the truth came from the landlord, because Mr. Thibodaux came in for his gumbo every Friday and finally asked me about the lease.
My grandmother owned that restaurant, and before she died in 2021 she signed the lease over to me, not to Remy, and for four years Remy had been running my restaurant and paying rent to himself while telling the family Grandmother left it to him.
The copy of the lease in my bag proved it, my name where everyone assumed Remys would be. Mr. Thibodaux, eighty years old and sharp, remembered my grandmother signing it in 2020, and he came that night to make it right.
Remy threw my eight knives in the bayou and told me to cook with that, sure I would never make it without him. He did not know the landlord was already on his way. He was still standing in the back door when the white pickup pulled in.
Aunt Colette asked what rent I meant. The rent Remy has been paying to himself since 2020, I told her, in a restaurant that is mine.
I did not stay for the reckoning. I drove to a friends in New Orleans, and at nine the next morning I interviewed at the Hotel Monteleone with my backup knife and my grandmothers recipes in my head, and they hired me as executive sous chef.
The restaurant is mine now, legally, and I have decided to let Remy stay on and run the kitchen, paying real rent to me, because it is still my grandmothers place and her gumbo should keep being served. He knows now exactly whose name is on the lease.
They dont want you, youre a line cook from Houma, Remy told me. The Monteleone wanted me. And Remy stopped talking before the landlords truck finished pulling in, because my grandmother, through a lease she signed in 2020, had the last word.