The car that came down my gravel road with its headlights off was a dark green sedan with Calcasieu plates, and it rolled to a stop at the foot of the porch steps like a hearse. Two men got out. The first, in a tan suit, was Lyle Fontenot, the lender from Lake Charles whose name I had read on the loan paper in the car of Celeste. The second, hanging back in the shadow of the oak, was a heavy man in a Lafayette Parish sheriff windbreaker. I had called the sheriff at half past seven, between my stew and my bread pudding, and told him which road to watch.
Lyle Fontenot climbed my porch steps with his hat in his hand and a smile that went nowhere near his eyes. He said that the loan to Broussard Cafe was legal and signed, that Beau had accepted the money in good faith, and that he had come to collect. I held out my hand, and my lawyer, who had arrived on his heels in a golf shirt, put in it the page from the car of Celeste. “This signature says owner, and it is not mine to give,” I said. “Celeste has never owned a spoon of this business. You lent one million, six hundred thousand dollars on a forged line, Mr. Fontenot, and the sheriff would like a word.”
Beau stood in the doorway with his wine glass broken at his feet, and he looked, for the first time since I had met him, exactly his age. His mother put a hand to her pearls. Celeste had gone gray. She took one step toward Beau and then one step back, as though the porch boards had turned to ice. “Mama,” she whispered, “I signed it. I signed the loan as owner. Beau told me you had agreed, and that it was only to cover the wedding. I did not read the page.” She looked at her future mother in law. “I did not ask a single question.”
A bowl of stew eaten on a back porch gave one widow the evening to bring her daughter back to her family in Lafayette.
I gave my terms from the old rocker of Alcide, with my bowl in my lap and my feet up on the rail. “Celeste, the wedding is postponed until you have read everything you sign. Beau, you will go with the sheriff to answer for the lender, and when you come out, you will go to the program in Baton Rouge for the video poker, and you will stay until they say. Madame, you are welcome at my table, but not at my restaurants. Mr. Fontenot, you may go with the deputy. And Thibodeaux, put on a pot. I have not had a decent dinner in two days.”
Celeste dropped to the porch boards and put her face against my knees, bowl and all. “Mama, I sent you out here in ninety eight degrees,” she said. “I looked at you through the window and I told myself it was only for a little while. I wanted so badly for his family to like me that I let them put you outside. I let them put you outside my own house.” Her shoulders heaved. “You made all of this. You made the roux and the tables and the name. I am so ashamed. I am so ashamed, Mama.” I smoothed her hair and I said nothing, because she was right.
At that moment Beau came to life. He grabbed the loan page out of the hand of the lawyer, vaulted the porch rail, and ran across the yard toward the road with the page flying behind him like a flag. He had not seen Thibodeaux, who had come up the back path from the kitchens of the cafe with a twenty quart pot of red beans in both arms, as he had every Saturday for twenty eight years. Beau ran straight into the pot. Red beans, rice and a man in a good shirt went down together in the grass, and the deputy stood over them, sighing, and put on his cuffs.
Celeste sat up on the porch and began to laugh, the wet helpless laugh of a person who has not slept, and then I was laughing too, and then even the mother of Beau, in the doorway, put a hand to her mouth. It was not funny. It was the kind of laughing that comes after something very bad has been stopped. I took my daughter by the chin and kissed her on the forehead, and I said, “Now go and get a clean dish towel. We have a porch full of company and no one has eaten.” She went inside with her shoulders straight.
The money consequences were all on the side of the guilty. The loan of one million, six hundred thousand dollars was void, since it was founded on a forged signature, and Lyle Fontenot was charged with predatory lending and conspiracy. Beau pleaded to forgery, received probation, and entered the program in Baton Rouge. The four restaurants and the line of frozen stew stayed in my family, and I put them in a trust that required two signatures to touch, mine and that of my attorney. Celeste kept her job and her pride, and she read the next paper she was handed all the way to the end.
In the name of Alcide, who passed in 2021, I started the Alcide Broussard Fund. It pays for gambling counseling and cooking apprenticeships for young Cajun cooks in Lafayette, Vermilion and Acadia parishes. In the first year we trained thirty one apprentices in the kitchens of our four restaurants. A boy of seventeen from Abbeville, who had been washing dishes at night to pay off the video poker debts of his uncle, learned to make a roux that turned the color of a pecan. He stood over the pot a long time, stirring, and said it smelled like the kitchen of his grandmother.
On the Saturday after the next wedding date was set, Celeste and I cooked together in the kitchen of Broussard Cafe, side by side, with the zydeco playing on the radio. She made the roux. I watched her wrist go round and round the pot, steady and slow, never leaving it. When the color was right, she held out the spoon to me, and I tasted it and nodded. Then I took my apron off and hung it on the hook by the door, and I went out to the dining room and sat in the best chair under the fan.