I did not answer her. I only slid the white envelope across the kitchen table, past the yellow legal pad and the vanilla candle, and let her open it herself. The first page was the contract with the food company in Lafayette, with a red stamp at the top. She read the number. Her lips moved. “Seven million nine hundred thousand dollars,” she whispered. “For the boudin.” I said, “For the recipe of my grandmother, honey. And for forty four years of Saturdays.” The ceiling fan clicked around. Beau stared at his hands as though they belonged to somebody else.
Brandi looked up. She is thirty eight, with a pretty, pinched face that I had learned to read like a weather report, and I watched the clouds pass over it one at a time. Surprise. Then greed, quick and bright, gone in a blink. Then something I did not expect, which was shame. “Ida Mae,” she said, “you lived in a shed.” I said, “I did.” She said, “You paid us five hundred dollars a month.” I said, “I did that too.” She turned in her chair, slowly, the way a woman turns toward a noise in the night, and she looked at her husband. “Beau,” she said. “What pension?”
He tried the old voice again. The one from the porch window. “Brandi, it is complicated. There was a clerical thing, and the money came to me by mistake, and I was going to straighten it out.” I took the printout from the envelope and set it beside his legal pad. “Account ending in 6681, son. Twenty nine months. Every month since the week your daddy was buried. I counted it on the bus. It comes to thirty one thousand dollars and some.” I let him look at it. “And you stood on your porch and told your friends I was too foolish to ask.” Beau did not say a word. A boat motor started on the bayou and faded out.
A white envelope kept in the Book of Ruth was pushed across a kitchen table and gave one boudin maker the afternoon to bring her son back to the stove.
Brandi pushed back her chair and went to the sink and stood there with her back to us, gripping the counter. I thought she might cry, or throw something. Instead she said, in a flat, quiet voice, “Beau, the boat payment.” He said, “Brandi.” She said, “The truck. The cabin at Toledo Bend. You told me you were doing so well at the dealership.” He covered his face. “Every month, I thought, I will stop next month,” he said. “And then there was the boat. And the boys. And I could not stop.” His shoulders began to shake. I had not seen my son cry since he was nine years old and the porch window broke.
I will say what I felt, because it was not what I expected. I felt no triumph at all. I felt as I did the year Lucien died, a heavy, gray tiredness, as if I were walking through wet sand. I got up and came around the table and stood behind my son, and I put my hands on his thick shoulders. They were the shoulders of Lucien, wide and sloped. “Beau,” I said, “look at me.” He turned his wet face up. “I am not going to put you in jail. I am too old, and you are too stupid.” A sound came out of him, half laugh, half sob. “But you are going to put every penny back.”
I laid out my terms at that table, with the coffee going cold. The pension would be redirected to my own credit union within the week, and my lawyer in Lake Charles would file the paper work that very afternoon. Beau would repay the thirty one thousand dollars, a set amount each month, out of his own wages, with Brandi keeping the ledger. And the tool shed would be torn down. “I will not sleep in it another night,” I said. “I will take the spare bedroom on the second floor, the one with the bathroom, and I will not pay a nickel.” Beau nodded, and nodded, and kept nodding. Brandi, at the sink, said only, “Yes, Ida Mae.”
That night I slept in the good bed for the first time in two years, and I woke at three in the morning not knowing where I was. I lay still, listening. There was no window unit rattling. There was no water heater ticking. There was only the house, breathing around me, and the frogs on the bayou. I said, out loud, “Cher, it came to me after all.” The dark did not answer. But the frogs seemed to sing a little louder.
The boudin went into grocery stores in March, from Houston to Pensacola, in a red and white package with my face on it, taken from a photograph at the Saturday market. Mawmaw Ida. I stood in the meat aisle of a supermarket on Ryan Street, in my navy dress, and watched a young father put three packages in his cart. He said to his little girl, “This one is the real kind. It says so.” I put my hand over my mouth. I did not tell him I was the woman on the package. I only stood there and let my eyes fill, among the pork chops and the cold air.
Beau came to my room on the first of every month, with the first envelope of his repayment, and he stood in the doorway until I invited him in. He never counted it in front of me. He only handed it over, and I wrote the figure in the green ledger, in pencil. In June, to my surprise, he brought a second envelope. Inside, on a sheet of lined paper, was a single sentence in his careful hand. Mama, I would like to learn to make the boudin. I read it twice. Then I looked at him. “Put on an apron,” I said. “And do not cry in the rice.”
He is not good at it yet. His links split in the casing, and his seasoning is shy. But on Saturdays we stand together in the kitchen of the big house, with the doors open to the yard, and I show him how to feel the rice with his fingers and the pepper with his nose. Brandi watches from the doorway with her coffee, quiet and a little ashamed. One of them, a widow, asked me last week what was in the blend. I laughed and told her it was a secret. Beau said, behind me, “It is mine, someday.”