I opened the long white envelope on the kitchen table and slid out the contract and set it down where Monique could see. It had a blue cover with the logo of a tackle company stamped in silver. A fishing lure, drawn in a single line. And under it, in the typeface they use for important things, my name. Lucien Arceneaux, Inventor. Monique read the first paragraph with her hand over her mouth. “Daddy,” she said. “It says eight million, three hundred thousand dollars.” I said, “Yes, cher. For the lure. The Odette.” Darren, who had been leaning back with his arms crossed, sat forward so fast the chair legs hit the tile.
“What lure?” he said. “What do you mean, the lure?” “The one you used to catch the nine pound bass at Toledo Bend,” I said. “The one you put on the wall. I carved the first one on a Tuesday night in 1989 and I filed a patent on it the same week.” I took out the railroad printout and laid it next to the contract. “And this is the pension that you told me was lost in the system. It has been going every month into the account that ends in 5052. Monique, you said it yourself. That is the account of your husband.” She had not taken her eyes from the table. “Yes,” she said, in a small voice. “It is.”
Darren got to his feet. He is a tall, soft man with a coach mustache, and I could see him trying to arrange his face. “Lucien, let me explain,” he began. “Sit down,” said Monique. She did not raise her voice. I have never heard that tone from her in forty one years. It was the tone of my wife Odette, the tone that filled a kitchen and ended an argument. Darren sat. “How much?” she said. He said he did not recall. “Darren, how much?” He swallowed. “Fifty three thousand dollars. About. Over twenty four months.” “And the truck?” “The truck was part of it.” “And the lake lot in Sulphur?” He did not answer, which was an answer.
A long white envelope laid on a kitchen table showed a daughter and her husband what a quiet switchman had built in his tackle box.
Monique put both hands on the table, palms down, and I watched her take a breath that seemed to start in her feet. She looked at me. Her eyes were swimming. “Daddy,” she said. “I am so sorry. I let him handle it. I let him tell me what was true because it was easier than checking.” I opened my mouth to tell her she was not at fault, and she raised a hand. “Let me finish. I knew something was wrong, Daddy. I saw you get thinner. I saw you stop eating at the table. And I told myself it was grief. I should have asked you.” I reached across the table and took her hand.
“Cher, I did not tell you either,” I said. “I could have said something a year ago. I wanted to know whether I was loved for myself. That was a foolish test, and I was wrong to give it.” She shook her head, laughing and weeping at once. “Daddy, you are the most stubborn man in Louisiana.” “It runs in the family,” I said. Then I turned to the man across from me, and the soft humor went out of my voice. “Darren. I worked thirty four years on the railroad. I lost a finger and a friend. I never took what was not mine. I cannot understand how a man looks at his father in law and does that.”
He had nothing to say. Monique stood, and went to the drawer by the refrigerator, and took out a folder, and set it in front of him. “I called a lawyer on Friday,” she said. “I did not know why I was calling. I just had a feeling.” She looked him straight in the eye. “That is for you to sign, and to repay my father, every cent, from your salary and your retirement account. Or I will give it to the Railroad Retirement Board, and they can sort it out in a court.” Darren stared at the folder as if it were a snake. “You are going to do this to me?” “I am doing this for me,” she said.
He signed. It took him eleven minutes, and I watched every one of them. When he finished, Monique put the papers in her purse, and stood, and said, “You can stay in the guest room tonight. Tomorrow we are going to talk about whether you stay at all.” He left the kitchen without a word. We heard the door of the guest room close, quietly, and then nothing. Monique sat down across from me and covered her face and cried like a girl, and I came around and held her head against my chest as I had done when she was five and had lost a tooth.
It took the railroad board six weeks to put it right. They restored every payment, and the investigator, a dry little man in a gray suit, told me that the case would be referred, but that the cooperation of the family helped. In the end, Darren was ordered to pay restitution and received two years of probation. Monique stayed married to him for four more months, and then she stopped. She keeps a small house in Sulphur now, with our grandson, and she has a job at the credit union. I think she is happier than she has been in a long time.
With the money, I did what I wanted to do since I was a boy. I bought a camp on the bayou with a dock and a cypress porch, and I put a sign at the end of the road that says, THE ODETTE. Every Saturday, I take my grandson out in the flat bottom boat at dawn, the water gray and still, the herons standing in the reeds.
He is eleven. He holds the rod like it is made of glass. Last week, he hooked a bass the size of a loaf of bread, and he shrieked, and I laughed, and we both nearly went over the side. “Papa,” he said, “what lure was that?” I opened my tackle box. “Let me tell you about your grandmother,” I said.