“Hey,” I said, plugging my ear with my finger so I could hear better. “Are you in a tunnel? I can hardly hear you.”
“Are people singing?” he asked.
“You don’t want to know,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I caught a homicide,” he said. “I’m on my way to the scene. Just wanted to let you know I don’t know how late I’ll be.”
“Wow, that’s a nice welcome back to work, huh?”
“You’re telling me,” he said. “You feeling better?”
“In a matter of speaking,” I said. “I’m on my way to Mom’s. She thinks Vince ran off with another woman, and she’s freaking out a little.”
“That doesn’t sound like Vince,” Nick said.
“I’m guessing Mom thought that too until she found Angelica’s phone number in his pants pocket and hotel receipts.”
“Yikes,” Nick said. “Have fun with that. I’ll see you when I see you.”
“Ask him,” Rosemarie hissed.
“What?” I asked, confused. “Ask what?”
“About redecorating the house,” she said.
“Who are you with?” Nick asked. “It sounds like you’re at a party.”
“I guess you could call it that,” I said. “By the way, it’s a shame you didn’t stick around this morning to say hi to Scarlet. She’s going to stay with us for a while.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Then he said, “There’s a lesson to be learned in there somewhere.”
“You think?” I asked. “Scarlet wanted cake for breakfast, so we drove into the city and stopped at Krazy Cakes. And it turns out Rosemarie’s new wedding planning business is right next door.”
“It sounds like you’ve had a busy morning,” he said.
“You have no idea.” I looked in the back seat and Rosemarie was still singing “Bad Boys” in her operatic soprano. “I was in the Audi, so when Mom’s call came in Suzanne volunteered her van so we could all go console my mother. We’re bringing her booze and cake.”
“So let me get this straight,” Nick said. “You, Scarlet, the cake lady, and Rosemarie are all in a cake van to go visit your mother?”
“That about sums it up.”
“She’s going to love that,” he said.
Suzanne was motioning for me to ask him about decorating the house, and I finally found the courage.
“Can I ask a favor?”
“After the morning you’ve had, you can ask for anything,” he said. “But do it quick because I’m almost at the crime scene.”
My palms were sweaty and I rubbed them on my leggings. Nick was a man. Which meant he didn’t like change, despite his assurance that I could ask for anything.
“I was wondering…”
“Yeah?”
“I was wondering if maybe it’d be okay to do some redecorating in the house,” I said in a rush. “You know, so it feels more like it’s mine too.”
Nick was silent for a few seconds. “Babe, the house is yours as much as it is mine. Do what you like. As long as I have a soft bed and the refrigerator doesn’t move, I’m good with it. With the way my job is, it’s not like I get to spend a lot of time there anyway. I’ve got to go. There are bodies in the yard, and the media is going nuts.”
“Fun,” I said. “Be safe.” And I hung up.
“What’d he say?” Rosemarie asked.
“He said the house was mine to do as I wanted.” Or at least that was close enough to what he said in my mind.
“I love a good house renovation,” Suzanne said. “I watch the shit out of Chip and Joanna. I can shiplap like nobody’s business.”
Suzanne kept oohing and ahhing over the cuteness of the town, and I tried to look at Whiskey Bayou through her eyes. I guessed the Welcome to Whiskey Bayou, The First Drink’s on Us sign and the cobblestoned roads were charming, and the railroad graveyard had a certain artistic sense to it that threw you back to a simpler time.
We didn’t have much of a downtown—a few specialty boutiques that came and went with the times and the Good Luck Café, which hadn’t gone anywhere in seventy-five years. Technically, the Walker Whiskey Distillery was in the dead center of town, which is what put Whiskey Bayou on the map, so to say, before prohibition. In a weird turn of events, Scarlet gave me the distillery as a wedding gift. I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do with it, but I’d had a couple of people ask to rent it out for their weddings, so Nick was looking into insurance and all the other adult things that came with owning property.
In normal towns, there would’ve been a courthouse in the middle of the town square, but since the distillery occupied that spot the courthouse faced directly across from it. The Methodist church was on another side of the square and then the fire station and police department rounded it out on the last side of the square.
My mother lived a block past the fire station on an old residential street that dead-ended into the bayou. The houses were all on double lots, so you weren’t too close to neighbors. My mom had grown up in the house, and the same families tended to stay in houses for generations and expand however they could. Whiskey Bayou was landlocked, and real estate wasn’t easy to come by.
“Huh,” Suzanne said as she pulled up to my mother’s house. “Looks like one of those cottages in the fairytales where small children go to die. And it’s even got the General Lee out front.”
In a fit of rebellion, my mother had taken the insurance money my dad had left her and bought an exact replica of the General Lee. I wasn’t sure why. I only knew that my dad would’ve hated it, which I’m guessing is why she’d done it. My parents had a complicated marriage.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I told her.
“Sugar, I’m a black cross-dresser from the South. I’ve seen everything.”
My mother had the front door open before we got out of the van,
