I smile like I always do and brush them off like I always do.But tonight I’m feeling the effects of working three jobs. I worked the lunch shift at Salties, and last night I worked my other bartending job at Cajun Joe’s until late.
I’m also feeling my ghosts around me more than usual tonight.
Sometimes it really hits me that I’ve losteverything.
In the photos taken before my mother’s death, my father was always well-dressed and so handsome and happy, with his arm wrapped around his beautiful and glowingly pregnant wife. Things were run better back then, and everything looked shinier in those old photos. Which could have had more to do with her than him, I can’t be sure.
I never knew my mother. She died less than a week after she had me, from some complication they couldn’t save her from. So it was always just me and Theo III (what the locals always called him), running our own little universe.
Which proceeded to spectacularly implode.
Of course there’s that other ember in me, the one that glows a deep, dark blue. The old one, that’s been there my whole life. The one that wonders if the implosion of Theodore Thibodeaux and his beautiful wife’s lives were ruined by yours truly. If she’d never had me, she might still be alive. And so might he, because things would still be shiny and he wouldn’t have had to drown all his sorrows so thoroughly or gamble all his money away just to feel something.
He never blamed me, not once. Not to my face, at least. But still, the ember burned and still does.
My daddy’s ashes got poured into the family crypt.
On the one-year anniversary of his death a month or so ago, I spent my entire week’s wages on a gigantic bunch of flowers and went and placed them on the front step of the crypt.
I wondered why I bothered. But I can’t stop loving him, even though he must have forgotten somewhere along the line that he wasn’t just spending his own money, but any chance I had of a future too.
It’s the only time I’ve ever cried over the whole thing and there must have been a lot of pent up feelings in there because it took me a while to calm it all down.
I sat there and cried hot tears all over those overpriced flowers until the sky turned purple and the stars started twinkling at me like all my lost family members were up there trying to cheer me up from The Great Beyond. So I pulled myself together and walked back to the hotel to start my shift.
After I lost the hotel and went bankrupt, I had no choice but to beg the new owners for a job. I convinced the manager, a prickly bitch named Ellen Jones—who’s running the place for some all-powerful, unseen billionaire from Houston—that I was indispensable because I knew everything there was to know about the Hotel Thibodeaux. I was born in Room 27, after all, and with any luck I’ll die here too, just like my daddy did. Hopefully before I even hit the floor.
“I know every creaking floorboard,” I explained, “every dripping faucet, every leaky roof tile and exactly where to put the buckets when it rains. No one else knows that shit.”
She looked me up and down with a critical Texan eye and told me the place was getting a new roof and upgradedplumbing so those details hardly mattered. It’s amazing when you think about it that our two states sit side by side but you could never mistake a Louisianan for a Texan and vice versa. We’re just altogether different breeds of human being. But she did agree to hire me part-time as a bartender and she also offered me minimum wage for five shifts a week as a housekeeper.
Luckily (and intentionally), I have the only key to a small hidden storage room at the back of the building, where there’s a tiny single bed. Ellen doesn’t know the room exists and she doesn’t know it’s where I’ve been sleeping for over a year. She also doesn’t know I use the showers in the rooms as I’m cleaning them and the hotel laundry room to wash my own clothes, and what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.
So here I am.
Jimmy’s finishing up his second Southern Comfort. “How come you won’t go out with me, Amelie? Don’t you like me?”
“I like you just fine, Jimmy.” I like you keeping my business afloat, even if it’s no longer mine, and I like your tips, is what I’m thinking.
Jimmy pays for his drinks, then slides me a five-dollar bill and I tuck it into my pocket before eagled-eyed Ellen sees. I don’t feel bad about it either. This hotel raised me and I work hard. And tonight I’m tired.
The money never seems to accumulate.
I try to paint to see if I could eventually maybe sell one, but the only time I have is at night and I don’t want the lights to give away the fact that I’m living in a hidden room for free.
Could I really move to New York?
With thirty-five dollars?
Do I even want to?
Not really, is the answer to those questions.
It sounds cold up there. And kind of … steely.
I’ve only ever been out of the one mile radius of the French Quarter, the Marigny and the Treme a few times in my life.
When I tell tourists that, they’re amazed. I don’t know why it’s amazing. And tonight desperation is making me feel weirdly reckless, like I’m slowly losing my grip.
