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“Oh, shut up,” I moaned. “You’re a crappy card player, Lou. You always were and the ten years I’ve been gone, you’ve just gotten worse.”
Lou strained against Gaetan’s arm with renewed fury. “Someone should have shut your mouth for you years ago.”
“They tried,” I muttered.
“Go on inside,” Gaetan said, his accent thick as the swamp air. “This boy just ain’t worth it.” If I didn’t know Gaetan, I might just be hurt.
Instead I searched for my cap, finding it trampled in the dust.
“You’re right,” Lou said, finally easing off. He spit and the thick glob landed in the dirt near my hand.
I reared up off the ground because spit? Really? But Gaetan’s gaze nailed me to the dirt.
Stay put, his eyes said. I can only save your sorry ass so many times.
Lou wandered back to the church and the Sunday night poker game that had been going on in the basement ever since the church had been built, and I hung my pounding head between my knees.
“Welcome home,” I muttered.
“Whatchu doing back here, Ty?” Gaetan asked. The old man crouched, his thick silver mustache trembling with anger.
“A guy can’t—”
“No,” Gaetan said, “if that guy is you, then no. Boy!” Gaetan pulled me up, and even though I towered over the old man, I was cowed slightly. Coming home had been a bad idea, but coming to the St. Pat’s poker game was just stupid.
But then I had a thing for stupid.
“Whatever made you come back, I hope it was worth getting your face beat in.” Gaetan pulled a red handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it over. I pressed it to my lip.
Beat in was a stretch, but I wasn’t about to get into it with the Cajun.
“I don’t know, Gates,” I said, instead. “The look on everyone’s face when I walked in there was pretty priceless.”
“Priceless?” Gaetan snorted. “Every man in there thinks you cheated.”
I bit my tongue and jammed my cap back on my head, trying hard to swallow down the urge that I’d spent the past ten years destroying. Of course, one night back in Bonne Terre and the need to defend myself came crawling back, like a kicked dog.
“I didn’t cheat,” I said, ready to go back into that church and fight anyone who said otherwise. “Not tonight, not when I was a kid. I never cheated.”
“I know that,” Gaetan said, scowling, his bushy eyebrows colliding to create a mutant caterpillar. “But you took a lot of their money when you were a boy and they haven’t forgotten that.”
The satisfaction of taking the money off those men who looked down their noses at my family, called my grandmother names behind my back and watched me out of the corner of their eyes, was still so sweet.
I couldn’t help but smile.
Gaetan cuffed me upside the head.
“Hey!”
“You took their money ten years ago and now you come back a rich man to take more?” Gaetan shook his head.
“It’s a poker game,” I said. “The point is to take each other’s money.”
“You—” Gaetan curled a hand in my shirt, pulled me down close to the old man’s height until I could smell the whiskey and peppermint on his breath. “You have always taken too much. Always. Even as a boy you could never be happy with what you had. You needed what everyone else had, too. And everyone in this town remembers that about you. You shouldn’t have come back here.”
I’d been telling myself the same damn thing the whole drive from Vegas to Bonne Terre, but hearing it from Gaetan, a man I’d always considered a friend, stung.
“I know,” I said.
“Then why come back?” Gaetan asked. “You’re a rich man. A celebrity. You’ve got that girlfriend—”
I snorted.
“Fine,” Gaetan said. “No girlfriend. But why are you back?”
I shrugged. “I have to have a reason?”
“This isn’t about your mother snooping around these parts, is it?”
I wished I could tell the old man, but I didn’t want to implicate my friend, should it come to that. Instead, I said nothing and Gates sighed.
“You best not drive,” Gaetan said, pointing at my head and I gingerly touched the swelling around my eye.
Lou was a crap card player, but the guy could throw a punch.
I glanced back at my beloved 1972 Porsche, its black paint melting into the shadows. “She’ll be okay here?” I asked, and Gaetan snorted.
“Last car stolen in Bonne Terre was the one you stole when you left.”
“I doubt that,” I said, reluctant to leave Suzy alone and vulnerable outside a place as unwelcoming as St. Pat’s.
“Merde, Ty, it’s just a car.”
“Don’t tell that to Suzy.”
“Suzy?”
“Suzette, really.”
“Lord, Ty, you don’t change. I’ll watch her myself.”
“Thank you. In that case, I might as well take in some night air,” I said, remembering the path through town past the police station and Rousseau Square down to The Manor as if it had been yesterday.
