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“I do feel like one, and I don’t want to stop. I’m lonely and he’s available.”
“Oh, for god’s sake, Lola, get a freaking job. Are you kidding me? What if Alphé finds out?”
“He’s going to because I want a divorce.”
“I know what’s wrong with you,” Babette said. “You’re still looking for a daddy’s love. Grow the hell up!”
Having had a first-row seat to the family life of the French girls, Babette never denied that she was just one step away from being as narcissistic as Lola was. But luck was on Babette’s side because those blond, Barbie Doll good looks didn’t last as long on Babette as they did on Lola. At thirty, Lola still looked as good as she did at eighteen.
And Babette knew right from wrong. A good beating by their mother, a strap always at the ready, kept Babette from going down that path of attention-seeking Lola rarely strayed from.
When Lola told Alfonso she was going to ask Alphé for a divorce, he told her to make sure she was doing it for the right reasons. Holding her on his lap, they were on the same couch Alphé used for a bed.
“I’m not divorcing Beverly; you know that, Lola,” he said, but without conviction. “At least not right now.”
“I know,” Lola replied, wrapping her arms around him. “But I can’t go on betraying the kids’ father like this and not have it affect them. Your kids are going to start talking around town, and it’s only a matter of time until some wiseass says something to one of my kids’ friends.”
“My kids are adults,” he said. “I don’t think your kids travel in the same crowds.”
“They might, though, and I just can’t take the chance.” She stood up, smoothing her hands over her hips in a way she had seen some actress do on TV that he thought was sultry. “How bad do you want me?”
“I want you forever,” he said, looking up at her.
“I’ll make it happen, then.”
But Alphé wouldn’t leave. “You go on and see your boyfriend,” he told her, hurt but alive. “I just can’t be the one to leave.”
“Then we’ll just have to make it work. I’ll try not to embarrass you.”
“I don’t care,” he’d said. “If he’s been hanging around my house, it’s already too late.”
But Alfonso wasn’t the first person with whom she’d betrayed Alphé. There had been someone else who had as much to lose as she did at the time, so they were careful, sneaking around at night long after their spouses had gone to sleep, and it wasn’t until the man died, forcing the affair to end, pushing Lola into another man’s arms.
***
“You don’t love her,jeune gommeux,”Pierre said,dudein French. “You didn’t blink an eye when she tells you she’s sleeping with that old man? No way.”
“It’s a weight off my back. You know how you can tell a woman ain’t happy; her nostrils get all pinched, and when she walks away from you, her arms don’t swing. You have to be dead not to know there’s something wrong, and there be something wrong at my house for a long time.”
“Just fuck your woman, dude, and you won’t have no problems.”
“Ha! If it were only that easy.”
Turning the crank on the mechanism that pulled the trawl in, they dumped the catch and sorted through it quickly, throwing anything too small or not wanted overboard. He kept a good-sized redfish for his mother. Heading back to the dock, Alphé pointed to the north.
“Check that out. No one in the cove on a Saturday morning. Let’s take a shot at it.”
He steered the trawler around Bonnet Island and put the anchor down.
“Do you want to throw out a net?” Pierre asked.
“Nah, I think I’ll hook up a line or two for catfish. We got a few minutes on ice here,” he said, pointing to their catch on ice in the hold.
“Wow, I got something already,” Pierre shouted, reeling his line in.
In ten minutes, they both got nice catfish.
“When we get back to the dock, I gotta send my mother a text, let her know we’re having catfish again tonight,” Alphé said, laughing.
