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Prologue
On a June morning, in the steamy atmosphere of a sleepy backwater, the residents of Cypress Cove ushered in the beginning of summer. School was finally finished for the year, and a group of adolescent girls in tank tops and shorts hung out on the dock with a string and a hook, fishing for crabs. Boys were at the baseball diamond down the street, getting in a few runs before the heat rose at noon and only the brave stayed outdoors.
Lucky fishermen in trawlers chugged along in the channel, aiming for the ocean where they would find cool breezes along with their catch. A man wearing a hat sat in a chair in front of the barber shop, smoking a cigar and reading theTimes Picayune, waiting for his turn. At the community center, a group of men and women waited for their AA meeting to begin.
Casson’s Hardware and Spencer’s Grocery were open for business, and across the street, the aroma of fresh beignets came from Café Delphine. At nine, church bells at Saint Anthony Padua peeled out nine times. It was officially time to get to work.
As usual, traffic was minimal that morning. Parents dropped off their children at the day care center and then headed to work. A man on horseback came down from Bayou Trail and stopped in front of the post office, tying his horse up at the post just as a train blew its whistle, coming into the station behind the post office.
Katy Theriot arrived home from college for a well-deserved three-month break with one year of college left to go. After dashing her dreams of being a slug all summer when her sister Calista asked her to help out at the new Cypress Cove daycare center, she tried to put herself into a state of suspended animation. She loved kids, but taking care of a bunch of screaming toddlers was not on her radar for the summer. One day at a time was in order.
“I should have stayed in Southern California,” she whined when her mother broke the news about the job.
“You’d have to work there, too,” Betsy Theriot said. “You might as well be here, in the bosom of your family.”
“I’d rather work with Dad on the boat.”
“It’s too dangerous. You’ll love the day care, mark my word.”
Then she discovered the facility that housed the day care also had a swimming pool. And that the lifeguard at the pool was as hot as the temperature in the bayou.
Born and raised in Cypress Cove, Adam Spencer of the Spencer’s grocery store chain, taught high school physics at Saint Anthony Padua High School during the school year and lifeguarded just to stay out of the grocery store on summer break. Katy had been in his physics class during her senior year and she remembered him well.
The owners had asked Adam to lifeguard that summer at the facility, an old ten-room hotel across the street from Saint Anthony Padua Catholic Church.
“After you take communion, you can slip over to the lifeguard chair,” the owner had said, laughing.
“I’ll take it,” Adam replied. He’d had a painful breakup, and staying busy was key for survival.
“Remember, it’s gonna be little kids, too. Just in case you were thinking it was all adults.”
“I’m looking forward to baby talk after teaching teenagers all year,” Adam said.
After college, one goal kept him busy, and that was the restoration of an ancient swamp shack that overlooked one of the largest estuaries in southern Louisiana. The first time he laid eyes on it, he knew he was going to buy it. Fifty acres of swamp, cypress forest, and canals to the bay surrounded five acres of marshy land, the centerpiece of which was the small turn of the century shack that was about ready to fall into the marsh.
The first year, he shored it up and began lifting it on stilts. Then little by little, he restored the interior, and once he got air conditioning installed, he could live there.
When he’d finished enough of the interior work, he could concentrate on the yard. The second year, he transformed the marshy swamp into an arboretum quality garden, with a maze of boxwood and a rose garden.
Turning off the dirt road into Adam’s driveway, Butch Spencer smiled at the vision of his handsome son, shirtless, digging in the muck with a big shovel.
“Hey, Pop! Welcome.” He stuck the shovel into the ground and walked to his father’s car, pleased he’d made the rare trip to visit.
“I didn’t know you liked to garden,” his father said, coming to see the progress Adam had made on the place.
“I found out once I started doing it that I love it. Where else can you get a great workout and increase the value of your property?”
“Son, I’m truly impressed. You grow vegetables, I’ll sell them in the store.”
Adam laughed, nodding his head. “Pop, if I do vegetables, they’re yours.”
“Show me around the place,” Butch said. “I can already see the outside is outstanding. When you said you were putting your house up on pilings, I thought you were teasing.”
“No, sir. The water table is rising every year, and this place would have been underwater soon if I didn’t do it.”
The brackish water ate at the foundation of places in the swamp and the only hope was to put them up on elevated cypress stilts, making the shack look like a leggy spider.
While his friends were out drinking and picking up women on the weekends, Adam was back in the bayou, working on his shack. It took all his free time, hand sanding the old growth cypress wood trim, including the cabinets, and doing all the tile and marble work. He just didn’t have time for a girlfriend.
