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“If I ever do anything like a Kardashian, shoot me, bro,” Sabre declared.
“Only if you make me the same promise,” Yves replied.
“Double suicide it is,” Sabre agreed.
I looked between the front seats of our rented Denali to the back where my two big boys were crunching my girl in between, and I watched them solidify their agreement with a fist bump.
They were being funny, even if it disturbed me greatly that Manon was cold-bloodedly spending her inheritance before she got it.
But I wasn’t surprised since she’d been confronted by the enormity of it considering Remy had just driven into the back drive of his parent’s home in New Orleans. A drive that had been paved in bricks in the 1910s. A drive, Remy had told me, that replaced the dual line carriageway that used to be there when it became clear automobiles weren’t going away.
The residents and guests staying at the house used that ingress, also using the stately porticoed door to the side for entry into the home. Other guests used the front door that faced the veranda at an angle to the side. An odd arrangement, that Remy explained when I’d asked after it.
“It’s about the windows, baby,” he’d said.
And when he’d shifted my perspective, I saw he was right.
Because beyond the regal white columns, past the graceful hanging lantern, if you didn’t get stuck on the manicured, potted, conical miniature evergreens dotting the porch among the curlicued wrought iron furniture, the fifteen-foot-high windows flanked by their narrow black shutters gave more than a glimpse of the opulence within.
Therefore, if that large, two-story home with its front veranda, top balcony and wide yard of velvet green skirted by a black-painted iron fence and trimmed by bird baths and meticulously tended greenery wasn’t in-your-face shouting, The people inside are loaded!, a view through the windows did.
Colette was an only child of two only children. Thus, Colette had inherited her family’s estate. Something they’d managed to build even if it had been 1883 when her great-grandfather left the plantation he could no longer maintain as he’d lost his free labor of enslaved human beings. So, he’d sold it, moved to the city, and made a second fortune in printing.
However, that fortune took a turn for the worse when Colette’s father died of polio when she was little.
Since she was too young, and her mother didn’t feel any need to keep her eye on things, the printing business suffered. This was due to the fact Mrs. Cormier left it in the hands of men who preferred to siphon money from her and her cossetted daughter, rather than keeping them in the style to which they were accustomed.
It took years, but that business eventually went bankrupt.
Even though Colette was of age when that happened and had a degree in English from Tulane, neither of them considered procuring paid employment.
Therefore, Colette and her mother were barely hanging on when Guillaume entered the picture.
I had no idea why they chose to make their official home in New Orleans rather than in Toulouse, where Guillaume’s family was from, and where his family’s business, which centered around shipping, was still maintained.
I just knew that Guillaume swept into Colette Cormier’s life like a tornado, dashing her into a whirlwind of international travel, parties on yachts, gambling in Monaco, frolicking on the Riviera, and turning around the Southern belle’s drooping fortunes, including spending tens of thousands on a complete restoration of her family home.
The inside, even I had to admit, was a dream of peaches, creams and pale yellows, greens, pinks and blues with ornate furniture, heavy, perfectly swagged draperies and Aubusson rugs.
The sitting room (my favorite, outside—something else I didn’t like to admit—Colette and Guillaume’s bedroom, which was impeccable) had a ballerina-pink wall that depicted a hand-painted mural of a grove of trees.
What I had never understood, even before I knew how his parents treated him, was how Remy grew up in that place.
It was gorgeous.
But it was like a museum.
I also knew, before what I’d recently learned, that Remy didn’t have an emotional attachment to the home he grew up in, and he had plans for it when it was his.
He’d told me years ago he intended to sell the house and donate the proceeds to the EJI.
“Far too little, far too late,” he’d muttered. “But that money should take care of the people who earned the man the means to build that house in the first place.”
Needless to say, with three astute children who knew they had deep roots in Southern upper-class society, they’d asked the question, and Remy and I’d had an uncomfortable conversation with them to explain that they were the descendants of slave owners.
Their reactions told me not one of them would make a peep when Remy sold his childhood home, part of their legacy, and invest it in a better legacy, justice.
