Dempsey wouldn't trouble my granny and knew better to ask for me at the front door when Mama was at home. He'd knocked at my window a few times, whispering my name like he hoped no one would hear him. But I did, far as I could tell I'd been the only one, but still didn't answer. Sylv's warning had been clear and had me thinking things I didn't like much. Things like telling Dempsey to stay well away from me. Things like he didn't belong with us, but just thinking that made my stomach go all heavy.
Walking down the drive, glance veering to the Simoneaux's place and further down to their empty fields made me wish I'd met Dempsey at the tree house this morning, like was usual any time we were home for the weekend. But I hadn't, still keeping my brother's warning in mind.
"Don't drag your feet, neither." I swear Mama's frown had only gotten worse the further away I walked from her and when I looked over my shoulder, caught the small snarl of her top lip, I figured I'd need to save myself from her anger if I didn't move faster.
My mama didn't hate me so much, I knew that, but I also knew I had the look of whoever my daddy had been and that always had been a sore spot between us, not like I could help it.
"Nothing for it." Bastie had blown off my question, the same one I'd asked a dozen times before I'd made twelve. "You don't need to worry over that." But every kid needs a family and ones like me, who grew up not knowing much about their daddies, needed them the most. Maybe that was why I took to Dempsey. Maybe I saw something of that missing family in him because he knew his daddy and still didn't much have one.
Bastie told me not to worry about who had made me. Mama wouldn't ever pay any mind at all to me all the times I'd asked her. But hanging out in Manchac and working in the city, you hear a lot of gossip. Me and Sylv didn't look a bit alike. He was the spit of his daddy, a man called Dante' Lanoix who mama married when Sylv was two. Bastie said Mama and Dante' had been sweethearts in school but that he'd gone off to the Army when she had Sylv swelling her belly and came back changed. We got his name and Mama got some money from the government when the scaffolding Dante' climbed at work gave way and he fell forty feet off a building. Mama buried him next to her daddy and then never spoke about him again.
But I was a Lanoix only by the name. Only because Dante' didn't much mind that Mama had already been pregnant with me five months when he came back after the war to call on her. He'd only wanted her and took what came with having her.
My daddy could have been anyone-some sweet stranger who flattered Mama until she got on her back, maybe told her how pretty she was on the rare times she laughed and smiled. Maybe he could have been one of the men who tipped their hats to her as she walked through the Square on Sundays, ready for Mass in her pretty yellow dropped waist dress and her hair finger waved all soft and close around her face. Likely though, if the gossip was true, my daddy was a white man Mama lost her mind over just a little. At least, that's what Lulu had said to one of the new maids Ester brought in when she wondered why my skin was so much brighter than my brother's.
I hadn't had a good listen to all that Lulu said, but I know I heard her mention Dempsey's uncle, his mama's brother, Lionel Phillipe who had stayed with the Simoneaux's years back before Dante' stuck around for good. Back when Mama's smile came easy and honest.
If Lulu wasn't a liar, that might make Dempsey's mama's hateful looks at me, definitely at my mama, hold more sense. That would also mean that Dempsey wasn't just my friend; he was my cousin. But I didn't think about Dempsey the way I do Uncle Aron's boy, Hank. I didn't think of Dempsey any way except how his bottom lip curved up in the middle, making it seem like he's always chewing his lip. I liked to think about his face and the small, faint freckle that sticks out from the others along his cheekbone. And his eyes, those big, bright eyes that look gray and blue and shades that remind me of the Gulf, way out in the deep when the dolphins and porpoise chase small boats, bobbing along the surf. I'd only seen it once, the Gulf, but you don't forget something like that, not ever.
Whoever my daddy had been didn't matter much now. Not to me and not to my mama. But sometimes when I was nodding off in the middle of Mass or when Bastie's low, sweet voice hummed a hymn all soft, like in a whisper, and my eyes got all heavy and I started to fade away, I'd catch my mama watching me like she wanted to see something on my face she wouldn't look for when I was full awake. Most days, that hard stare of hers was followed by a curved lip and a look of outright sick. Most days, it was all I could do from asking what sin I'd committed and how she wanted me to repent. After all, it wasn't me that asked to get born.