All Gabriel remembered about the night his father walked out of their home was harpoons of lightning slashing the night canvas followed by thunder that roared and rumbled. The kind of thunder Tante Virgine said could “break a boy’s bones.” Huddled in the corner of his bedroom, Gabriel didn’t know if he feared the fury of the storm outside or the one he overheard inside. The one that ended with his mother’s tears.
In the years since, Gabriel had helped his mother by working in the café. During that time, his cousin left New Orleans as a gangly, credulous kid and had returned a gentlemanly, cosmopolitan young man.
“When did you arrive in New Orleans?” Gabriel handed André a steaming cup of café au lait and sat at a small table, one protected from the sun by a canvas awning.
“A few days ago.” André answered Gabriel, but his eyes surveyed the small stand.
He thinks he is above this simple place. That I have sunk to a different class. Gabriel shifted in his chair. “Tante Virgine must be quite proud and happy that you are here. We don’t see as much of her because of”—Gabriel motioned toward the stand and shrugged—“well, we have the business now.” He sounded guiltier than he meant to, thinking André might interpret it as apologizing for having to work. And work seemed as foreign to André as André’s double-breasted frock coat and broad, pleated, starched linen shirt did to Gabriel.
André sipped the coffee and leaned back, comfortably slouched. “Yes, yes, she is. Cooking as if I have not eaten for the past five years, which”—he patted his stomach—“does not seem to be the case. But I doubt she will be excited for long. I plan to return to Paris. I am studying to be a medical doctor.”
“Excuse me,” Gabriel said to his cousin, relieved that a couple approached the stand and gave him a reason to walk away. The realization of all he could have been throbbed in his chest, a knot of dreams pushing its way out. This is now my life. He reached for the pots, holding one of almost-scalded milk in one hand and coffee with chicory in the other, and poured them together into each cup.
Gabriel returned to the table and hoped that disappointment had not settled like a cloud on his face. But it didn’t need to. His cousin already knew that the distance between them was more than miles.
“So, a doctor of medicine,” Gabriel said. He hoped his words carried pride instead of envy. “What school will you attend?”
“The University of Paris has accepted me,” André said, sounding almost apologetic and only glancing at Gabriel. He stared at a trio of nuns on their way to the cathedral. “To dress in so much black, with hardly a hair showing, in this depressing heat… Now that is showing a commitment to God. Something my mother wished I had taken to Europe with me all those years ago. But maybe I will find it again while I’m here.”
Gabriel opened his eyes so wide, he felt his eyebrows wrinkle his forehead. He stifled his laugh when he saw the look of confusion on his cousin’s face. André’s years in Paris, European clothes, living as free as any white man, attending medical school…what more evidence did André need of God’s commitment to him?
“What amuses you?” André seemed confused.
“Only that the person least committed to faith has the most to be thankful for.”
“Yes, but none of it can I find here. Home. With my family and friends. And yet, what is humorous to me,” André said, “is that the friend I leave surrounded by voodoo, slavery, and crime continues to believe.”
“Some days more than others,” said Gabriel. “I need to close early today. With Rosette gone, I will be walking home.”
“I have a carriage. You don’t need to do that,” said André.
A part of Gabriel wanted to refuse, to prove that he didn’t need the comforts to which André was accustomed. But he remembered that soon his cousin would be thousands of miles away, and he didn’t know if or when he might see him again. He nodded his thanks, and André waited as he closed up the shop.
“I saw your mother and Alcee at the French Market buying shrimp,” said André as they climbed into his carriage. “Alcee still laughs like the little girl I knew, not like the young woman she is becoming. How old is she now? Thirteen?”
“Not yet. She just turned twelve,” Gabriel said. Without Alcee, he might have joined André in Paris. Maybe his father would have stayed, with one less person to depend on him. But, no, he had seen his father’s face soften with delight, his generous smile when he held his sister. Money flowed too freely from the river of the landed gentry into the stream of the Girod home for that to be the reason he left.