Politics was Nanan Cherise’s catchword for all the corrupt stuff that went on behind the scenes in Louisiana to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. But Galen noticed she put the most offended emphasis on the Perreaults thinking they were better.
Galen didn’t mind his mother’s better family. In his opinion, they paid well enough, in his opinion, and other boys on their bayou had it worse.
Plus, he liked all his freedom. He got to build rafts and fix things around Cherise’s house and do super-hero stuff for the neighbors, like catching extra fish for the bigger families, babysitting when single mères were sick, and even learning how to maintain and fix everybody’s various boats.
He didn’t even mind that his neighbors sometimes teased him for not being a real Cajun, like Nanan Cherise. Or that a few of them also shook their heads over his mother’s job.
A lot of mamas yelled and got mad. His was always sweet and happy to see him. After he began reading, she started bringing home books and comics during her weekly visit. And whatever he asked for, he got. Candy. Binoculars. Even a computer. Though, he had to take their swamp boat followed by two buses to a Radio Shack in Baton Rouge before he could get internet working at the house, like on the computers at school.
His little sister, Ellie, probably could have done with a mother, though.
She refused to wear dresses from the time she could stand up straight—even the ones their mama sewed. She insisted on running all over the swamp with her big brother and convinced Galen to take her to his barber.
Ellie cutting off her long hair had put Nanan Cherise in her emotions for weeks. All the way up to her death, she insisted to Galen, “That poor girl never would’ve turnt out the way she did if your mère had raised her right.”
But he liked how Ellie had turned out. It was like having a little brother. And besides, his mère already had a girly girl—two when the Perreaults added that second daughter out of nowhere. She didn’t need a third princess.
At least, that was what his mother told Nanan Cherise when her sister friend got to complaining too long about the Ellie situation.
Anyhow, Galen got everything he needed to grow up right and serve his country as a real hero by joining the Army. So no, Galen never held any ill will against his mother’s other family.
Not even when Mrs. Perreault called her in a panic, the one week before New Year when he was on stateside holiday leave.
By this time, the Perreault lady had put his mother on their family phone plan—as a gift, she claimed. Cherise, and even a precociously cynical Ellie, had translated that gift as Mrs. Perreault wanting to make sure her housekeeper didn’t ever get a moment to herself. But reception remained non-existent on the bayou, so most times the Perreault lady ended up calling on the landline anyway.
Her voice was so frantic that Galen could hear her loud and clear, even though he was sitting on the other side of the living room.
“Jose’s not here, and the pool’s not working!” the Perreault lady cried in that strange accent of hers.
His mother once told him, she was from some no-name family in the Midwest. But she’d spent a lot of time improving herself so she could marry into a family like the Perreaults. And that was why she sounded like the Black anchorwomen on television who enunciated every syllable down to the unnecessary gees and esses at the end of words. Also, she didn’t speak a lick of French.
Jose hadn’t been there for over a decade. Their former handyman left the state of Louisiana about two days after his mother announced she was pregnant with Ellie. Mrs. Perreault blamed his mère, not Ellie’s absent father, for this turn of events. And ten years later, if something the Perreault queen would have called Jose about came up, his mother was expected to “handle it.”
Galen got up to grab the keys to the swamp boat before his mother was even done with the call.
Apparently, the Perreault pool wasn’t working right. And they couldn’t have that. The original spoiled princess was going to be on TV. However, the boy who usually fixed it was on vacation.”
“Like the two of you are supposed to be,” Nanan Cherise grumbled before they headed out in the swamp boat Galen had built himself—from the cup holders to the huge back fan.
“Swamp Boy, do I need to be worried about whatever you and Waylon are getting up to in the Army?” his mother demanded after they climbed into the brand new F-350 Galen had purposefully not told her about.
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. They’d mostly made small talk over the week of their vacation—the differences between Middle Eastern winter and bayou winter, back bayou folks versus city desert folks, how neither of them were looking forward to voting for anybody in the local elections.
How had she come to suspect about his extracurriculars with Waylon?
He supposed the same way she knew that him getting assigned to his cousin Waylon’s unit wasn’t just a matter of luck, even before he did.
“Another generation of Fairgood men getting exactly what they want,” she’d muttered back when he called to tell her.
And now, as if hearing his silent question out loud, she answered, “You think I don’t know what Fairgood men get up to after they join the Army? Your great-great-great-granddaddy started one of the first criminal motorcycle gangs when he got back from fighting in World War Two.”
Galen frowned. That debacle in the Middle East wasn’t World War II, and he’d never considered himself a real Fairgood. That was just the name he’d used on all his government paperwork to enlist three years ago.
His grandfather had kicked both his daughters out of the family for taking up with men he didn’t approve of. And Galen had grown up knowing his birth was the reason his mother had become a black sheep. She’d also insinuated that the disappearance of her son’s father, the scion of a Tennessee-based Greek mafia family, might not have been a case of abandonment.
“We tried to run away together,” she once told him. “That’s how we ended up in Louisiana. But one day he just clean disappeared, and I couldn’t prove it, but I knew…I knew in my soul the Fairgoods had something to do with it.”
Her father was dead now. But his mother still called her brothers and the rest of her Tennessee family “not welcoming.” And though he didn’t believe every word out his godmother’s mouth, he suspected that Cherise’s claim they were “crazy white supremacist criminals” was closer to the truth than his mother’s “not welcoming.”
