Crescent City Connection

but—”
    Cammie Fontenelle had clicked into the kitchen on shoes so tiny Dorise wondered if she had to special-order them. In fact, Cammie was so petite she probably had to get her clothes somewhere in Asia. At the moment she was wearing a flamingo-pink spring suit that nipped in to show a waist about the size of a hummingbird’s. Dorise liked her as well as it was possible to like someone from another planet.
    Cammie’s pretty little face was screwed up in distress, blue eyes all squinty. She didn’t know how to ask for what she wanted.
    What was Dorise doing wrong?
    Singing. She hadn’t even noticed.
    “Oh, darlin’. I’m so sorry. I didn’t even know I was doing it.”
    Cammie smiled, all better again. Her eyes were sparkly between their liner and their shadow. “It’s beautiful. Really. Maybe you should come out and entertain.”
    Dorise waved a hand at her and smiled. She started humming again before she caught herself. All things considered, she’d rather be in the kitchen, washing Cammie’s antique crystal, lovingly handling the gorgeous glasses, loading the china in the dishwasher, getting a gander at the silver as she put things back in the kitchen cabinets.
    She liked serving, too, standing at the buffet table, ladling out the crawfish pasta and grilled vegetables, checking out the ladies’ sleek bright suits. Cammie always requested her, and now so did lots of Cammie’s friends, who also had occasion to give luncheons from time to time. She was careful, she was thorough, she was fast, and she was cheerful—those were some of the things that had consistently been mentioned in her evaluations ever since she went to work for Uptown Caterers. Her mama had taught her right.
    It was easy to be nice in houses that were cool in the summer and warm in the winter, where you walked on Oriental carpets nearly as old as the houses themselves. Another lady, one the next generation up from Cammie, had explained to her that the more threadbare and tattered the rugs looked, the more likely they were to be valuable, thus the more careful she had to be.
    In these houses, upholstery was always some kind of soft stuff, like silk or velvet. The furniture was dark and shiny, crystal prisms rained from sconces, mirrors were framed with gold leaf, metallic-colored tassels tied the curtains. There was so much to look at, she could hardly work.
    She didn’t exactly fantasize about living in these places. That made no more sense to her than taking up residence in a museum—and anyway, she had an eight-year-old daughter. How did you keep a kid from breaking the Chinese vases? How did you get comfortable in a place like this? How did you keep it clean?
    And then, of course, there was the problem of keeping the neighbors from shooting you. (Or more likely, shooting your brother or husband. Black men were viewed with suspicion in the Garden District. But she didn’t think much about that—her own living room in the East hadn’t been all that healthy for her late husband.) These places were just foreign—great huge rooms and high ceilings, more than a hundred years old. But she loved being in them, looking at everything, taking care of things. And the people who came to lunch! Judges’ wives, doctors’ wives, legislators’ wives, and for the night parties, the judges and doctors, too, some of them women. Some of them black. At Cammie’s once, she had met Suzanne Nickerson, the most popular anchor-person in the city. A black woman.
    “I felt like I was really hangin’ out with the stars,” she told her sister.
    Her sister had said, “Dorise, don’t you get it? You aren’t hangin’ out with anybody. You the help.”
    “You just jealous,” she had said. “How else you gon’ meet Suzanne Nickerson?” Her sister worked at a laundry, back in their old neighborhood.
    Under questioning, even her sister would have said Dorise was doing good. Dorise knew she was. She’d gotten married young and had some piddly job at a video store until her husband insisted she quit working. He made plenty of money and she had a kid to take care of.
    She didn’t ask him how he got his money—he was a businessman with lots of investments. She didn’t know he had his own apartment somewhere else and a life she knew nothing about, until the day he died. Leaving her with nothing. Leaving their daughter with nothing.
    “Why didn’t you know, Dorise?” her mother had asked. Her sister had asked. Everyone had asked.
    But they