Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts
Hurukan is impotent in the face of it, but somewhere south of Galveston a brewing storm waited for the chance, once again, to try to wipe the sullied world clean.
Chapter 18
The Pirate’s Lair was one of those rare restaurants where patrons could arrive dressed elegantly, enjoy warmly efficient service and fine linen napkins, and dine well, yet leave completely relaxed. Housed in an actual refurbished pirate’s lair, its well-polished floors bore scars that spoke of treasure and skullduggery.
Cyril strode out of the restaurant before Faye finished parking, in plenty of time to open her door and extend his arm to help her out of the car. Had he been watching out the front window? That seemed undignified. More likely, a discreetly placed gratuity had made sure he was notified as soon as a certain well-used Pontiac rolled off the highway.
She had brought a shawl, partly because the evening was unusually cool and partly because her dress was rather bare. Faye, like any woman reared by a mother who sewed well, appreciated well-made clothes constructed of good fabric. These days, she was appalled by what such clothing cost. On her budget, when she wanted something nice, she was forced to make it herself.
Another thing her seamstress mother had taught her was to never, never expend the effort to make a dress in the trendiest style. When Mama put days and days into a sewing project, she intended for Faye to get years and years of wear out of it.
As usual, Mama was right. Faye remembered making this dress for a party celebrating her short-lived engagement to Isaiah. Every pintuck in its strapless bodice was an old friend. The bias-cut skirt still clung where it should and floated free where it should. Best of all, it was flame red, and Cyril obviously liked it.
His admiration was apparent in the way he cupped her elbow in his hand, the way he helped her wrap the shawl around her bare shoulders. She let him guide her through the historical part of the restaurant out onto a newer open-air deck, where he had secured a choice table. They sat in comfortable wicker chairs with their backs to the other diners, facing the Gulf. The sky to their left was silver-black. To their right, the water still glowed orange where the sun had melted into it like a crayon.
Conversation came easily over an eclectic meal that featured Ethiopian-style vegetables served authentically on flatbread and without silverware. The inclusion of some inauthentically grilled shrimp and bay scallops reminded them that they were not actually in Ethiopia but, rather, were perched on the rim of the Gulf of Mexico, which was a damn fine place to be.
Pinot noir suited the spicy vegetables, and though their waiter delicately tried to guide them toward a rich Chardonnay to complement the seafood, they insisted on their wine of choice. Swigging the pinot and eating with their hands, they swapped garrulous tales of growing up in rural Florida. Cyril, of course, had her trumped. He was older and drew on memories of a time when nobody he knew had air conditioning and even indoor plumbing hadn’t completed its conquest of the American South. He even remembered when saltine crackers came in big wooden barrels that sat next to grocery store cash registers for God-knew-how-long, yet the crackers never tasted stale.
Faye’s city-girl childhood in Tallahassee hadn’t been nearly so colorful, but she’d spent many a summer day at Joyeuse helping her grandmother make sure the old house didn’t rot to the ground. She didn’t bother to tell him about learning to replace termite-ridden clapboards at ten, then moving up to tin roof repair by age fourteen. Instead, they shared stories about cottonmouth sightings, and evaluated whether dewberries were best cooked in cobblers or eaten as soon as they were plucked ripe off the vine, if not before.
“But nothing could touch my mother’s blackberry jam, God rest her soul,” Cyril said, automatically tracing the sign of the cross on his body: forehead, sternum, shoulder, shoulder.
Faye was shaken to her bones. The pieces of the puzzle collided inside her skull and assembled themselves into a coherent, ugly whole.
If Cyril was Catholic then so, likely, was his whole family. Fragments of information leapt out of her subconscious. Criss-Kross, his brother Cedrick’s high school nickname—for sarcastic, sadistic high schoolers, there could be no more perfect nickname for a boy so religious that he wore a cross adorned
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