House of Blues

painful, that's all. If you really need to
talk, go ahead."
    Wimp.
    "We met on a blind date—did you know that?"
    He shook his head, stunned that he hadn't known it,
that it wasn't a piece of family mythology. His parents had never
talked about such things.
    " I was a senior at Sacred Heart and he was
already in college.
    He was a junior at LSU, home for Christmas vacation.
I couldn't believe someone like me got to go out with someone like
him."
    Grady's curiosity was piqued. "What were you
like?"
    "Well, I was naive."
    " What else?"
    "I guess I was pretty."
    "Come on, Mother—you had to have been pretty."
    " Well, I was considered rather . . . pretty."
    Suddenly he saw her through his father's eyes: blond
with big tits.
    " And he was . .
    " Worldly?"
    "More than that."
    " Well, what?"
    She looked uncomfortable. Finally, she shrugged,
apparently deciding there was only one way to say it. "He was
Arthur Hebert."
    " What did that mean?" He thought he knew
full well.
    "There was nobody like him in New Orleans. When
I saw him in that coat and tie, hair slicked back, so tall and
everything, I thought I'd swoon. We went to a fraternity party, and I
had my first drink. Can you imagine? I just never dreamed I could
marry somebody like that. Then when the children were young . . . She
stopped and started to cry again. This time he waited her out,
wondering about her odd reference to "the children"—probably
she was talking to herself more than to him.
    "We were so happy, Grady. You can't imagine how
happy we were. You were the cutest little boy and your father just
loved you so much. And then a few years later, I don't know, this
mean streak came out."
    She had never talked like this. He said, "You
saw it too?"
    "Saw it! or course I saw it. He started treating
me like a servant."
    "Oh. Did he change toward other people?"
Meaning himself.
    "Other people? How should I know? All I know is
one day we were in love and the next day he hated me. He just turned
against me, right in midstream."
    "When was it, do you remember?"
    "I don't know when I first noticed it. It must
have happened gradually. All I know is one day I woke up and I had no
husband."
    "Do you think it had anything to do with what
happened?"
    The Thing.
    They never spoke of it. Grady's heart pounded.
    "What do you mean ‘with what happened'?"
    "You know. At the restaurant that day; that
time. On Sunday." Don't make me name it .
He couldn't; he was quite sure he couldn't get the words out.
    " Oh. No, of course not. In fact, we were close
for a while after that, and then he went back to treating me like
dirt again. He just turned against me, that's all. One day, he up and
turned against me. My own husband."
    She could probably get a golden retriever to tum
against her—or at least she could convince herself that it had.
    "And then he turned you against me," she
said.
    "What?"
    "My own children. I know the way he talked about
me. What am I talking about? Usually he did it in front of my face.
He made you hate me."
    "Mother, you know that isn't true."
    She was sobbing, sunk in such a swamp of self-pity it
would take a crane to pull her out of it.
    "Do you think Reed hates you?"
    "Once he turned against me, then he just didn't
care, that's all. He had all the mistresses he wanted—slept with
everybody in town and didn't care who knew it."
    "Did he?" Grady had never heard a whiff of
it, and he didn't like to think of himself as naive.
    "Well, if you didn't know, that's a blessing,
that's all I can say about it. I've been thinking about what happened
the other night, Grady."
    "What happened the other night." A new
euphemism for those madcap Heberts.
    "He did the same thing to one of his women that
he did to me—and she killed him for it. But she didn't think Reed
and Dennis and Sally would be there, so she had to kidnap them."
    Was this possible? If Arthur was a philanderer, he
supposed it was, but most of Sugar's stories were cut from whole
cloth. And he didn't want to say it, but he thought killing the
Fouchers would have been a better solution than kidnapping.
    "See, she thought if she kidnapped them, then it
would look like some kind of mob thing or—you know—something
criminal."
    Grady hooted involuntarily. "Not that," he
said, for a moment almost enjoying himself
    Even Sugar saw the humor of it. She smiled. "Well,
you know what I mean. A cover-up." Her cheeks were flushed with
the thrill of the chase—Sugar liked nothing better than to be on
the trail of