Lousiana Hotshot

“Great big piece by Jane Storey.”
    “Let me see that.” Eddie pulled the screen toward him and read the piece aloud, as naturally as he’d once read his daughter
The Cat in the Hat.
“Yeah, she said she worked for Allred.”
    Angie nodded. “I guess it was around the time he had that unfortunate collision with a hunk of hot lead.”
    He stared at her. “What you been readin’? You’re talkin’ funny.” Without waiting for an answer, he kept putting things together. His head started bobbing, as if a puppeteer were running it. “Yeah. Yeah. She checks out. Looks like she’s who she says she is. Damn. She helped break the Russell Fortier case.”
    Angie leaned back in her dad’s chair, looking smug— as if the entire female sex had been challenged and had passed the test. “Dad, you’ve got a problem.”
    “What’s that, baby?” He was still staring at the screen, distracted.
    “She’s not going to go for those slave wages you’re offering.”
    “Who’s offerin’? I don’t know if I could work with a woman like that.”
    “A woman like what? Black or female?” His daughter’s voice was cool, but her eyes were hot and dangerous. She could turn on him like a snake— she had a history of it.
    “I’m not prejudiced, Angie.”
    She said, “I ought to know whether you are or not,” and walked out, scooping up her purse on her way.
    I could call her back,
he thought.
Maybe she’ll go to lunch, anyway.
But physically, he couldn’t. His throat had closed. When that chasm opened between them, that Grand Canyon of a thing that cracked open as suddenly as a fissure in an earthquake, he felt as if someone were sitting on his chest, squeezing the air out of him. The world turned gray, and he floated above himself, watching his body, shriveled and ancient, lying in a hospital bed and facing a wall, a gray wall in a gray world, perhaps for all eternity.
    It hadn’t always been this way. He didn’t know what was happening to him, exactly, except that it was a form of hopelessness and it wasn’t about Angie. Or wasn’t all about Angie. He sensed that it was partly about his impending birthday, and wondered if it happened to everyone, and if so, if it ever went away.
    He decided against lunch; it would only prolong life.
    ***
    It was three when Audrey called, and his stomach was sour from too many cups of coffee. “EdDEE,” she said, the way people in their old neighborhood called each other. He’d say “AuDREE” if he wanted her. “Ya want meat loaf and red gravy tonight?”
    His stomach growled. He wanted some now, he realized. He wanted some bad.
    “Come home early,” she said. “The poetry readin’s at seven.”
    “What? The what’s at seven?”
    “The thing Angie’s taking us to. I thought y’all talked about it.”
    Damn,
he thought.
Why bother thinking up a good name for your kid? We might as well have called her Devila.
He said, “Okay, Audrey. I’m leavin’ early, anyway.”
    “Why? You don’t feel well?”
    He almost said,
The goddam screen. It’s giving me a headache.
But he caught himself. By now, Angela would have rounded her up; the two women would be irrevocably locked into a conspiracy against him, a mission to get him to hire a nerd to save him from himself. This nerd, apparently. The one who thought she was royalty.
Why the hell Baroness Pontalba?
he wondered, and thought with resignation,
I bet I’m about to find out.
    Some four hours later, full of the promised protein and tomato concoction as well as a mountain of mashed potatoes, he and his wife and daughter (who’d not-so-coincidentally been invited to dinner) found themselves at a restaurant on North Carrollton it would never have occurred to them to patronize in other circumstances. Or Audrey and Eddie, at any rate. For all Eddie knew, it was Angie’s favorite hangout.
    Reggie and Chaz was a black-owned restaurant for starters, a gay-owned joint for a follow-up. It was fairly new as well. All those facts added up to a hip restaurant, a multicultural, happening kind of restaurant, of a sort that would normally have merely bewildered the elder Valentinos, who leaned more toward the likes of Mandina’s. Tonight, they got the hang of it, though; it was a venue for Art.
    If that was what poetry was: Eddie really wouldn’t know.
    He looked around him. The place had a little bar, which was fortunate, since the three of them had already eaten dinner and would certainly be expected to spend money for the