Lousiana Hotshot

I mean. Like a cartoon or something. It was like rain— it just kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper.”
    “What kind of noise?”
    “I don’t know. Like a crash. A boom or something.”
    “A gunshot, maybe.”
    “Too loud, I think.” She shuddered. “Can I have some water?”
    He got her some as if she were a child, and once again, she fell asleep in his arms. She felt as if she might cry when he got up and dressed and left for school.
    It was raining out, and she fell easily back to sleep. Eddie was right. She needed to decompress.
    She slept as long as she could and went in to make herself some toast. Darryl had made coffee for her.
Maybe,
she thought,
I should marry him.
    But you could hardly marry a man who didn’t know your brother. And who had a kid he never talked about.
I wonder,
she thought,
if we really do have such a healthy relationship. God knows I’m no judge.
    One thing she did know— Darryl made her happy when many men had made her cry.
Good enough,
she thought.
Good enough. And Miz Clara likes him.
    On the other hand, Miz Clara might not be infallible in these matters— by all reports she’d chosen poorly herself.
    The rain made her want to stay put, but there was little point without Darryl there. Her own house— Miz Clara’s house— seemed lonely without her mother, who had left a tart note asking please to call her at work and say whether she was dead or alive. It brought a small lump to her throat, made her realize how accustomed Miz Clara had become to their arrangement.
    Originally, her mother had permitted her to move back in for a reason— she had some poems to write, and a project to do, involving her given name and the intern who’d stuck her with it. When she’d gone back to her day job— which she roughly thought of as “computer genius”— she had never moved out. Neither she nor her mother had ever mentioned it. She’d just started working for United Oil, paying rent, and putting money into the house when it needed something.
    Of course, she’d met Darryl in the original move-back period. If she had had a different boyfriend— somebody like Lamar, the last one, Miz Clara would have thrown her out on her ear. But she was probably more smitten with Darryl than Talba was; she was happy to put up with her daughter to have him around.
    Talba dressed for work, but it was only midmorning. She was so depressed, so disoriented as a result of yesterday’s events, that she thought of going in early.
    Instead, she did a search on the name Denman La Rose Wallis. As expected, she came up with nothing. It was an odd name.
    Well, hell,
she thought.
If I want to see it written down, I know where to go.
    After a maddening phone search to find where the records she wanted were kept, she drove to the State Building, went to the Office of Vital Records, and applied for three documents: First, a copy of the marriage certificate for Clara Suzanna Guidry and Denman La Rose Wallis. It cost her, but she asked also for the birth certificate of Urethra Tabitha Sandra Wallis, grateful she had to write the name so she wouldn’t have to say it.
    The cruelty of the name— to Miz Clara; she didn’t care about herself— at one time had made her so angry it ran her life. But now her mother’s innocence moved her more. That, and her genuine wish to give her daughter a pretty name. Her second name, indeed, was not TABitha, but TaBEETHa, to rhyme with Urethra.
    Third, she requested a copy of the death certificate for Denman La Rose Wallis.
    And then she settled down to wait. After an hour, she left, cursing bureaucracy and uncooperative civil servants. She tried to walk off some of her nervous energy, returning flushed, sweaty, and just as antsy as before. She still had to wait another twenty minutes.
    Finally, having sweated a quart of blood, she had the documents— at a collective cost of $27, the marriage license being the cheapest. She folded them carefully into her purse and found a place to have coffee before she looked at them. Urethra Tabitha Sandra Wallis (later to become the Baroness de Pontalba) had been born to Clara Suzanna Wallis and Denman La Rose Wallis in 1977. Seven years later, her father had died. That was wrong, she thought. Corey had said she was only two when he died. Had he made a mistake or lied? She looked at the cause of death:
Gunshot wound to the chest.
Not an overdose. He had lied, and about more than one thing. She was seven at the time, not two.
    No one,