Lousiana Hotshot

never had the slightest interest in it.
    Maybe Miz Clara had learned the hard way.
    Talba’s overloaded brain was screaming with the effort of it.
Come on, folks, is this worth driving me crazy for? Give me a fucking break!
    She realized she was furious.
    “Goddam it to hell!” She yelled loud enough to be heard on the north shore and threw a shoe across the room. Unsatisfied, she threw the other shoe. “Motherfucking motherfucker!” No doubt Mrs. Glapion down the block had heard her, but she was well beyond excusing her French.
    She sat down hard on the bed and lay back, staring at the ceiling.
This is what made me so mad last night. The goddam conspiracy.
    They are
not
getting away with it. There’s got to be something.
    There were several things. There was an old cedar chest in which her mother kept— what? She didn’t know.
    There was a hall closet that hadn’t been cleaned since her childhood, that she knew of.
    And there was an attic.
    It was Saturday, and she had all day.
    Every instinct told her to go for the cedar chest, that that was where it would be, if it existed. She’d never even known Miz Clara to open it.
    But she couldn’t do that quite yet. She was angry at her mother, but such an invasion of privacy was going to require an act of will she wasn’t yet up to.
    She figured the heat in the attic would be unbearable, but she was still willing to go there first. To get to it, you had to pull down a door in the ceiling and climb a folding ladder. Armed with a flashlight, she ascended gingerly, on fastidious alert for crawly things.
    But it was remarkably clean up there. This was where her mother kept her winter clothes in summer, and her summer clothes in winter. There were garment bags there, and some black-plastic leaf bags closed with a twist of wire.
    Talba worried them open. Clothes were inside— clothes of her mother’s that she could remember Miz Clara wearing fairly recently. Certainly nothing from another era. They were probably things waiting to go to the Goodwill, or maybe a rummage sale at church.
    She was drenched when she descended and folded up the ladder. Okay, it was done. Some iced tea and then back to work.
    Was she ready for the cedar chest?
    Now or never,
she thought.
Let’s do it.
    She popped briefly by the closet, just to reassure herself, and found it so packed with things she couldn’t identify, she found she actually preferred the chest.
    Ms. Clara used the top for a catchall. It was stacked with old church bulletins and boxes of pledge envelopes. There was a little shell-encrusted figure of Jesus on a cross that Talba had brought her from Florida once when she was a child. It made Talba wince, as it had even at age nine, but she’d known her mother loved Jesus, and there wasn’t that much of which Miz Clara did approve.
    There was a cardboard stationery box of cards her mother had saved, birthday and Mother’s Day cards from Talba and Corey, which made Talba tear up. Things like that were private; they shouldn’t be seen by anyone but the collector— especially not by the collected. There were some pills, too, and some old magazines, mostly copies of the
Watchtower
left by Jehovah’s Witnesses. She had heard Miz Clara promise the Witnesses she’d read them, and Talba was sure she still meant to, though some were seven years old and had never been touched.
    Talba took careful note of where everything was and then laid it all out in the same pattern on her mother’s carefully made bed.
    She opened the chest. The smell of cedar filled the room. Startled, she jumped as if an animal had leapt out.
    Fitted onto an inch-wide wooden shelf that ran round the perimeter of the chest was a sort of shallow drawer that lifted out, divided into two small compartments and one large. Lying there right on top, in the middle of the large one, was something that took her breath away. Her parents’ wedding picture, framed in silver.
    She picked it up, taking in every detail. Miz Clara thirty-odd years younger and wearing a white dress! She couldn’t get over it. Absolutely could not imagine such a thing.
    It was a long, beautiful, lacy white dress, with veil to match. Absolutely the whole nine yards. Ten minutes earlier, Talba would have bet money that Miz Clara had worn a church dress down to City Hall to get married.
    But her mother had been a real bride, as radiant as the cliché held. Talba kept staring, inspecting the picture for signs of her mother’s cynicism, her