Ben parked up behind the miniature GMC, which could probably have fitted in the Tahoe’s rear cargo space. He climbed out into the hot sun and opened the gate and walked up a neat little path to the door to ring the bell. A minute later he heard movement inside.
The inner door opened, then the screen door, and a large African-American lady with a smile that made the house’s dazzling pearl-white paintwork seem dull and faded greeted him with a vivacious ‘Well, hello there, sugah. I’m Lottie Landreneau, and how are you today?’
Ben knew from the start that he’d struck lucky with Lottie. The warmth of her hospitality was as endearing as her smile and from the moment he walked into her house he felt right at home. The place was filled with flowers, light and Southern charm, like her personality. ‘Where y’all from, sugah? You sound English without soundin’ English, if you know what I mean.’
‘I’ve moved around.’
‘Oh, I know all about that,’ she said mysteriously, and seemed to enjoy keeping him in suspense for now. ‘Come, let me show you your room.’
He followed her from the richly carpeted entrance hall and up a switchback staircase with a thick gleaming mahogany banister rail that she clutched as she hauled her weight up the stairs. ‘That’s me,’ she said, motioning towards a glossy white door at the end of the galleried first-floor landing.
Spaced out along the passage were two more doors, each adorned with a little brass number plaque. ‘Y’all are the only guest I got right now, so you get your pick of the rooms.’ She pointed at the door nearest to hers. ‘How ’bout this one?’
‘What’s up there?’ he asked, nodding towards a drop-down wooden staircase that led from the opposite end of the landing to an open hatch in the ceiling.
‘Rooms three and four. It’s an attic conversion. Ceilings are kinda low.’
‘I love attics.’
‘Okay, well then let me show you.’
The attic conversion was a work of genius, executed with style and taste. The drop-down wooden staircase was a fine piece of carpentry that could be retracted from above by means of a rope pulley to create a cosy, isolated sanctuary at the top of the house. As for the bedrooms themselves, room three was nice, but room four was perfect. The inverted V of the sloped ceiling was all decked out in gleaming white tongue-and-groove panelling, and the floor was sanded and varnished bare boards with a furry rug. The single bed ran along the middle, where the ceiling was at its highest point. It had a simple iron frame and a patchwork quilt, and a small table with a reading lamp. The single dormer window looked out beyond the slope of the nearest neighbour’s roof to offer a view of Chitimacha as far as the winding brown snake of the bayou in the distance. The room reminded Ben a lot of his quarters in the old farmhouse back home in France.
‘This is the one I’d like.’
‘No problem at all. It’s yours, sugah.’
Lottie led the way back down to a little salon on the ground floor, where she made a fuss of serving home-made iced tea with lemon in tall, slender glasses. Not too sweet, not too lemony, perfect and refreshing after the wilting heat. Then, wedging her not inconsiderable bulk into an armchair, she began to talk. Which was something she loved to do, as Ben now discovered. But she did it so beautifully, mesmerising him with her accent and laughter, that he could have sat listening all day.
He got the whole life story. Born and bred right here in Chitimacha, she’d moved to Villeneuve in her teens and ended up living there for twenty-plus years until a bad marriage had grown worse and she’d eventually escaped with the intention of doing something with her life. A goal that Lottie had taken extremely seriously, celebrating her fortieth birthday with the vow to waste not another single minute of whatever time God had provided for her. The last three years had been spent travelling and studying in Europe, from where she’d returned to Louisiana only a few months ago.
‘Studying how to run a guesthouse?’ Ben asked, to which she giggled and replied, ‘No, dearie, studying cookery. The guesthouse thing, that’s only temporary. What I’m gonna do, my real plan, is to set up my own restaurant, the best eatin’ house for a hundred miles around. It’s gonna put this little ol’ town back on the map and bring folks from all over.’
Lottie’s travels had taken her to London, Paris and Rome, where she’d scrubbed pots and waitressed in all the top restaurants, while using her divorce settlement money to take classes in some of the most famous cookery schools in Europe. Now armed with the requisite skills and a clutch of diplomas, she had proudly returned to her roots in order to realise her grand ambition of bringing together the finer points of classical cuisine with the best of traditional Cajun cooking. ‘Because there ain’t nothin’ like it in the world,’ she assured him.
‘Everywhere I go around here, it’s all about food, food and more food,’ Ben observed with a smile. ‘Everything from Mickey’s crawfish to fresh coon meat to Creole jambalaya to boudin to gumbo to gar balls. I’ve done nothing but eat since I got here. Does anyone in Louisiana ever think about anything else?’
She laughed. ‘We do worship our bellies, that’s a fact. Fattest state in America, and we’s only just gettin’ started.’
‘Whatever the heck gar balls are.’
‘Those are a kind of patty, made from alligator gar. That’s this ugly big ol’ fish the river folks catch. Might look like a livin’ nightmare, but sure tastes like heaven.’
Ben remembered the fanged monster he’d seen displayed outside the fish shack on the way into town. He still didn’t fancy eating it. ‘And what on earth is gumbo? Where do you get these names?’
Lottie’s big brown eyes opened wide. ‘Heavens, honey child, you mean to tell me you ain’t never eaten no Louisiana gumbo before?’
‘I can’t say I’ve had that pleasure yet.’
‘Then you sure came to the right place, sweetie. And I know just what to put on the menu for dinner tonight.’ Lowering her voice and turning on the accent even more strongly, she said, ‘Mm-hmm, you is in fo’ a treat!’
But before the treat could happen, some preparations needed to be made, and so did a confession. Because she was still getting on her feet with her new guesthouse business, and because Ben was her only customer and had turned up out of the blue the way he had, Lottie had to admit the shocking truth that her larder was all but empty. Which to her was a major embarrassment, but to Ben was completely unimportant. All he wanted was a room for the night.
‘Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to feed me. I saw a café in town. I can eat there.’
‘You don’ want to eat there, trust me.’
‘How bad can it be?’ He could have offered plenty of examples to illustrate how used he was to roughing it, but there were already enough citizens of Clovis Parish with more insights into his past than they really needed to have.
Despite his protests Lottie was resolute, her eyes already beginning to glaze as she visualised the feast she was going to cook up to mark the occasion of her first-ever customer.
Hence, a serious shopping expedition was called for – and hence, as Ben had nothing else to do for the next few hours, nor for the rest of that day for that matter, he happily allowed himself to get roped in as a general aide and grocery carrier. And, as it turned out, he soon became the chauffeur for the occasion too, after pointing out that Lottie’s matchbox-sized bright green GMC, as cute as it was, couldn’t hold more than a couple of bags of shopping whereas his Tahoe could haul enough goods to stock a restaurant kitchen for a month.
He gallantly escorted Lottie