My son Antoine stood beside me at the high limit tables of the riverboat casino in Shreveport, in his good gray suit that smelled of shrimp and diesel, and pointed with his chin. I am Annie Mae Fontenot, seventy eight years old, and I had driven four hours with him that Thursday in his truck, with my purse in my lap, to see what he had seen. At the third blackjack table sat a woman in a red dress, laying down five thousand dollar chips, and the name on the little brass plate before her seat was mine.
I knew the woman. Everyone in Lake Charles knew her. She was Celeste Thibodeaux, the wife of my other son Andre, the lawyer, who had told me for three months that I was becoming forgetful and unsafe and needed a guardian. I had made up a story to test them both, that I had lost four point eight million dollars gambling. Andre had gone straight to the courthouse to have me declared incompetent. And all that time his wife had been gambling in Shreveport under my name, with copies of my identification taken from his files.
The pit boss stood at her elbow, courteous and bored. Celeste laughed, raised her glass, and looked up. For a moment she met my eyes across the green felt. She went as white as the chips in her hand. Antoine squeezed my arm. “Mama,” he whispered, “do you want me to call the sheriff?” I shook my head. “Not yet,” I said. “I would like my other son to see this with his own eyes. Telephone Andre, and tell him I have had an accident at the casino.”
A high limit room in a riverboat casino gave one mother the evening to bring her twin sons back together in Lake Charles.
I gave my terms to Antoine, in a low voice, while Celeste stood and began to gather her chips. “I will not shout at her, and I will not have her arrested in front of strangers. I want the manager of the casino brought here. I want the records of the name of Annie Mae Fontenot printed, every night for two years. And I want Andre standing in this room when I read them. I am his mother. I will give him a chance to be ashamed. I think it will be more than he is expecting.”
Andre arrived in ninety minutes, rumpled and out of breath, having driven the whole way from Lake Charles at a hundred miles an hour. He stopped in the doorway of the private office behind the cashier cage, where the manager sat with a stack of printouts, and stared at his wife, and at me. His face crumpled. “Mama,” he said, “I did not know she was using your name. I swear it. I only wanted to protect you.” I told him that was a very expensive way to protect somebody.
It was Celeste who made the mistake. She saw the printouts on the desk, all of the receipts for her play, and seized the whole stack in both arms. She ran for the door, scattering paper behind her in a white trail, down the corridor toward the parking garage in her red dress and her stockinged feet. But the corridor was narrow, and at the end of it stood four of the shrimpers of Antoine, big men from Cameron Parish who had driven up in a truck behind us, in their rubber boots, and who blocked the corridor shoulder to shoulder.
Celeste stopped. She looked at the wall of the shrimpers, and at the printouts in her arms, and at the security officers coming up behind her. She slid down the wall to the floor, with the papers around her, and began to cry. Andre stood in the corridor and looked at his wife for a long time. Then he turned to me. “Mama,” he said, slowly, “I filed the petition because I believed her. She told me you were losing your mind. I was a fool.” I told him that being a fool was not a crime in Louisiana.
The money consequences were quiet. The casino, hearing the facts, returned the sums lost under my name, since they had been played on forged identification, and Celeste agreed to repay the rest and enter a program in Lafayette. Andre withdrew the petition and wrote me a letter of apology that took four pages. The four point eight million dollars that I had pretended to lose was exactly where it had always been, in a bank in Lake Charles, and I moved it into a family trust that named both of my sons.
In the name of my husband Clovis, who passed in 2014, I started the Clovis Fontenot Fund. It pays for gambling treatment, free legal help against false guardianship petitions and boat repairs for retired shrimpers, in Calcasieu, Cameron and Jefferson Davis parishes. In the first year we placed thirty one people in treatment and defended nine seniors in court. One was a retired oyster fisherman from Grand Lake who had been called forgetful by his niece. The judge heard him, and said he sounded sharper than the lawyers.
On a warm evening in October, Andre, Antoine and I sat on the back porch of my house on the bayou, with a pot of gumbo on the table and the cicadas singing in the oaks. Celeste was in the kitchen, five months in recovery, washing the dishes with a dish towel over her shoulder. Antoine pushed a bowl across the table to his brother, and Andre took it. “Mama,” he said, with his mouth full, “you are the sharpest person I know.” I told him I had been saying so for years. Antoine laughed so hard that he had to set down his spoon, and the old porch light came on above us, drawing the moths, and I thought that Clovis would have loved every minute of it.
