Mr. Fontenot slid the cassette into a black machine on the credenza, and my grandmother filled the room. Not through headphones this time, but out loud, in her warm, dry, Shreveport voice, with a little crackle behind it like grease in an iron skillet. “Hello, everybody,” she said. “This is Ida Mae Boudreaux, and this is side B, and I want it understood that I am of sound mind and sitting at my own kitchen table. Brandon, baby, I know you are in that room. I know your face is the color of milk. Sit still and hear me out.” Brandon sat. His hands were gripping the edge of the table. Kiara had edged her chair a foot away.
“Here is what I know,” the tape went on. “In June of last year you took three thousand dollars in an envelope to Leon Guidry at the courthouse. You asked him to file a deed putting this house in your name. I never signed it. Leon called me the same afternoon. He is a good man, and he did not file it. He gave it to me.” A pause. The tape hissed. “I have it right here in my Bible. I will give it to Mr. Fontenot. And, Brandon, there is one more thing. Last summer you asked Leon how long it takes to transfer a house, after the owner is gone.”
Nobody in that room moved. Uncle Ray had pulled his chair back and was looking at his nephew with an expression of such grief that I had to look away. “I want to say something to you, honey,” my grandmother said. “I am not going to lie and tell you that it did not break my heart. But I have lived ninety four years, and I have learned that a heart can be broken and keep on beating. So I am going to give you a chance. You can listen to every word of this tape, in front of your family, and go with Mr. Fontenot afterward and tell the truth. Or you can walk out. If you walk out, he calls the sheriff.”
A cassette tape with a side B left behind by a grandmother in Shreveport gave a cousin one last chance and gave the rest of the family a home.
Brandon put his face in his hands. I had never seen a grown man come apart so slowly. It started in his shoulders, and then his whole back shook. “I did not mean for her to,” he said, into his palms. “I would never. I only asked about the house, because I was behind on the truck and the rent, and Kiara was talking about a baby.” Kiara said, “Do not put this on me,” in a small cold voice. Uncle Ray rose and went around the table. He put his big hand on the back of the neck of his nephew, not in anger, but the way you steady a dog that is afraid. “Boy,” he said, “you tell it. All of it. Right now.”
And he did. For the better part of an hour, in a conference room smelling of old paper and floor wax, Brandon told Mr. Fontenot everything. The missing jewelry, sold to a pawnshop on Line Avenue. The checks he had cashed, small at first and then bigger. The mail he had rerouted to a box. The envelope to Leon. He cried through most of it, and Mr. Fontenot wrote it all on a yellow pad in tiny precise letters and never once raised an eyebrow. When Brandon finished, the lawyer looked up. “Thank you, Mr. Boudreaux,” he said. “That took courage. Your grandmother is entitled to that much.”
Then, at last, the will. Ida Mae had deeded the shotgun house on Texas Avenue to me in 2021, in a transfer on death deed recorded the very week Brandon moved in. The savings went to a trust for the church and for my uncle. Brandon received the sum of one dollar, and a clause that said he would be forgiven, in her words, every cent he had taken, on one condition: that he repay the jewelry, work for the church for two years, and stay out of the house forever. She had written it in her own hand and signed it before a notary. At the bottom, she had added, A mercy is a gift, baby. Do not waste it.
The district attorney took the matter very seriously, but in the end she followed the wishes of my grandmother. Brandon pleaded to a misdemeanor, with probation and restitution. Leon Guidry testified, with the forged deed in a plastic sleeve. The jewelry was recovered, most of it, from the pawnshop, thanks to a ticket in his pocket. Kiara left him in April and moved to Baton Rouge. Brandon went to live with Uncle Ray in Bossier City, in a spare room above the garage, and he sweeps the floor at Greater Mount Zion every morning at six.
I moved into the house in June. I had not lived in Shreveport since I was nineteen, and I wept when I opened the front door and smelled the old wood, pralines, and Pond cold cream. Every room still had her in it. Her apron hung on the hook by the stove. Her reading glasses lay on top of the Bible. I found her recipe box on the shelf, full of cards in her slanting hand, and under the praline card, she had written a line in pencil. Tasha, do not scorch the sugar, and do not let anybody tell you that you are not enough.
I made her pralines that night, in her old iron pot, and I scorched the first batch. The second was perfect. I carried a tin of them to the church bake sale the following Saturday, in the same folding chair where she had sat for sixty years, and they sold out in forty minutes. A woman at the table next to mine pressed my hand and said they tasted just like Ida Mae. I could not answer. I stood there with the empty tin and let the tears run, and nobody looked away, and nobody minded.
Brandon came to the house last Easter. He stood on the porch, sweating in his Sunday suit, with a bag of oranges from the store. He had not been inside in two years. I did not let him in. But I took the oranges, and I sat with him on the front steps for an hour, under the live oak, and we talked about Grandma and her Jeopardy tapes. When he left, he stopped at the gate. “She gave me a chance,” he said. “I am trying not to waste it.” And I said, “I know you are, cousin.” I watched him walk down Texas Avenue in the long gold light.
