I drove to the clinic on Main Street the next morning in my church dress, with my pocketbook on my lap, and Dr. Thibodeaux met me at the door of his office with a business card in his hand. He turned it over so I could read it. The card said Lake Charles Casino Resort, Player Accounts, Collections Department. Under it, in blue ink, was the name Roy Guidry. “Mrs. Broussard,” the doctor said quietly, “this man was sitting in my waiting room with your daughter yesterday. He is still out there. He told my receptionist that Renee owes the casino one hundred eighty seven thousand dollars.” I am Odile Broussard, seventy nine years old, and I folded my hands in my lap.
I should have known. For three years, I watched my Social Security checks disappear, and I told myself that Renee was only helping with the mail. I found the receipts in the trunk of her car in August, a stack as thick as a Bible, casino after casino, always on the day my check arrived. Alcide would have wept. He made me patent a ladle that cost nothing, and he said that a woman should never have to depend on anyone. I signed with a lawyer in Lafayette in June, and I told no one, not even Renee, because I wanted her to tell me herself.
Through the glass of the waiting room door, I could see my daughter on a plastic chair, small in her sunburned shoulders, with her phone in her lap. Beside her sat a heavyset man in a polo shirt with a clipboard on his knee. The receptionist, a young woman named Tasha, had put a hand over her eyes. The nurse stood in the hall with a stack of charts hugged to her chest. And in the corner, an old gentleman with a cane, Mr. Landry, who had eaten gumbo in my cafeteria every Friday for six years, turned his head and saw me, and rose to his feet.
A casino business card in the hand of a doctor gave one retired cafeteria cook the length of a clinic morning to bring her daughter back to the table in Opelousas.
I gave my terms in the waiting room, in the voice I used to quiet a cafeteria of two hundred children. “Renee, you are my daughter, and I love you, and I am not going to a home. This is what will happen. I will pay the casino what you owe, once, today, and Mr. Guidry will write you a receipt that says paid in full. You will go to the Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Lafayette tonight, and every night this week. You will return my mail and my checks. And you will sit at my table on Saturday morning, and we will eat gumbo and say nothing at all.”
My daughter looked up from her plastic chair, and her whole face crumpled. “Mama, I started with twenty dollars on a bus trip in 2015,” she said, in a small, ragged voice. “I won three hundred, and I felt like somebody. I have not felt like that one day since.” She covered her face. “I took your checks, and I forged your name on the card, and I told the doctor you were wandering because I was going to sell the house to pay the casino. I am not your daughter anymore, Mama. I am a thief.” Mr. Landry shook his head slowly, from the corner.
But the fear was too large. Renee sprang up, snatched the manila folder of receipts from the table, and bolted for the clinic door, pressing it against her chest. She was three steps from the street when Tasha, the receptionist, ran around the desk and stood in the way. The nurse planted herself in the hall. And Mr. Landry, eighty seven years old and leaning on his cane, moved to the door with the slow dignity of a man who has waited many years to repay a kindness, and set his cane firmly across it.
Renee halted with her back to us, one hand on the glass, and the October light fell across her shoulders. For a moment no one in the clinic breathed. Then Mr. Landry spoke in his gentle, creaking voice. “Little Renee Broussard,” he said. “I remember you in the line with a tray. Your mama gave you an extra roll. Go on back to her, cher.” Renee turned. The folder fell from her hands and spilled across the floor, and she crossed the room in three strides and flung her arms around me, and wept like she was six years old.
The consequences were as tender as gumbo. I paid the casino in a cashier check that afternoon, and Mr. Guidry shook my hand and told me he had a grandmother of his own. Renee attended the meetings in Lafayette every night for ninety days, and she moved into the room at the back of my house. Dr. Thibodeaux tore up the papers for the nursing home and filed them in a drawer marked Nonsense. Mr. Landry came to supper on Fridays after that, and he and Renee played dominoes on my porch until the lightning bugs came out.
In the name of my husband Alcide, who passed in 2020, I started the Alcide Broussard Fund. It pays for gambling counseling for families and for the school lunch debts of children who cannot pay, in St. Landry, Evangeline and Lafayette parishes. In the first year we paid off lunch debts for four hundred and eighteen students and funded seventy counseling sessions. One was a nine year old boy from Eunice who had been given a peanut butter sandwich in place of hot food for a whole month, and who ate his first hot lunch holding the tray with both hands.
On a Saturday morning in November, the zydeco music rolled out of the radio on the windowsill, and the whole kitchen smelled of onions, celery and dark roux. Renee stood at the stove in an apron, stirring, her hair pinned up, with a ninety day coin in a dish on the counter. I sat at the table with my coffee and watched her. She turned and held out a wooden spoon with a taste on it. “Mama,” she said, “is it right?” I tasted it. It needed a pinch of salt, and a little more time, and it was the best gumbo I had ever eaten.
