kid needs a family and ones like me, who grew up not knowing much about their daddies, needed them the most. Maybe that was why I took to Dempsey. Maybe I saw something of that missing family in him because he knew his daddy and still didn’t much have one.
Bastie told me not to worry about who had made me. Mama wouldn’t ever pay any mind at all to me all the times I’d asked her. But hanging out in Manchac and working in the city, you hear a lot of gossip. Me and Sylv didn’t look a bit alike. He was the spit of his daddy, a man called Danté Lanoix who mama married when Sylv was two. Bastie said Mama and Dante’ had been sweethearts in school but that he’d gone off to the Army when she had Sylv swelling her belly and came back changed. We got his name and Mama got some money from the government when the scaffolding Danté’ climbed at work gave way and he fell forty feet off a building. Mama buried him next to her daddy and never spoke about him again.
But I was a Lanoix only by the name. Only because Danté didn’t much mind that Mama had already been pregnant with me five months when he came back after the war to call on her. He’d only wanted her and took what came with having her.
My daddy could have been anyone—some sweet stranger who flattered Mama until she got on her back, maybe told her how pretty she was on the rare times she laughed and smiled. Maybe he could have been one of the men who tipped their hats to her as she walked through the Square on Sundays, ready for Mass in her pretty yellow dropped waist dress and her hair finger waved all soft and close around her face. Likely though, if the gossip was true, my daddy was a white man Mama lost her mind over just a little. At least, that’s what Lulu had said to one of the new maids Ester brought in when she wondered why my skin was so much brighter than my brother’s.
I hadn’t had a good listen to all that Lulu said, but I know I heard her mention Dempsey’s uncle, his mama’s brother, Lionel Phillipe who had stayed with the Simoneaux’s years back before Dante’ stuck around for good. Back when Mama’s smile came easy and honest.
If Lulu wasn’t a liar, that might make Dempsey’s mama’s hateful looks at me, definitely at my mama, hold more sense. That would also mean that Dempsey wasn’t just my friend; he was my cousin. But I didn’t think about Dempsey the way I do Uncle Aron’s boy, Hank. I didn’t think of Dempsey any way except how his bottom lip curved up in the middle, making it seem like he’s always chewing his lip. I liked to think about his face and the small, faint freckle that stuck out from the others along his cheekbone. And his eyes, those big, bright eyes that looked gray and blue and shades that reminded me of the Gulf, way out in the deep when the dolphins and porpoise chase small boats, bobbing along the surf. I’d only seen it once, the Gulf, but you don’t forget something like that, not ever.
Whoever my daddy had been didn’t matter much now. Not to me and not to my mama. But sometimes, when I was nodding off in the middle of Mass or when Bastie’s low, sweet voice hummed a hymn all soft, like in a whisper, and my eyes got all heavy and I started to fade away, I’d catch my mama watching me. Like she wanted to see something on my face she wouldn’t look for when I was full awake. Most days, that hard stare of hers was followed by a curved lip and a look of outright sick. Most days, it was all I could do from asking what sin I’d committed and how she wanted me to repent. After all, it wasn’t me that asked to get born.
But sometimes, I got the notion that Mama was looking for something of the man who made me in my features. My nose was long and small at the tip. The bridge was slender and maybe too long for my round face, but my eyes, Bastie always said, were like melted chocolate to match my skin. Sylv was darker than me, his nose wider, his lips