POV: Cal
Beau arrived at the Mabry house at nine-fifteen on Thursday morning with a box of beignets from Delia's, a thermos of his own coffee, and an energy that Cal recognized immediately as the energy of a man who had decided something and was waiting for the right moment to deploy it.
There was no right moment. There never was with Beau. Cal had learned this over twenty-eight years of brotherhood and eight years of working together, and he still occasionally made the mistake of thinking he could manage the timing.
"She here?" Beau said, coming through the front door in his work boots, looking around the living room with an interest that had nothing to do with the structural repairs.
"She's on the back porch," Cal said, without looking up from the subfloor section he was measuring. "And before you say whatever you're about to say —"
"I'm not going to say anything."
"You brought beignets."
"I like beignets."
"You drove past Guidry's to get to Delia's. Guidry's is closer, makes better beignets, and you have been a loyal Guidry's customer since you were nine years old." Cal marked his measurement. "You went to Delia's because Delia knows Savannah and you were hoping for intelligence."
Beau set the box down on the sheet of plywood Cal was using as a work surface and opened it with the studied nonchalance of someone who had been caught and was choosing not to acknowledge it. "I got plain and powdered. I didn't know what she liked."
"You got them for her."
"I got them for the job site. It's a morale thing."
Cal put down his pencil. He looked at his brother. Beau looked back with the wide, clear eyes of a man who was genuinely not capable of sustained deception and had long since stopped trying.
"She's a professional contact," Cal said. "She's the estate's point of contact on a repair job I've contracted. That is the entirety of the situation."
"You've been here four days."
"The job is three weeks."
"Delia says she's staying longer than three weeks."
Cal was quiet for a moment. "You talked to Delia."
"I ran into Delia."
"At her diner. That you drove out of your way to get to."
Beau picked up a beignet and took a large, committed bite, which covered the lower portion of his face in powdered sugar and gave him approximately eight seconds of legitimate inability to speak. Cal used those eight seconds to pick up his pencil and return to measuring.
"She also said," Beau said, once he'd dealt with the beignet, "that Savannah's thinking about doing her photography project here. The big one. The one she's been not doing for eight years."
Cal said nothing.
"Which means she'd be here a while."
Cal marked another measurement.
"Which means the situation is maybe not entirely as —"
"Beau."
"I'm just noting that the parameters have potentially —"
"I know what you're noting."
"And?"
"And nothing." Cal sat back on his heels and looked at his brother with the even patience he'd developed over decades of being the older one, the steadier one, the one who finished things and kept his word and didn't make scenes in parking lots or send texts he'd regret or fall in love with the wrong woman at the wrong time and expect the universe to accommodate him. "And nothing, Beau. It's a repair job. She's selling the house. When the house sells, she goes back to Nashville."
"Unless she doesn't."
"She does."
"You don't know that."
"I know enough."
Beau looked at him for a long moment with the expression he'd worn since he was about twelve, the one that said he thought Cal was being an idiot and had enough respect for him to say so with his eyes rather than his mouth. It was, honestly, the most useful of Beau's expressions, and Cal had never told him so because it would make him insufferable.
"The Clifton," Beau said.
Cal stilled.
"Delia said she found the Clifton in your truck. That you talked about it."
"We had a conversation about a book, yes."
"You showed her the annotations."
"She saw them. I didn't show them."
"Cal." Beau said his name the way their mother said it when she was going to follow it with a truth he hadn't asked for. "You have had that book for eleven years and I have never once seen you share it with anyone. Not Deanna. Not anyone."
The subfloor had a soft spot he hadn't marked yet. He pressed it with his thumb, felt the give. He marked it.
"It came up," he said.
"Things don't just come up with you. You're the most deliberate person I have ever met in my life. You think about whether to use a Phillips or a flathead for forty-five seconds before you pick up a screwdriver."
"That's called being precise."
"It's called being someone who doesn't do things by accident." Beau crouched down across the subfloor from him, putting himself in Cal's line of sight whether Cal wanted him there or not, which was another thing he'd been doing since he was twelve. "I'm not trying to make it complicated. I'm just asking you to be honest with yourself about what's happening."
The back door opened and they both heard it.
Footsteps through the kitchen — coffee cup on the counter — and then Savannah appeared in the doorway of the front bedroom in her jacket, her hair in its morning state, camera bag over one shoulder. She registered Beau with the slight adjustment of someone recalibrating a room.
"Oh," she said. "Hi."
"Morning," Beau said, rising to his feet with a speed that communicated enthusiasm in a way Cal would have words with him about later. "I'm Beau. Cal's brother. I brought beignets." He held out the box.
She looked at the box and then at Cal and then back at Beau with the reading expression. "From Delia's?"
"You know Delia?"
"She's my oldest friend."
Something crossed Beau's face — delight, entirely unmanaged. "So she told you about —" He stopped. Recalibrated. "She makes a good beignet."
"She does." Savannah took a beignet from the box with the directness of someone who liked beignets and didn't perform ambivalence about it. She bit into it. Powdered sugar dusted the front of her jacket. She looked down at it and back up without particular concern. "I'm going to be shooting outside this morning," she said to Cal. "I won't be in your way."
"You're not in the way," Cal said.
"I might be going up on the roof," she said. "Is that —"
"The roof's sound," he said. "Watch the flashing at the back vent. I replaced it but the sealant's still curing."
She nodded. "Okay." She took the camera bag from her shoulder and opened it, checking something inside — lens cap, he thought, the specific click of it — and then slung it back. She took another bite of the beignet.
Beau was watching this exchange with the barely contained attention of someone watching a nature documentary from uncomfortably close range.
"I'll be outside if you need anything," she said. To Cal, specifically. And then, to Beau: "Nice to meet you."
"Likewise," Beau said, and managed to make it sound like he meant more than the word contained.
She went back through the kitchen. They heard the back door.
Beau turned to Cal.
Cal picked up his pencil.
"Not a word," Cal said.
"I wasn't going to —"
"The look on your face constitutes words."
"I'm just standing here."
"You are standing there looking like a man who's about to say something I've specifically asked you not to say."
Beau sat back down on the other side of the subfloor and reached for another beignet. He ate half of it in contemplative silence, which for Beau was an unusual length of silence and suggested he was organizing something.
"The Tate thing," he said finally.
Cal looked up.
"You need to tell her," Beau said. "I know you know that. I'm just — the longer you wait, the worse it gets."
"I'm aware."
"Because if she finds out from someone else —"
"I'm aware, Beau."
"Mama Kike was talking about it at the Gas-N-Go yesterday. If Mama Kike's talking about it, it's got maybe three days before it reaches Savannah through a channel that isn't you, and then you're not managing a complication, you're managing a — you're managing something worse."
Cal pressed the soft spot in the subfloor again. He'd need to add it to the sister joist work — another few hours tomorrow.
"I know," he said.
"Then —"
"I said I know."
Beau was quiet. Then: "Why haven't you told her?"
Cal marked the soft spot. He made a note on the legal pad he kept for each job — not the formal documentation, the working notes, the honest record of what he found and what it needed.
"Because once I tell her," he said, "she has to decide something. About the house, about Tate, about what Cora wanted versus what Cora wrote down. And whatever she decides — she might decide to sell it fast, to a developer, just to be done with the whole thing. Cut through the moral complexity with speed." He paused. "Or she might decide to stay longer and figure it out properly. And either decision is hers to make. But right now she's — she's just starting to settle into something. She's starting to — " He stopped.
"Be here," Beau said.
"Yes."
"And you don't want to disrupt that."
"I don't want to give her a reason to make a fast decision when a slow decision might be the right one."
Beau ate the rest of his beignet and thought about this with the genuine care he brought to things that mattered, underneath the performance of things that didn't. He was not, Cal knew, actually as careless as he appeared. He was someone who had decided that warmth was more efficient than armor, which Cal respected even when it inconvenienced him.
"That's a real reason," Beau said finally. "And also a convenient one."
Cal said nothing.
"You can want her to have time to settle and also not want to risk what's settling between you," Beau said. "Those aren't mutually exclusive, is my point."
"Nothing is settling between us."
"Cal."
"We're professional."
"You had lunch on the porch steps with her for the second time yesterday. You know how many times you had lunch outside with the estate contact on the Fontenot job? Zero. On the Trosclair job? Zero. On the —"
"Enough."
"Just saying."
"I know what you're saying."
"And?"
Cal set down his pencil. He looked at the subfloor, the section he'd been working on for forty minutes, the careful documentation of what was soft and what was sound, what needed support and what could hold.
"And I'm handling it," he said.
Beau opened his mouth.
"By doing the work," Cal said. "By doing the job I contracted to do and telling her what she needs to know and not — " He stopped. Found the word. "Not complicating something that has a natural end point."
"By which you mean she leaves."
"By which I mean she leaves."
Beau looked at him for a long moment. Outside, faintly, they could hear movement — footsteps on the porch above them, Savannah crossing to the roof access he'd shown her, careful and deliberate.
"What if she doesn't?" Beau said. Quietly, this time. No performance in it.
Cal picked up his pencil.
"Then that's a different situation," he said. "And I'll handle that then."
"That's not a plan, that's a —"
"Beau."
"Okay." Beau held up both hands, a gesture of peace or surrender or the specific Broussard-brother signal for I've said my piece and will now stand down but reserve the right to have been right about this later. "Okay."
He picked up his tools.
They worked.
Above them, through the ceiling, the measured careful footsteps of Savannah Mabry crossed the roof of her grandmother's house, and the October light came through the bedroom windows and lay across the subfloor in long rectangles, and Cal worked with the focused precision of a man who was not thinking about the wrong woman at the wrong time, which was true in the same way it was true that water was not going anywhere near the repaired vent flashing on the northeast corner.
Technically accurate. Not the whole picture.
He marked another soft spot.
He'd have to tell her about Tate. He knew that. He'd tell her soon. He'd find the right moment and he'd tell her plainly and without drama and she'd make whatever decision she was going to make and the work would continue and the house would eventually sell and that would be the end of the particular situation.
From above, one careful footstep, and then another.
He knew exactly where she was on the roof from the sound of it.
He marked it down.