Iron Gut, Golden Lung Pt. 8
29
On Wednesday, after a particularly frustrating shift, Jaelin checked the listings on Craigslist and found a detailed ad for a nanny posted by one Mary Ledoux. She fired off a marijuana-fueled email listing her qualifications. Two minutes later, Mary Ledoux requested they meet at noon the next day at Community Coffee in Morgan City.
Jaelin woke at five in the morning to blow out her hair and comb it down. She’d donated much of her clothing to Goodwill ninety pounds ago, leaving her with a knee-length black skirt and gray blazer that fit tight around the shoulders for an interview outfit. Nanna couldn’t spare the car that day. The paper bus schedule—Google seemed unaware that busses ran between Houma and Morgan City—estimated a three-hour trip. She gave herself five hours to get there.
Over a long and lulling ride, she watched wilderness overtake civilization. At one point the road became a concrete bridge and she gazed over the high green waters of the estuary on either side. The connecting stop was a wooden bench on a swamp road, no sidewalk, hungry mosquitoes everywhere. Midday sun blazed red like Polyphemus’s blinded eye through the cypress. Sunglassed, she stared on roots that grew thick as sailboat rigging from the same brackish waters the Choctaw saw every day before a host of empires murdered them. An hour passed. To keep up her energy, she listened to DMX.
She itched all over from bug bites. Somehow they’d even gotten under clothes. She heard Zora say, There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
The bus finally showed. She asked the fat-bellied little driver why he was late.
“They cut the routes, cher,” he replied. “You getting on or what?”
From the Morgan City terminal, she ran three blocks in two-inch heels and made it to the café on time. A white woman at a window table called her name. For someone who claimed wealth, Mary Ledoux dressed absurdly casual in a boob-hugging cammo shirt and pink capris. Short and narrow, she had an aquiline nose, auburn hair scooped in a bouffant, her small and serious eyes bracketed with shiny, botoxed crow’s feet.
Jaelin introduced herself. “Nice to meet you. I love your nails!”
“Yes,” Mary Ledoux replied in a tone dryer than inflamed nostrils. A pause. “Can you be a dear and remove the pen from behind your ear? It makes you look like an alien.”
Jaelin did so and ordered herbal tea.
Mary Ledoux wanted a nanny to take her kids on excursions. “I need them out the house because a TV show is filming there until September. I think it takes place in Atlanta but the tax breaks are better here.”
“I love outdoor activities,” said Jaelin. “The other day I took my etiquette class on a trip downtown to show them how to act in public. As I tell them: people are always watching.”
She thought she gave a solid answer. Mary Ledoux looked unimpressed.
“Can you be strict?” she asked urgently. “Ashley and Hannah need strictness.”
“Certainly! I’ve had to babysit up to seven kids. That doesn’t work if you’re not strict.”
From there Mary Ledoux went into a screed about how her husband spent months at a time doing field work for Halliburton, claiming no diversions on these trips except the occasional casino, unaware she’d seen the mysterious numbers in his phone and was already speaking to the best divorce attorneys in the state. And really, why couldn’t a man stay in shape when she was thirty years old, too, and did cardio ten hours a week? All through this Jaelin proved her attentiveness with head nods and sympathetic noises.
“I think,” she said when it became clear Mary Ledoux was awaiting a response, “that whatever you choose to do could be inspiring. To women. Other women. All women!”
Mary Ledoux scratched a cerulean pinky nail against her cheek. “That sounds like feminism. Don’t be a Hillary. Nobody likes a Hillary.”
“Of course not,” Jaelin said through a tight grin.
“I like you,” Mary Ledoux concluded, her smile much like her frown. “You’ll start at thirty an hour.”
Back at the terminal, Jaelin waited in the shade of an oak for her bus. So, she thought, this is victory. Her kidneys began to ache.
She texted Jeremiah: i got a job! $30/hr!!! Then she waited. For a bus. For answers.