Page 56 of Seven Days in June

“That’s my mom,” said Eva, nodding. “Anyway, she wasn’t trained for anything beyond winning pageants. She got all the way to Miss Universe in 1987 but was disqualified.”

“On some Vanessa Williams shit?” asked Shane.

“No, ’cause she couldn’t enter the swimsuit competition with a second-trimester bump.” She chuckled. “After I was born, we moved to LA, but she was too short to model, and her accent was too thick to act. Her saviors were rich men. She became a sort of…professional mistress. Which was lucrative, for a while. The homes, clothes, schools—all top-notch. You know, I don’t remember the inside of any apartments I lived in as a kid? Just the view from my bedroom windows. A man-made lake with marble mermaid fountain in Vegas. The back of a ritzy Persian restaurant in Chicago. In Atlanta, it was a cul-de-sac with a heavy stray-cat population, all of which I named after Wu-Tang members.”

“That’s a lot of cats.”

“After each break up, we’d move. By the time I was a teenager, the cities had gotten seedier, and the men she chose were nightmares. But she never saw trouble coming, you know? She was so childlike,” said Eva. “She slept all day, went out at night, and I was left on my own.” Eva paused, her brow low. “Lizette was a kook. But to be fair,hermom, my grandma Clotilde? Also a confirmed kook.”

“She was a professional mistress, too?”

“No, a murderess.”

“A…what?”

“Grandma Clotilde had ‘fits.’ Fainting spells, the blues, and…” She stopped abruptly.

“And what?”

“Violent headaches.”

Shane stared at her, unblinking.

“The town thought she was possessed. Especially since she’d get excruciating headaches after she drank the ‘blood of Christ’ every Sunday at mass. Of course, the blood of Christ was just cheap red wine, a classic migraine trigger. But no one knew this in the ’50s.” Eva laughed a little. “Everyone thought she was a—”

“A witch,” interrupted Shane, looking incredulous. “A witch with migraines.”

Eva’s dimple popped.

“One day my grandfather was singing in the shed, in this loud baritone. Legend has it, she was having a month-long spell and couldn’tbearthe noise, so she went crazy and shot him. The sheriff was too scared of her to prosecute, but she was run out of town. She left Lizette with an aunt and started over in Shreveport. Oh! And she became an entrepreneur. Apparently, she made a mean jambalaya. She cashed in on the witch thing, selling her recipe at county fairs.CLO’S WITCH’S BREW: SPICES KISSED BY SATAN HISSELF. Her handcrafted labels show up on southern-aesthetic Pinterest boards. My mom told me all of this. She was one hell of a storyteller. It’s the only thing we have in common.”

Shane slumped back against the bench.

“Thisis your lineage? That’s some remarkably dark, fantastic shit!”

“It gets darker.” Eva had been holding on to these stories her entire life and was ecstatic to let them go. “When Clo was an infant,hermom, Delphine, took off in the dead of night. No warning, just fled to New Orleans and passed as a Sicilian. Changed Mercier to Micelli, became a showgirl, married the attorney general, had a “white” son, conquered 1930s society—and when her husband died a few years later, she inherited his house. A secretly Black woman owned the finest mansion in the very, very racist Garden District.”

“Imagine living with the fear of being found out,” said Shane.

“I guess she couldn’t. At forty, she drowned herself in the tub during her annual Christmas party, with a house full of New Orleans aristocrats. She wrote ‘Passant blanc’ on the tiles, in lipstick. Outed herself.” Eva shrugged vaguely. “The story was buried, apparently. I have white cousins who don’t know who they are. I found them on Facebook. They’re extremely white, too. Republican white.”

“You have Fauxtalian family members?”

Shane wanted more. As Eva talked, she transformed—her hands floating in the air, as if grabbing pieces of the story, her voice fluid, shape-shifting. Like she’d lived the stories herself.

Eva was all of these women.

“This is a book,” said Shane. “Pleasewrite it.”

“Right, and what would the title be?Unstable Mothers and Unattended Daughters?” Eva sounded like she’d thought about this. A lot. “Plus, I have to write book fifteen before I start anything else.”

“This is the book you brought up at the diner,” said Shane, remembering. “The one you said no one would read? You’re wrong! This is Black American history told through some fascinating matriarchal badasses.”

“Look, Audre doesn’t know about any of this. She thinks Lizette’s a hero. I’ve…tweaked history a bit, ’cause I want her to be proud of who she is,” insisted Eva. “I’ve never even been to Belle Fleur.”

“Go.” Abuzz with energy, Shane turned his whole body to face her. “Go.”

“Can’t.” Eva shook her head. “It’d require breaking myself open.”

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