The morning paper had an article on the front page about a bridge replacement project over on the bayou that was running four months behind schedule and cost taxpayers an extra $1,441,600. I remember that number because I stared at it for a full minute while the kitchen floor boards groaned under Anna’s footsteps. You get used to the sound of those old heart pine planks after living in the same house for twenty-four years. They talk to you. They tell you when the weather is turning damp or when someone is walking a bit heavier than usual.
That morning, Anna was walking with the kind of purposeful, measured stride that usually meant the toaster was acting up again or the neighborhood stray cat had gotten into our screened-in back porch.
She was holding a ceramic mug with a chipped handle, the blue one I bought down in Biloxi back when we took that weekend trip for our tenth anniversary. I did not look up right away because the sports section had a write-up about the high school district playoffs, and Tom Jr. was coaching the JV squad over at St. Jude. But the smell hit me before the mug even touched the cherry wood coffee table. It was not the rich, dark roast smell of the chicory blend we get down at the corner market. It was flat. It was dark. It looked like ditch water after a heavy July rain.
“Morning, Tom,” Anna said. Her voice had that light, singing quality she gets when she has spent twenty minutes planning something mildly illegal or wonderfully annoying.
“Morning, honey,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the batting averages of the district outfielders. “What’s this?”
“Coffee,” she said simply. “Drink it while it’s hot.”
I reached out blindly, my thumb still marking the column about the parish drainage bond, and picked up the blue mug. I took a good, healthy swallow before my brain had time to consult my taste buds. I have never tasted anything in my fifty-four years on this earth that made me want to turn myself inside out quite as fast as that sip. It was not just strong. It was the kind of bitter that stays at the back of your tongue for three days and makes your teeth feel fuzzy. There was zero sugar. There was zero cream. There was just pure, unadulterated bean acid and malice.
I sputtered, nearly spraying half the living room rug, and slammed the mug back down onto the wood so hard the porcelain cracked a little more around the rim.
“Ugh!” I yelled, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand while my eyes watered. “Anna, this coffee tastes absolutely terrible!
It’s completely bitter and has zero sugar! What is wrong with you?”
Anna just stood there by the sofa, leaning against the armrest with her hands folded neatly over the apron she wears when she cans peaches. She did not look flustered. She did not look like she had made a simple kitchen mistake with the measuring spoon. She just smiled that sweet, terrifying little smile that usually preceded me spending a Saturday afternoon cleaning out the gutters.
“Oh, honey,” Anna said, her voice dropping into that melodic tone that meant I was in deep trouble, “there is nothing wrong with the coffee. I made it perfectly.”
“Then why is it so bitter?!” I demanded, coughing and trying to clear my throat of whatever chemical reaction she had managed to brew in our four-cup drip machine.
“Because five minutes ago, I looked at your phone and saw a text from a girl named Jessica saying ‘See you tonight, handsome’,” she said, her eyes twinkling with pure, unadulterated devilry. “I decided that instead of putting sugar in your cup, I would just let you taste exactly what your life is going to look like starting tomorrow!”
The sentence hit me right in the sternum. My heart did a little double-tap, skipped a beat, and then started hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird trying to get through a closed window.
I choked on a residual drop of the ditch water she called coffee, my face turning completely pale as the sheer, unmitigated panic of an innocent man caught in an impossible trap washed over me. I didn’t think about the paper. I didn’t think about the parish drainage bond. I just thought about twenty-four years of marriage flashing before my eyes while my wife looked at me like a cat that had just cornered the prize canary in the pantry.
“Anna! Wait!” I gasped, grabbing the edge of the sofa cushion so hard my knuckles turned the color of lard. “Jessica is my cousin from out of town!”
Anna didn’t even blink. Her smile didn’t waver by a single millimeter.
“I know, dear,” she said, reaching down to pick up the blue mug by its handle. “I just wanted to see how fast your heart would beat. Now, go wash your own cup!”
She turned on her heel, her apron swishing against her knees, and walked back toward the kitchen humming a tune that sounded suspiciously like a marching hymn. I sat there on the sofa for a long moment, my chest heaving as the adrenaline slowly drained out of my system and left me feeling like I had just run three miles through sugar sand in August. I looked down at my hands. They were shaking just a little bit. I mean, I knew Anna had a sense of humor, but the woman had practically given me a premature coronary over a breakfast beverage.
“You’re a cruel woman, Anna,” I called out toward the kitchen, my voice cracking slightly on the vowels.
“And you leave your phone face-up on the kitchen island when you go out to check the mail!” she shouted back over the hiss of the kitchen faucet turning on. “Fair is fair, Tom!”
I let out a long, ragged sigh that sounded like a tractor dying out in the back forty, threw the folded newspaper onto the cushion, and pushed myself up off the sofa. My knees made that little clicking noise they always make when the humidity is high. I dragged myself into the kitchen, where Anna was standing by the sink with a sponge in her hand, looking entirely too pleased with herself.
The kitchen smelled faintly of cinnamon and nutmeg because she had started baking peach pies for the weekend company hours before I even rolled out of bed. That was the other thing. Jessica was coming down from Shreveport for the weekend to help us go through some old family photo albums we found in my mother’s attic after we cleared out the house over on Magnolia Street. Anna had been the one who invited her three weeks ago. She had helped pick out the dates on the wall calendar. She knew damn well who Jessica was. She just couldn’t resist a good piece of theater when the setup fell right into her lap.
“Give me that,” I grumbled, reaching out to take the blue mug from the counter.
“Wash it good,” Anna said, stepping aside to let me get to the basin. “Use the hot water. The sugarless misery has to soak off.”
I turned the tap until the water ran scalding, squeezed a dollop of green dish soap onto the yellow sponge, and went to work on the inside of the mug. You don’t argue with Anna when she’s got you dead to rights on a technicality. I had left the phone unlocked on the counter while I went out to see if the mail carrier had dropped off the auto insurance renewal. That was my first mistake. My second mistake was not noticing that Anna was already up and moving around the house before I sat down with the paper.
“You know,” I muttered, scrubbing at a stubborn coffee ring near the bottom of the ceramic, “my cousin Jessica is twenty-two years old and five foot eleven. If she called me handsome in a text, it’s because she wants me to drive her to the antique mall on Jefferson Street and buy her a po-boy.”
“She’s a very pretty girl,” Anna said, leaning against the refrigerator with her arms folded again, watching me work like a parish judge overseeing a petty misdemeanor. “And she knows how to butter up her favorite cousin.”
“She gets that from her father’s side of the family,” I said, rinsing the suds down the drain and setting the clean mug upside down on the wire drying rack. “Total con artists, every last one of them.”
“Well, your cousin is going to be here around five o’clock,” Anna said, her tone shifting back to practical domestic management as she wiped down the laminate counter with a damp cloth. “Which means you need to go out to the guest room and clear off that pile of old tax forms and spare lumber you’ve been storing on the twin bed since Thanksgiving.”
“Aye, captain,” I said, giving her a mock salute that made her roll her eyes.
The rest of the morning passed in that quiet, rhythmic way that rural Louisiana afternoons have when the heat settles down like a heavy woolen blanket over the oak trees. I spent two hours in the back guest room moving three boxes of 2018 receipts, a broken floor lamp, and a stack of lumber we salvaged from the old storm shed into the garage. Every time I lifted a box, I could still taste the bitter tannin of that coffee at the back of my throat. It was like a lingering reminder of my own carelessness. You live with a woman for nearly a quarter of a century, you figure you know all her moves, and then she goes and invents a brand new psychological torture technique involving chicory and family genealogy.
By four o’clock, the guest room looked respectable enough to pass inspection by a Methodist bishop. The sheets were fresh out of the dryer, the ones with the little blue cornflowers that Anna bought at the catalog outlet in Lafayette, and there was a clean towel folded over the foot of the bed. I came back out to the kitchen just as Anna was pulling the second peach pie out of the oven. The kitchen filled with the smell of caramelized sugar, butter, and crust that made my stomach do a much more pleasant kind of flip-flop than it had done three hours earlier.
“The room is fit for a queen,” I announced, leaning against the doorframe and watching her slide the hot pie tin onto a wire trivet.
“Good,” Anna said, untying her apron and tossing it over the back of the kitchen chair. “Because your cousin just texted me to say she’s crossing the bridge over the Atchafalaya right now. She’ll be here in twenty minutes.”
“Did she call you handsome too?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“No,” Anna grinned, walking past me and giving my shoulder a light tap with the back of her hand. “She asked if I was making my peach praline pie. She knows which side her bread is buttered on, unlike some people in this house.”
At five o’clock sharp, the familiar crunch of gravel sounded in our driveway as Jessica’s little red hatchback rolled to a stop beside the back porch. The car doors slammed shut with that tinny echo only economy imports make, and a second later heavy footsteps came bouncing up the wooden steps. The screen door pushed open before we even had a chance to reach the latch.
“Aunt Anna! Uncle Tom!” Jessica called out, dropping a duffel bag right by the door and marching straight into the kitchen with her arms wide.
She was wearing a denim jacket and her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, looking every bit like her father when he used to come down to help us bale hay back in the nineties. She gave Anna a big, tight hug that nearly lifted my wife off the floor, and then turned to me with a grin that was way too bright for someone who had just driven two hours across the interstate.
“Hey, Uncle Tom,” Jessica said, giving me a one-armed squeeze that smelled like bubblegum and highway exhaust. “Did you get my text this morning?”
I stopped dead in my tracks, my eyes darting over toward Anna, who was standing by the stove with her hand over her mouth, her shoulders already starting to shake with suppressed laughter.
“I got it, all right,” I said slowly, looking right back at my niece. “Your aunt Anna here decided to turn your greeting into a federal case involving an unsweetened cup of swamp water.”
Jessica blinked, her hazel eyes going wide for a second before she burst out laughing so hard she had to grab onto the back of the kitchen chair for support.
“Oh, no!” Jessica howled, pointing a finger right at Anna. “Did you really? Did she actually fall for it?”
“She fell off the sofa,” Anna wheezed, losing whatever composure she had left and leaning against the counter while the tears of laughter started pooling in the corners of her eyes. “He looked like he was about to confess to tax fraud and grand theft auto in the span of five seconds.”
“I did not,” I protested, though I couldn’t keep a straight face anymore. The corners of my own mouth started twitching until I had to give up and crack a grin. “I merely experienced a temporary cerebral misfire due to extreme chemical shock.”
“Chemical shock!” Jessica laughed, shaking her head as she tossed her car keys onto the counter right next to the empty coffee mugs. “Uncle Tom, you are such a dramatic old man. Next time I’m sending a text that says ‘See you tonight, sugar’ just to make sure you survive the morning.”
“Don’t you dare,” Anna said, wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron as she walked over to the cabinet to pull down three dessert plates. “One near-death experience per weekend is quite enough for this household.”
We sat down at the round oak kitchen table ten minutes later, the three of us crowded around the yellow Formica surface while the late afternoon sun slanted through the windowpanes and made long, golden bars across the floorboards. Anna cut massive wedges of the peach praline pie, the crust flaky and warm enough to melt the vanilla ice cream she scooped out of the tub right beside it.
The kitchen was warm, smelling of cinnamon and old pine and the kind of easy, comfortable quiet that only comes when you’ve known the people sitting across from you for half your life. I watched Anna lean across the table to hand Jessica a fork, her fingers brushing against the sleeve of the girl’s jacket with that familiar, effortless affection that had kept our house running for over two decades. There wasn’t a jealous bone in her body, and she knew it, and I knew it, and even Jessica knew it by the way she was grinning at us over her coffee cup.
Speaking of coffee, Anna had brewed a fresh pot twenty minutes before Jessica arrived. This time, she didn’t let me touch the sugar bowl myself. She stood over my shoulder while I was sitting down, deliberately spooning two full mounds of white sugar into my mug and stirring it three times clockwise before sliding it across the table toward me.
“Drink,” Anna commanded softly, her eyes dancing with that same wicked little light from the morning. “And make sure you taste it before you start complaining about parish drainage bonds.”
I picked up the blue mug, took a careful, deliberate sip of the sweet, hot chicory blend, and let the warmth settle all the way down to my toes. I didn’t say a word. I just looked across the table at Anna, caught her eye in the fading evening light, and gave her a slow, deliberate wink that told her loud and clear she had won round one, but the rematch was already forming in the back of my mind.
