Page 1

January

New Orleans Book 1

Kyle Schafer had to grow up fast. Being a daughter of a reluctant mother and an older sister on top of that had practically guaranteed it. When she discovers that the stories her mother told her about her recently deceased grandmother might not be true, she treks to New Orleans to find out the truth about her own history.

Melinda Andrews loves New Orleans. So much so that she runs NOLA Guides, the top tour company in the city, knowing it will be handed to her by the owner and her mentor soon enough. When her unlucky-in-love best friend suggests that they go out so she can meet someone, Melinda sees a woman, who she knows is a tourist, and now, she can’t help but think that she should have said hello.

Ending up in New Orleans with her younger sister, trying to uncover the truth about her family, was never part of Kyle’s plan, but maybe that’s okay because meeting Melinda on a tour and figuring out that there was more to the story than her mother led her to believe might just be worth it.

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CHAPTER 1

“Mom, you didn’t even tell us,” Kyle said as her mother rushed into the kitchen.

“What’s there to tell? You didn’t even know her.”

Kyle rose from the beaten-up sofa, nodded for her sister, Jolie, to join her, and watched as Jolie rolled her eyes at her and reluctantly stood.

“She’s being dramatic, as always,” Jolie muttered under her breath.

Kyle heard her but didn’t really take it in as she moved into the kitchen. Her mom placed a half-finished cup of instant coffee onto the counter next to the sink, but not in it, and didn’t dump the coffee out and clean the cup, either. It had always bothered Kyle that her mother had so little space in this trailer but insisted on packing it with more stuff than Kyle had in her two-bedroom apartment, rarely cleaning the place. She was awful with dishes and typically just wiped them off with a rag or ran some water over them as if that would make them instantly clean and offered them to Kyle or Jolie.

“Mom, she died, and you didn’t even tell us. I had to hear about it from Dad, andyou’re her daughter.”

“She always liked him better than me,” her mother said.

“Mom, come on. Don’t be like this,” Jolie spoke, crossing her arms over her chest. “Just tell us.”

“She died. She was old. It happens. There’s nothing to tell.”

“But she was your mother and our grandmother,” Kyle argued.

“You never met her,” her mother stated a little louder this time. “And you should thank me for that. She was awful.”

“All you’ve ever told us is that you two didn’t get along and that you left the house when you were sixteen.”

“Yes, that’s true.” The woman turned back to the sinkand dumped the coffee out of the cup she likely got from a thrift store.

“But you never told us what happened,” Jolie noted.

“Because it never mattered. I had Kyle to deal with, and your father wasn’t exactly helpful.”

“I always assumed she kicked you out because you got pregnant with me, and that’s how you and Dad ended up here,” Kyle said.

She watched as her mother turned on the water, ran it over the cup, and placed the cup upside down on the counter on top of a rag that had probably been there since she’d moved into this trailer years ago. Then, she turned, and Kyle caught something in her mother’s expression that had her doubting anything that was about to come out of her mouth. She’d seen it when her mother had told her that their father would be back in time to take them to the park or that she hadn’t spent their grocery money that week on cigarettes instead, and they’d be fine. So many times, they’d gone without dinner or had to rely on generous friends at school to give them things off their trays at lunch to make it through the day just in case they wouldn’t have anything for dinner later. She’d seen that expression when her mom told her that this time, it was going to work with her boyfriend of the month, but shortly after, he’d be gone, and at least twice, he’d left with either some of their belongings or whatever money he could find.

“Yes, that’s what happened. I’ve told you that before. She didn’t like that I got knocked up and told me to go. She was hoity-toity and didn’t want a pregnant teenager at home, so she gave me a hundred bucks and told me to get my ass to a hotel. So, that’s what I did. You act as though I haven’t told you that story before.”

“You haven’t,” Jolie reminded. “You just said that you left. You’ve told us that she was a bad mother and that you hated living there, but we put the rest together ourselves over the years.”

“Well, you were right.”

Kyle knew they weren’t. At the very least, they weren’tall the waycorrect, and something else was going on that their mother wasn’t telling them. She thought about leaving and having Jolie talk to her. Jolie, as the baby of the family, was the one her mother felt more comfortable opening up to on the rare occasion she did actually open up about something. Kyle, on the other hand, had been the reason the woman had gotten kicked out of the house, or at least, that was what she’d always believed because her mother hadn’t ever been particularly kind to her. Three years after Kyle was born, when her mother was close to twenty years old, she’d had Jolie, named after her father’s mother, and they’d been a happy little poor family for another couple of years.

Her mother had even been relatively nice, and they’d each gotten a couple of birthday and Christmas gifts during those years. Then, the arguments had started. A year later, her father had moved out, and she’d only seen him once every month or so. Eventually, he had remarried, and after sending child support payments for a while and finding out that their mother hadn’t used them on their children, he’d started giving them money on the side. Kyle had been nine years old when her father had handed her twenty dollars each week and told her to keep it a secret from her mother. For a while, he’d given her Jolie’s money, too, and when Jolie got old enough, Kyle would hand it over to her, so he began giving her the twenty dollars himself.