Page 28 of January (New Orleans #1)

“S o, how did she take it?” Melinda asked.

“Better than I did, but she wasn’t the one in the womb at the time,” Kyle replied, biting into her shrimp.

“How are you still doing with it?”

“I’ve mostly tried to put it behind me. Did I tell you that they had a video recording of my grandma going over the will? I’ve never even heard her voice. I’ve seen a few pictures, but that’s it.”

“Did you watch it?”

“No, the lawyer just mentioned it. But I think I might ask him for it. It’s hard, though, knowing I’d be watching her and she’s not here anymore. I can’t talk to her.”

Melinda took a sip of her wine and said, “It might still help, hearing her voice, just seeing her like that.”

“Probably. But tell me about work today.”

“It was work.” She shrugged. “I did the food tour, the Garden District tour, and the cemetery tour. Tips were great, though. Some guy gave me fifty bucks.”

Kyle cleared her throat and said, “He did, huh?”

“Jealous?” Melinda teased.

“Only if you’re going out with him tonight after you say goodnight to me.”

“I wasn’t planning on saying goodnight to you at all,” Melinda replied. “I know we’ve been staying at my place a lot, and I don’t mind going to yours tonight, but–”

“I’m sleeping on my grandma’s bed in one house, and the other one has no furniture?”

“Right. But I wouldn’t mind sleeping out in the garden again,” Melinda suggested.

“We didn’t really sleep, did we?”

“Will you stay over again? ”

Kyle nodded with a smile and then asked, “What are Bridgette and Jill up to tonight?”

“I don’t know.” Melinda shook her head. “Why?”

“Just thought we could hang out with them after dinner.”

“You want to hang out with my friends on our date?” Melinda asked, confused.

“ After our date. But not if you don’t want to.”

“Babe, the date is kind of the whole night. You, me, and dinner followed by you and me at my place, probably naked.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to–”

“Are you okay?” Melinda leaned over the table.

“Yeah, I… don’t know. I feel like I really just started to dive into the city a bit, and I’m not used to having friends.”

“Kyle, you have friends back home, don’t you?”

“Not really, no,” Kyle said. “Having my own business is great. I work when I need to. I have regular clients. I wake up and go to bed whenever and have no commute, but it’s also just me. I don’t have a team of people or co-workers to go to lunch with how you have Jill. I don’t talk to people I went to high school with like you do with Bridgette because I was just the trailer trash in school who had jars of jelly or nothing at all on the bad days and cheese sandwiches on the good days until we got put on the school’s free meal plan for poor kids, so I got made fun of a lot. I guess I have a few friends from college whom I still follow on social media, but they’re all married or close to it and have kids of their own already.” Kyle paused. “Then, there’s me. I’ve got a chip on my shoulder the size of a mountain and couldn’t ever afford therapy, which I probably could use, and now, I’m sitting at dinner, on a date with a beautiful woman, but I’m talking about hanging out with her friends instead of having a whole night with her because I’m an idiot. I’m sorry, babe. I… I’m still trying to figure out how all this happened.”

“How what happened?”

“How I met you. How you like me. How we’re doing this. How I ended up with two houses and money. How I… Just how all of it , I guess. ”

Melinda didn’t say anything for a minute while Kyle finished her shrimp and took a long sip of her wine. They’d gone to a nice restaurant, though, admittedly, not as nice as Commander’s Palace. It was a beautiful night, and they’d walked here holding hands and not doing much talking. Now, she stared across the table at this woman whom she knew she was falling for, picturing her sitting at the lunch table in the cafeteria, with people staring at her and mocking her, and Melinda wanted to go back in time and kick each individual ass until they all found something better to do than picking on someone who couldn’t afford lunch because their mother was a train wreck.

“So, the guy who gave you the fifty dollars; he didn’t, like… flirt with you, did he?”

“He did,” she replied. “Happens a lot with the college-age guys.”

“A lot?” Kyle asked.

“Once every few tours. They flirt, ask me if I’m going out later, making sure to tell me where they plan to be to start off their nights, and I usually get a big tip.” Melinda smirked. “Then, I tell them I’m gay.”

Kyle laughed and asked, “Did any of them ever ask for their tip back?”

“Just once, but he said I could keep it if I’d let him watch me make out with a girl that night in the Quarter. I kept it. He left.”

“Did you make out with–”

“Hell, no,” Melinda interrupted. “And today, I did more than just tell him I wasn’t interested because I’m gay. I told him I had a girlfriend, so I’d be on a date with her tonight. He was good about it and walked off with his tail between his legs.”

“You told him you have a girlfriend?”

“I did. But he got confused when I said her name was Kyle .”

Kyle laughed and said, “Want to hear the story?”

“Yes. ”

“Well, my mom was on her own when I was born. My dad wasn’t there; he’d been at work when she’d gone into labor. They called him, but I came out pretty quickly while he was still on his way to the hospital, so he missed the whole thing. He got stuck in traffic and wasn’t there to make sure the nurse heard my mom say, ‘Kyla,’ instead of ‘Kyle.’ My mom swears she said, ‘Kyla,’ but the nurse heard ‘Kyle,’ ran with it, and it got typed up on the birth certificate. From there, it just kind of stuck. They didn’t fix the error, and I was named Kyle instead.”

“Well, I would’ve liked Kyla, too, but I love Kyle.” Melinda’s eyes went wide, and she swallowed at just how that sounded. “The name. I mean, the name.”

“It works,” Kyle said.

“What’s your middle name?”

“I would’ve been named Kyla Jane, so I’m Kyle Jane instead, and Jolie is Jolie Jane. It’s my mom’s middle name, too.”

“Kyle Jane. I like that. I’m Melinda Marie. All my sisters have the same middle name, and Mike is Michael Mitchell.”

“They love those Ms, huh?” Kyle laughed as the waiter approached.

“Can I interest you, ladies, in any dessert tonight?”

“I think we’re good,” Kyle smirked at Melinda.

Melinda liked the sound of that and the look of that sexy smirk on Kyle’s face. When they left the restaurant and walked hand in hand back toward Melinda’s apartment, they were silent again for most of the way, and Melinda realized she’d never had that before. She’d never had someone she could have this kind of silence with, the kind where it was comfortable and not awkward or weird.

“I think I’ll do it,” Kyle said eventually.

“Do what?”

“Watch the video of my grandma. I think I want to hear her voice. I’ve gone through everything at the house, and I didn’t see any old videotapes. She had an old computer, but I don’t think that got much use, and I don’t know what happened to her phone. Maybe she had some recordings on that, but I don’t know.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” Melinda replied.

“I might want to take it back with me and have Jolie watch it, too. I know she’s not as interested in the whole thing, but now that she knows the truth, and not some lie my mother told us for years, she seems like she might want to read the journals and learn more about what happened; our grandmother’s life and how it was a struggle with our mother.”

“When you go back? After the renovations?”

“Yeah. Before she left today, Myra said they could be done sooner than she originally thought. I picked out some stuff she had in her warehouse. I think you’ll really like it.”

“Stuff?”

“Flooring and windows. Hey, do you want to help me pick out furniture, though? I don’t know; the cheap stuff is fine, I guess, but it doesn’t exactly fit with the history of the house. I understand why she had it, but if I got better furniture, higher-end stuff, I could charge more for the rentals.”

“True,” Melinda said, swallowing as they turned onto her street. “Sure. I’ll help.”

“I’m talking nicer bedroom furniture, for the most part. The downstairs wasn’t bad, so I thought I’d start upstairs and work my way down. Maybe we could pick out some things for outside, too. A couple of chaise lounges sound nice. And that table is great, but the umbrella should probably be replaced. Should we just go to a store, though, or hire someone? I was thinking about getting an interior decorator, but I don’t know how to do that.”

“It’s your house, Ky. You should do what you want.”

“I know. But I wanted to do this with you .”

“Why? You’re renting it out, right? It’s not like we’d be spending time there.”

“I guess you’re right, yeah,” Kyle said, sounding disappointed.

Melinda knew she’d done that to her, but she didn’t have the heart right now to try to turn that disappointment around by offering to go furniture shopping for a house she’d never live in with a woman who might be leaving sooner than they’d both thought.

“Want to get some beignets?” she changed the subject.

“Sure,” Kyle said.

“And maybe stop by some of the artist displays in the Square?”

“Yeah, sounds good,” Kyle replied, but her tone was different now.

Melinda squeezed Kyle’s hand, and they passed by her apartment and headed toward Jackson Square, where they got beignets and coffee to-go before they just walked around aimlessly, taking in the palm-and-tarot readers who set up their tables at night.

“Come on. It’ll be fun,” Kyle suggested as she nodded toward one woman who was sitting by herself, awaiting her next customer.

“If you want to,” Melinda replied.

Kyle sat down in front of the woman, and Melinda stood off to the side, thinking about how much she wished Kyle would just stay here. She obviously loved the city, and that love seemed to be growing the more she experienced here.

“So, you are going through a major life change,” the reader said to Kyle as she turned over the cards.

“Yeah,” Kyle replied and then looked up at Melinda in surprise.

Melinda just smiled at how cute her girlfriend was being and pushed the thoughts of her impending departure out of her mind.

“And you’re going to be making some difficult decisions soon.”

“Yes,” Kyle said, sounding shocked.

Melinda chuckled and rubbed the back of Kyle’s neck.

“You’re worried you might make the wrong one.”

“I am,” Kyle said.

The reader asked Kyle to cut the deck again, which Kyle did. She drew a card from the top and stared at it for a long while. Then, she looked up at Melinda questioningly. Melinda wasn’t sure what that glance meant, but she remained quiet.

“This is good,” the reader said.

“What is?” Kyle asked.

“This.” The woman pointed at Melinda while staring at the card. “This is good.”

Melinda looked down when Kyle looked back at her. Both of them seemed confused.

“You will be very happy. You’re not married?”

“Huh?” Kyle said, turning back to the reader. “We just started dating.”

The reader nodded, turned another card, and said, “Yes. And it’s good. This is good for both of you.” She turned another card over. “Ah, and children.”

“Sorry. What?” Melinda asked, leaning down now.

“There will be children. Not now, obviously, but later.”

“Children?” Melinda said.

“You mean kids?” Kyle asked. “For us?” She pointed her finger up at Melinda.

“Yes.” The reader looked back up at Melinda. “And you need to trust that it will all be all right, okay? Patience.”

“Hey, this isn’t my reading. And I am patient,” Melinda argued, wondering how she’d gotten pulled into this whole thing.

“You are tied together,” the reader replied simply, looking down at the cards that she seemed to find some meaning in as if they were a code that only she could break before she looked back up at Kyle. “You must trust yourself. What you are thinking is the right decision to make.”

“Trust myself? With her?”

“You already trust yourself with Melinda.” The reader looked up to meet Melinda’s eyes. “I mean, trust yourself with your mother.”

Melinda’s eyes had to widen at that. She hadn’t ever put much stock in this tourist palm-and-tarot reading stuff that happened nightly in the Square, but there was no way this woman could know her name. She hadn’t introduced herself, and as much as Melinda joked about knowing everyone in the city, she’d never seen this woman before in her life. There was also no way she’d know about Kyle’s mother and what was going on there.

“Trust yourself,” the reader repeated. “And when you’re ready about the other decision, you’ll know. Trust yourself there, too.”

“The other decision?” Melinda asked. “Are you talking about kids again?”

“No.” The woman shook her head and glared at Kyle.

“Okay,” Kyle said. “Um…” She pulled cash out of her wallet and tossed it on the table. “With my mother? Really? Just trust myself?”

“Yes,” the woman repeated. “It’s time.”

Kyle nodded and turned around to take Melinda’s hand. They walked off and turned right at the cathedral.

“What the hell just happened?” Melinda asked her.

“I have no idea,” Kyle replied.

“Apparently, we’re having kids one day,” Melinda said, taking Kyle’s hand in her own. “Were you aware of that?”

Kyle laughed and said, “I was not . I thought she’d tell me I was about to come into a great fortune, and I’d get to tell her that that already happened or something.”

“She said you trusted yourself with me. Is that true?”

Kyle looked over at her before she kissed her on the temple and said, “I do.”

“Save that for the apparent wedding we’re going to have one day before those kids she said we’ll have, too.”

Kyle laughed, which Melinda was grateful for because it gave her a chance to try to process what had just happened. That woman had known about Kyle’s mom, her relationship with Melinda, and had told Kyle to trust herself with something else that neither of them had revealed. She’d also told Melinda to be patient, and as Melinda looked over at Kyle, she knew she would be. Kyle was worth a little patience.