The Day Claudette Asked For My Keys Across The Crawfish Table

Claudette tapped a crawfish claw against my key ring and told me to hand it over.

We stood under her carport in Lafayette, with newspaper spread across two folding tables. Red shells filled a wash tub. The air smelled of lemon, pepper, and rain on hot concrete.

“Marc can't work,” she said. “Someone has to protect what belongs to this family.”

My husband sat near the fan, his left arm held in a sling. Three weeks earlier, he had fallen beside a trailer at the float warehouse. His shoulder needed more time than our savings could give it.

At forty-five, I had olive skin, deep brown eyes, and black curls threaded with silver at my temples.

I was Joumana Wakim, a Lebanese American woman who built carnival faces large enough to look over a crowd. I shaped foam, wire, and thin wood into birds, queens, and grinning fish. A narrow blue ribbon rested behind my ear. I used it to measure curves a straight ruler could not follow.

Claudette wore her white hair in a hard little roll, and her pale blue eyes sat above cheeks pink from the boiling pot.

My mother-in-law was a white Cajun woman of seventy, and she expected every Borel to move when she pointed.

“Which keys?” I asked.

“Don't play games. The warehouse keys.”

Her other son, Antoine, held out his palm. He managed the books for Borel Float & Form. That day, he also seemed to manage my place at the table.

“You married into this,” Claudette said. “You didn't build it.”

I looked at Marc. He lowered his eyes toward his untouched potatoes.

“I've worked there for nineteen years,” I said.

“And who gave you somewhere to work?”

A cousin stopped cracking a shell. Someone turned up the radio, then seemed to think better of it.

I had heard versions of this for years. I was the wife with the strange lunch. The woman whose father had run a small upholstery shop instead of pulling a parade float. The outsider Claudette had graciously allowed to stay.

My father had taught me how to stretch fabric over a bent frame. His hands had made my work possible. His last gift had bought the floor beneath it.

“The company has a lease,” I said.

Claudette laughed.

“Listen to her. A lease. We put her name on some papers, and now she's the bank.”

That was when I knew she had never read the whole packet.

In 2017, after my father's estate closed, Marc and I had signed a marriage settlement. The warehouse deed and the settlement had been recorded. Copies sat in a gray folder above my workbench at home.

Claudette had called that folder my little security blanket.

“Give Antoine the keys,” she said. “You can collect your personal things on Sunday.”

“My tools aren't personal things. They're how I earn.”

“Then perhaps earn somewhere else.”

Marc finally spoke. “Mama, leave it for today.”

He had not said she was wrong.

I slipped the keys into my pocket. The brass teeth pressed my leg through the cloth.

“I'll answer in writing.”

Antoine gave a small, tired smile, as if I were a child refusing a bath.

“Fine. But we need clear access by Monday. There are deliveries.”

“What deliveries?”

“Storage. Regular business.”

Across the driveway, a man in a faded green shirt rose from the children's table. I knew Jamal Price from the spring youth parade. At forty-one, he had more patience for tangled fishing line and angry parents than anyone I had met.

He was Black, tall, and careful in the way he moved around people carrying hot plates.

“Joumana,” he said, “can we talk before you go?”

Claudette waved him away. “Your young people are covered. Don't start another meeting.”

He waited until she turned toward the pot.

“Our build starts Tuesday,” he told me. “Twelve kids, three adults. Antoine said the back bay was ours through the parade.”

“It is,” I said. Free youth use had been in the lease from the start.

Jamal rubbed his thumb along a folded paper.

“Then why did my board have to pay a space deposit?”

The fan rattled behind us.

“How much?”

“Twenty-four hundred dollars. I have the receipt.”

I took the blue ribbon from behind my ear and wound it once around my finger. In my shop, a curve often looked right until I measured it.

“Send me everything,” I said.

Marc watched from his chair as I walked toward my truck. He opened his mouth, then closed it.

Before I reached the door, Jamal caught up and put the folded receipt in my hand.

Under PURPOSE, Antoine had written: Owner-Required Youth Space Deposit.