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CASSIE
WE DIDN’T GET a lot of customers in that quiet time between lunch and dinner, when the staff was
whittled down to just me waiting for Tracina to spell me off. And we definitely didn’t get a lot of
handsome six-foot six-inch African-American district attorneys in three-thousand-dollar suits coming
into the Café Rose at that hour. But Carruthers Johnstone was campaigning for re-election, his face on
billboards all over town. I told myself he was probably there to drop off pamphlets. But when he
asked if a “pretty little black gal, long legs, about ye high”—he held his hand at his chest—worked at
the Café, my brain started humming.
I knew exactly who he was: the guy I’d seen Tracina straddling in that dark garage after the
Revitalization Ball, the night I fell under Pierre Castille’s charms. While nearly naked in the back of
Pierre’s limo, I spotted Tracina, her arms and legs around this man, kissing him against a big white
Escalade. Ever since, I’d tried to put that scene out of my mind, filing it under “absolutely none of my
business.” But now this “business” was standing right in front of me, wiping his brow and looking
around the Café uneasily.
“Tracina’s not in. May I mention who is looking for her?” I played dumb, afraid of becoming
somehow complicit in whatever drama he had brought through those doors.
“Yes … uh, tell her Carr came by. Give her this,” he said, handing me a card.
Carr? She called him Carr?
Oh, I will, I wanted to say, but instead muttered, “Sure,” slipping his card into my pouch. As
tempting as it was to pry further, the less I involved myself with Tracina’s problems, the easier my
life would be.
But now “Carr’s” card was sharing space with Mark Drury’s phone number, which had been
burning a hole in my apron for four days. I had written it out on a little piece of paper because Will
didn’t like us to carry around our cell phones on shift. But now it was becoming faded with all the
folding and unfolding. I kicked myself for not insisting he take my number too. But I wanted to make
the first move for the first time in my life. I had asked him for his number, hadn’t I? One whole week
had gone by since I’d met him on the patio at Ignatius’s. That was also the day I first met Dauphine,
and it had taken her a day to call me and accept the life-changing offer of joining S.E.C.R.E.T.
One day.
So what was I waiting for? It was just a damn phone call.
An hour later, Will’s truck pulled up in front of the Café to drop Tracina off for the afternoon shift,
which I had asked her to start a little early so I could attend Dauphine’s S.E.C.R.E.T. induction,
scheduled that afternoon. Tracina waddled up the threshold. She was only four months pregnant, but I
could tell she was going to be one of those pregnant women who gained weight only in the front. I
ducked into the kitchen. Dammit. Call him. Now. I picked up the wall phone in the kitchen and dialed
the number.
After five rings, he answered. Arrgh. Call him from home, I told myself, hanging up after his
groggy “Hello.” I punched open the staff washroom door. Tracina was standing on a milk carton
admiring her belly in the vanity mirror.