House of Blues Read Free

restaurant? The players seemed to be
changing drastically.
    Sugar was much more in the mood for flowers than for
complaints about Hebert's. Right now there wasn't that much in bloom,
at least on this street. There were some hibiscus and some roses,
though—some gorgeous double yellow hibiscus. They'd be fun to
paint. She didn't usually work with tropicals—something about them
seemed a little too easy, like long summer days with nothing to do.
She preferred a more complicated flower, like these double blooms.
    A kid came barreling down the street on his bike,
pedaling so fast his feet looked like an eggbeater. He was giving it
every ounce of energy he had, pouring it on as if that were all there
was to life, moving your legs and feeling the breeze in your face,
your heart pounding in your chest until it hurt. Sugar could remember
doing that, and for a moment bemoaned the dulling effect of age,
regretted that she'd never do it again nor want to. Though she could
remember the act, she no longer had the slightest notion what it was
like to have that kind of energy.
    As she drew closer to Reed and Dennis's, she walked
more slowly, enjoying herself, glad to be away from the oppression of
the house.
    Of Arthur.
    What's wrong with me? she thought. He's my husband
but I can barely stand him anymore. The older he gets, the surer he
is that he's right. Which is all he wants to be.
    She didn't think at all about how the problem with
Reed would be resolved—she wasn't interested. She thought only
about Arthur. She thought he had been horribly unfair to Reed, given
the hard work she'd done for the restaurant. But fairness entered
into few of Arthur's decisions. He wanted what he wanted, which was
to be right, and to be in control.
    She wondered what had made him think for a moment
about giving up control of the restaurant. He had said he would run
Hebert's II, and that he couldn't do both. But it would be like
Arthur to die trying.
    Do married people ever really like each other, or
is it always this way? He doesn't like me or he wouldn't have other
women. And I haven't liked him since . . . when?
    Since the time the
children started coming, probably. You fall in love and then you have
children,and you lose all sense of everything but that, and then one
day you look across the table and you think, "What am I doing
with this jerk?"
    * * *
    Reed's house was beautiful, even bigger and
better—restored than Sugars own. Reed wasn't much of a gardener—had
only a few perennials blooming—and the house was plain white with
green shutters; Sugar would have done something more imaginative with
it.
    But it was freshly painted and graceful, a Victorian
with a wonderful huge front porch supported by Ionic columns.
    The front yard was enormous. Two giant oaks grew
there, dwarfing a small forest of bananas.
    Sugar entered the yard through the small iron gate
and walked briskly up to the porch, finding the view before her very
pretty indeed.
    She fit the key in the lock, turned off the burglar
alarm, and relocked the door. Just as she headed up the stairs, she
heard the phone ring. Was it quickest to dash up the stairs or race
down and try to catch the call in the kitchen? She opted for the
kitchen and got there just as the phone stopped ringing.
    "Hello?" she said, but Reed's voice on the
machine floated above hers, saying she wasn't home but the caller
could leave a message.
    Sugar would have hung up, but the caller had heard
her.
    "Hello?" said a man's voice. "Reed, is
that you?"
    When Reed's alter ego had stopped speaking, Sugar
said, "It's Sugar Hebert, Reed's mother. Can I take a message
for her?"
    "Why, Sugar, how are you, dear lady?" She
tensed at something forced in the voice, something falsely hearty.
"This is Milton Foucher, Dennis's father. It is a pure delight
to hear your voice."
    "It's good to hear yours too, Mr. Foucher."
She had met him once—at Reed and Dennis's wedding—and she was
quite sure she wouldn't recognize him if he