purse, which she stuffed into the crook of her arm, and her floral print scarf, which she didn’t bother putting on her head, and headed for the kitchen door. “You tell Mellette I want my usual. She’ll know how to fix it for me.”
Then she was gone. Miss Willie and all her one hundred pounds of acrimonious fire stormed out the back door, but not before she’d looked in the pot of gumbo and snorted again. “I don’t smell filé in there,” she said. “To make a good gumbo you’ve got to use filé powder, or do you have some fancy prescription for that, too?”
“Seems like sassafras is going to be your downfall today,” Mellette said, walking into the kitchen through the front door at the same time the back door slammed shut. She was referring to filé, a thickening powder made from dried sassafras leaves.
“She always was a tough old lady,” Justin replied, on his way to the kitchen cabinet to look for filé. “Who wants what she wants.”
“She swears by the liniment. Don’t think she’s going to change her mind about that, and at her age I guess that’s her right.”
“But I can’t give her the damned liniment.” He turned to look at her. “And as a registered nurse, I’m surprised you would.”
“When you hired me to come to Big Swamp to help your grandmother, what did you expect me to do? Dispense pills these people don’t want to take? That’s not what Eula wanted, not what she would have tolerated from me. So she taught me her ways and for the most part it works out.”
“So I’m paying you to practice my grandmother’s version of medicine? Because that’s not what I wanted.”
“What you wanted was to have me help her, which was what I did. On her terms, though. Not yours.”
“If I’d wanted someone to dispense more of what my grandmother dispensed, that’s who I would have hired. But I wanted a registered nurse, someone from the traditional side of medicine. Someone to take care of the people here the way traditional medicine dictates.”
“Then I expect you’ve been paying me under false pretenses because I’ve been taking care of these people just the way your grandmother did and, so far, nobody’s complaining.”
“You’re still doing that even now that she’s gone?”
“Especially now that she’s gone. They’re scared to death they’re going to have to give up the folk medicine they’ve trusted for decades, and I suppose if you have your way, that’s what’s going to happen. Which just adds to the list of reasons why they don’t like you.”
He pulled a tin marked filé from the cabinet and measured out a scant spoonful for the gumbo.
“Twice that much,” she prompted him.
“You’re a chef, as well?”
“I know how your grandmother fixed gumbo, and I’m assuming you’re trying to copy that since it’s probably the best gumbo I’ve had anywhere.”
He shook his head, not sure if he should be angry or frustrated. Or both. “So tell me, how am I supposed to treat Miss Willie when she won’t take a traditional anti-inflammatory?”
“You give her what she wants, then if you insist on one of the regular drugs, maybe you can prescribe it after she’s come to trust you.”
“Which will be when hell freezes over,” he snapped.
“Probably. But she’s reasonable. All the people here are reasonable, which is why, when malaria hit, they took quinine—”
“Quinine?” he interrupted. “Isn’t that pretty oldschool treatment for malaria?”
“Been around for hundreds of years, but it’s cheap, and it works. And it’s what I was able to get the pharmaceutical companies to donate to me.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded. “That’s the way it works here, Justin. For the most part we get donated drugs, prescriptions that have gone over the expiration date but are still good, partial prescriptions that haven’t all been taken. And quinine worked just fine for us. But I used it along with Eula’s prescribed water and orange juice fast, along with warm-water cleanses. It all worked together, and who’s to say which was more effective—the natural remedy or the quinine, which is actually a natural remedy itself.”
“So what you’re telling me is that patience with the people here will be a virtue.”
“My husband always said patience is more than a virtue, it’s a necessity. But he was the most patient man to ever grace the earth.” She smiled fondly. “Which was good, because I’m not and I needed that counterbalance.”
“Then I say your husband deserves an award, because there aren’t too many patient people around.”
“He did deserve an award,” she said. “For a lot more than his patience. Landry was a good man. Maybe the best man I’ll ever know.”
She was speaking of him in the past tense, but Justin hated to ask, because if she was widowed, that was something he should have read on her application for working with his grandmother. Truth was, he’d hardly read past her name and credentials, he had been so impatient to hire someone. “And you’re not …” He glanced down at her wedding ring.
“Not moving on, like most people think I should. But I don’t have to. Landry can’t be replaced, and I don’t particularly want to.”
“How long?” he asked.
“A little over two years. Leonie was just a baby when he was diagnosed, and he didn’t get to stay with us very long after that. It was a pervasive pancreatic cancer. Took him almost before he knew he was sick. And you know what? If I’d known your grandmother then, I’d have been happy to give her herbal treatments a try, because I was desperate for anything. To try anything that might save him.”
“I’m so sorry,” Justin said.
“So am I, every day of my life. But thank you for the sentiment.”
“You’re raising your daughter by yourself?”
“Yes, but I have a supportive family—mother, father, six sisters. They’re so much help to me, and they love Leonie. You might have heard of my mother, actually. Zenobia.”
Justin blinked hard. “Seriously? Dr. Doucet is your mother? I’ve heard her lecture. She’s … extraordinary.”
“I think so. As a mother, anyway. As a doctor, I know she has her reputation, but I don’t pay much attention to that. So now, about Miss Willie …” Mellette pulled a small jar out of the pocket of her tan cargo pants and handed it to him. “I’d suggest you take this to her and try to make amends. I’m with you on getting her an anti-inflammatory prescription since I’ve been noting some gradual changes in her physicality, but in the year I’ve worked here she’s refused every time I’ve mentioned it. Maybe if you can get on her good side …”
He laughed out loud. “Do you really think that’s going to happen?”
“No. But I don’t believe in giving up.”
