She beams at me and places her own order of salad and étouffée. When the server walks away, she leans across the table on her elbows. “He’s cute.”

She says this with a deviant smile as though we’re girlfriends. My annoyance from this morning at her need to pretend that the last ten years didn’t happen begins to wind its way up my limbs. But I don’t want to fight with her in public. I remember a few of those moments from before—being in a McDonald’s somewhere off the interstate when the soft-serve ice cream machine wasn’t working and she thought the woman behind the counter was withholding it. She started screaming so loud they had to call the police to escort us out.

“I didn’t notice,” I lie and decide to change the subject. “So, what was that? Back there?”

She sits back. “Not the friend thing again?”

“No.” I’ve accepted that we’re getting nowhere fast on that. I want to know what happened before. “The cathedral. That whole last-minute dodge you gave me. You looked…scared.”

She fiddles with the paper wrapper from her straw on the table, wadding it into little knots and unwadding it again. “I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”

There is something to this, I can tell. I can see it in her jittery fingers and refusal to look at me. There is a story to be unearthed here if I excavate carefully. I wonder if everyone drawn to New Orleans is like this, full of deeply buried stories, like graves. “Sure you do. You definitely didn’t seem like you liked that place.”

I try to change my voice, like she does, like we’re girlfriends. It is higher and thinner than normal. It is inviting.

She shifts in her seat. “I don’t like it, I guess.”

“Any particular reason?” I ask.

She shrugs. “I spent a lot of time in churches growing up. Edna insisted. Mass every Sunday, sometimes on weekday mornings. The rosary before bed every night. Catholic school in between. It was a lot. I’m done with all that now.”

The way she says that makes it sound like she is spitting it out of her mouth like a bad fruit. It sounds like more than the inconvenience of getting up early and dressing in scratchy clothes. There is something she’s not saying. I also can’t help but notice that Moony made her attend a lot more than she did me. I wonder if she was afraid I’d turn out like my mother, rebellious and unstable—if that’s why she had me stop going once I reached a certain age.

“Catholic school, huh? What was that like?” I didn’t even know there was a Catholic school in our town. I went to the public school ten blocks away like everyone else around us.