Natalia brings him his coffee and warm milk and a single powdered beignet from the Café du Monde on a tray. She draws the blinds, turns the electric fan on him, and asks, “You want me to do it for you?”
“No, I don’t need it right now. I’ll wait until later in the day.”
“I don’t think you got no sleep last night.”
He watches the rainwater feathering off the roof and makes no reply. When he sits up on the rollaway bed, tentacles of light wrap around his thighs and probe his groin. Natalia sits down beside him, her dress dropping into a loop between her knees. Her hair is black and thick and she washes it often so it always has a sheen in it, and when she takes it down on her shoulders she is truly lovely to look at. She doesn’t smoke or drink, and there’s never a hint of the life she leads in her clothes or on her skin, not unless you include the tracks inside her thighs.
Her face is lost in thought, either about him or herself, he’s not sure. To her, Jude LeBlanc is a mystery, one she never quite understands, but it’s obvious she accepts and loves him for whatever he is or isn’t and imposes no judgment upon him.
“Can I do something else for you?”
“Like what?”
“Sometimes I feel I don’t ever do you no good, that I can’t give you nothing,” she says.
“You fixed breakfast for me,” he says.
She changes her position and kneels behind him on the rollaway, rubbing his shoulders, clutching him briefly to her, resting her cheek against the back of his head. “They got drugs in Mexico the pharmaceutical companies don’t allow on the market here,” she says.