When she finally decided to accept the invitation of her co-workers to join them for an overnight trip to New Orleans, Melanie Hayes never dreamed that she'd fall in love that weekend, much less to a man she literally met on the street.
But love has a funny way of striking at the oddest times when you least expect it.
Truthfully, even though she was still young at age 38, Melanie had thought her capacity to love another man had died the night six years earlier when her husband had been killed in a car crash. They had gone to a party and had both had much more to drink than they should have. John, though, had been quite a bit more intoxicated than she'd been, yet he'd insisted that he could drive.
But on the two-lane highway that led to their house, they'd continued a heated argument they'd been engaged in at the party, he'd taken his eyes off the road at the wrong moment, missed a curve, then overcompensated and run off the other side of the road, hitting a tree. Melanie had managed to crawl from the wreckage without serious injuries, but her husband was dead on the scene.
It had been a hard six years. The first thing she'd done was admit to herself that she had a drinking problem and joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
After she'd been sober a year, she left the small central Mississippi town where she and John had lived, and moved to Jackson, the state capital and the largest city in the state. She enrolled in nursing school, obtained her degree and had been working in the emergency room at a large hospital for three years.
During that time, Melanie had made some very close friends among her co-workers, but had little social life, preferring to concentrate on her career and her two sons. She was a good nurse, with a friendly demeanor you couldn't help but like.
She was also pretty, with striking green eyes and short, curly hair that was a flaming orange color. She was average-sized, with everything in absolute perfect proportion. Indeed, whatever excess weight she had carried around during her drinking days had melted away from the combination of stress and exercise.
A month or so previously, not long after the beginning of the school year, one of her best friends from work had approached her about joining a group that was planning to make a trip down to New Orleans in early November, when it was a little cooler.
They were planning on driving down on Saturday morning, spending the day seeing the sights and enjoying the lively nightlife that evening. They were planning on getting a room at a funky old hotel in the French Quarter to spend Saturday night, then would return Sunday afternoon. They wanted her to come along, to get her out of her rut, and to be a sober presence.
"We could use someone who's not drinking to kind of keep us in line a little bit," her friend had said. "But the main thing is I want you to get out and have some fun. You can't stay locked up forever."
Melanie wasn't sure why she'd agreed to come along. Certainly she missed going down to the city, where she and John had spent many happy times. She thought she could do some early Christmas shopping, and finally, there was the encouragement from her mother, who had urged her to make the trip.
"You have to confront your memories, dear," her mom had said. "At some point, you have to let it go. If it's too much, at least you'll know you tried."
So she'd taken the boys to her mother's, then gathered a carload of co-workers that Saturday morning and headed off for New Orleans. It was a beautiful autumn day, warm, but not too hot, and unusually dry for the Deep South, and the bright, clear day put Melanie in a happy frame of mind, as if promising something.
It was a little after noon when the caravan of three cars picked its way into the French Quarter to their hotel. They had booked two rooms at The Thomas Jefferson Hotel, a quiet little place tucked amongst the shops on Royal Street. It looked like what it was, an old ante-bellum home that had been converted into an inn.
After getting their luggage stowed, the group went out to explore the Quarter. Melanie and a couple of others made their way through the shops, then took the requisite walk down Bourbon Street. Melanie bought a few gifts, and was able to sit down at a couple of clubs to listen to good jazz without being tempted to drink, a good sign.
They were walking back down Chartres Street to meet the rest of the group for dinner, just a block before reaching Jackson Square, when fate played its hand.
The sun was starting to dip into the west, and Mathieu Sonnier was about to call it a day. He'd been standing on the street playing for most of the day, and had made a tidy sum from the passersby who had stopped to hear him perform. His feet hurt from standing on the old pavement and his fingers were raw from playing his guitar and dobro all afternoon.
Mat didn't need to perform to make a living. During the week, he taught social studies and Louisiana history at one of the many large Catholic high schools in the city, and while teaching didn't pay tremendously well, he did well enough to afford a one-bedroom apartment on Dauphine Street. Living in the Quarter allowed him to walk to the Jackson Square area and perform.
He was a full-blooded Cajun, originally from Breaux Bridge, so he was steeped in the culture, especially the music. So on weekends when the weather was nice, he would take his guitar and his dobro and spend several hours playing traditional Cajun songs, singing most of them in French, which had been his first language.
Melanie was walking with two of her friends when they heard the mellifluous tones of Mat's voice and the peculiar sound of his dobro. Melanie was captivated by the clear tenor tone of Mat's voice, even though she couldn't understand a word he was singing. But as they approached, she was even more captivated by the man's dazzling blue eyes, which seemed to pierce right through her.
At 35, Mat was still lean and wiry, and though he wasn't real tall, he had an air of confidence that came through in the way he sang and played. He was nice-looking, with the dusky complexion of his people, and his hair was dark and full with just the first few wisps of gray starting to creep in.
He took keen and immediate notice of the pretty redhead with the sad eyes who had stopped to listen, and he bowed dramatically when she dropped a five-dollar bill into his guitar case. At first, Mat thought she would simply walk on, and he felt a twinge of disappointment, for some reason.
But Melanie told her companions to go on, that she'd meet them at the hotel in a few minutes. She wanted to hear more from this mysterious-looking creature who seemed to look right into her soul. She looked around and there were a half-dozen other people standing enjoying the man's performance.
"For my final number tonight, I'll be performing the Cajun National Anthem," he said jovially in his peculiar accent, then broke into a leisurely rendition of "Jole' Blond," a song his mother had put him to sleep with when he'd been young.
Melanie let the two-step rhythm and soulful lyrics move her, even though she couldn't understand the words, and she found herself swaying to the music. When he was finished, to the applause of the onlookers, she dropped a couple of ones into the case, but made no move to leave. It was as if she was anchored to the spot.
"You're quite good," she said hesitantly, nervously, as the rest of the audience drifted away.
"Well, I'm OK, but I'm not good enough to make a living at it," Mat said as he gathered the bills and loose change, then put his gear away. "So what brings you to our fair city?"
