Monica Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Monica Faulkner was born in 1988 at Houston, Texas, at the end of a long and sticky afternoon at a church supper, and is living today in Houston, where she is a line cook in a kitchen off the Gulf Freeway and, by common consent, the fastest pair of hands on the shift. She belongs to the House of Faulkner and the Red Ledger, the Lancastrian line that descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, but she is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and she has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of her own beyond a chef's knife that her father gave her and a towel that she has never been seen without. She is the younger daughter of the diner cook Leonard Washington, who died in 2024, and of the bookkeeper and slayer Cynthia Faulkner Delacroix, The Quiet Rook, who is living, and the sister of Clara Washington Faulkner, born in 1987. She has not married and has no children. The family remembers her as the cook of the Gulf, the one of Leonard's daughters who took his stove to a new city, and the person whom the Texas cousins ring when they want to be fed. She was born in Houston because of a wedding. In the thin summer of 1988, when the oil bust had emptied the offices on Louisiana Street and the city was a good deal quieter than it had been, a cousin of Leonard's, who ran a lunch counter on the ship channel, was married in a church hall in the east end, and Leonard, who had been asked to cook for a hundred and fifty, took a week of leave and drove across in a borrowed station wagon with a stockpot in the back. Cynthia, who was twenty-six and eight months along, said that she would not be left at home with a calendar. She ate a plate of rice at two in the afternoon and went into labour at four. The aunts of both families, who had never before been in the same room, took charge of the matter between them in the hall's kitchen, with a great deal of boiled water and conflicting advice, and the child was taken in a pickup to a hospital on the freeway, where she was born at dusk, before the cake. She was named for Monica Delacroix, a cousin of Cynthia's, the waitress of the morning shift at the Blue Plate, who stood godmother to her by post. She weighed seven pounds and was reported to have bawled in a way that the bride, who was cutting the cake in the car park, could hear. She was taken home to New Orleans in a fortnight, in the station wagon, in a laundry basket, and grew up in the long house above the hardware store in the Irish Channel with her sister Clara, a year older, who was patient with her. She was the louder of the two, a short, quick, square girl with her father's hands and her mother's sharp eye. At four she was found at the back of the Blue Plate, on a milk crate beside the flat-top, with a spatula, flipping an egg that nobody had ordered. Leonard, who stood nine inches above her and had never been known to raise his voice, said that she had a good wrist. He taught her, from then on, in the odd hours, to season a pan, to read a flame and to taste with the back of the tongue. A roux, he said, is made by standing still. She said that it was boring. He said that it was the whole of cooking. She stood still, as far as she was able to, for about a minute. She was told the truth about the family at fifteen, at the kitchen table, in the same words as her sister, over a plate of eggs which her father had cooked and which she thought the best part of the proceedings. She asked what the Ledger did for lunch. Her mother said that it ate, in general, at whatever hour the work allowed, and Monica, who had spent six years learning that nothing in the world mattered so much as a hot plate at the right moment, said that she supposed that was where she came in. Her mother said that it was a good place to come in. She was never called, and she did not mind, since she had, by then, a theory, which was that the people who went out in the dark would be needing a decent supper and that no one else in the family was proposing to supply it. She went to a university in the city at eighteen, intending to be an engineer, and left it at twenty with a certificate in surveying that she had not meant to take, and a conviction that she disliked being indoors. She went to Houston in 2008, to the city that she was born in, because a cousin had a room and a firm of surveyors on the ship channel had a place for a chainman. She worked for six years on survey crews, in the heat, in a hard hat, on the docks, the refinery roads and the bayou banks where the new pipelines went in. She learned to walk a line and to hold a rod and to know from the sag of a fence where an old property boundary had run. She also learned what a long day on a bayou bank does to the appetite. The crews ate from a truck. She found that the best cook on the crew was a cheerful woman called Mrs Ochoa who ran the truck, and in 2014, at twenty-six, she went to work for her. She has been on the line since. She was a prep cook and then a fry cook, in a seafood place on the channel that fed the refinery shifts at four in the morning, and she is now the head of the grill at a restaurant off the freeway that is a good deal busier than she would like, a tall, hot, steel-and-tile kitchen in which she works a flat-top, a fryer and a stove, with four people and a clock. She puts out two hundred covers a night. She is known for a roux that she makes, against all instruction, at a very low heat for forty minutes, and for a habit of tasting a pot and saying nothing, which the staff have learned to read as approval. Her father's gumbo, which she makes on the first Sunday of each month, is the only dish on the menu that she will not allow to be altered. The Houston cousins found her out within the year. The White Ledger has a great many people along the ship channel, among them the Proctor welder Scott Proctor and his wife Lisa, who have kept a safe house there for thirty years, and the Faulkner cousins, who have fewer, and the two houses, which were enemies for centuries and are on civil terms, share the habit of eating together on a Sunday. She cooks for them. She sends a plate, now and then, to a hunter who has come in off a night on the bayou and has not eaten since the morning, and she has fed, by the family's count, some two hundred suppers at a table in the back of a church hall. A man who came in once, wet to the waist and grey in the face, was given a bowl of gumbo and a towel, and said that he had been out at Baytown and was a good deal obliged. She did not ask what he had been doing at Baytown. In the pandemic years the restaurant closed for eleven weeks, and she was thirty-two and for the first time in her life out of work. She cooked in the church hall instead, for the nurses and the ambulance crews at a hospital on the Medical Center, five hundred meals a week, in a mask, with a borrowed fryer and a church volunteer who held the door. She says that she has never worked so hard for nothing, nor been so well paid in thanks. Her sister Clara, on the other side of the country, in an intensive care ward, said the same. Her father died in the spring of 2024, at the counter of the Blue Plate, with a sausage in the pan, and she drove through the night with her mother's cousin to be at the wake. She cooked the red beans herself, from the card that he had written in marker in 1979, and put a plate for him at the head of the table, and the ten hunters of the Red Ledger who stood in the churchyard afterwards ate every bean. She has the knife that he gave her on her twenty-first birthday and the towel that he left on the hook, a plain white towel with a scorch mark, and she keeps them on a shelf above the stove. Monica Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the cook of the Gulf, the second daughter of the Blue Plate who took her father's red beans to Texas and fed the hunters of two houses at one table. In the Slayerverse she stands for the cooks and kitchen-keepers of the Red Ledger, who were never called to the hunt, who learned from a father that a roux is made by standing still, and who showed that a good supper put in front of a tired person is the surest of the family's quiet weapons.