It is not all blue skies and sunshine when 1929 hits Tiana's Palace hard enough to rattle the chandelier.
The flow of customers thins, so they drop the prices. The head chef protests his significantly lower income, and leaves soon after. The suppliers begin to bring less and less food for the money they spend. And yet the rent remains as it was in the days when the old sugar mill was crammed full every night.
Now with dessert menu left in her hands thanks to the absent chef, Tiana spends mornings in the kitchen and nights in the study, making marks in a ledger that has filled up frighteningly fast. Sometimes she gets ink on the crescent dough, and flour on the checkbook.
"Sometimes I think we'd be better off if we kept the webbed feet," she sighs, idly drawing sugar circles on the apple pies. At the sink, Naveen glances up from the soapy dish in his hands.
"Eh, you never know. Perhaps the economy has hit the bayou as well."
Tiana snickers.
"Maybe. There could be a swamp moss shortage."
"It is in high demand," Naveen counters. "Water bugs have it especially hard these days. The turtle mafia is profiting nonetheless."
"And if we had stayed frogs, we wouldn't meet the deadline on our log mortgage. The herons would seize the property."
"We would be a plight on the state! Mama Odie would have to open her home to poor boarders such as ourselves."
"Or we could take up with the fireflies, goin' from place to place searching for light jobs."
"Dependent upon the weakest flies for nourishment! We would always be wet and bad-smelling."
"Not to mention muddy."
"How could I have forgotten the mud?" Naveen puts his hand to his forehead in a dramatic moan. "I could not bear it! I would surely offer myself to the alligators!"
"And leave your froggy wife without a second source of income? You wouldn't dare," Tiana warns, smacking him with the egg beater.
"Ah, life in bayou is cruel these days! It is a lucky thing that we are human, no?"
"A lucky thing," Tiana agrees.
She hugs her husband from behind, and he turns to kiss on the top of her head, and it feels like 1926.