Snow on the Bayou: A Tante Lulu Adventure (10 page)

Except something did.

The slamming of car doors.

“Yoo-hoo!” someone yelled, and it wasn’t Belle and her boys. It was that Cajun wackjob Tante Lulu, with pink hair that matched a pink T-shirt proclaiming
I MAY BE OLD, BUT THERE ARE PARTS OF ME THAT STILL ZING
. With her grinning niece Charmaine in a hoochie-mama, leopard print catsuit. Noticing the direction of his stare, Tante Lulu remarked, “I know. I tol’ her ta be careful. That getup’s so tight, folks will see the dimples in her butt.”

“I do not have dimples in my butt,” Charmaine insisted with a laugh.

Cage pressed his forehead against Em’s, praying that his hard-on wouldn’t be evident. Em moaned; she had a few things to hide, too, like her nipples under the thin silk shirt she wore, tucked into a pair of denims.

“We came to help,” Charmaine said, smacking him on
the butt as she passed by, carrying a box overflowing with plastic containers of food.

“Jist in time, by the looks of things,” Tante Lulu remarked. She was also carrying food. Looked like one of those lidded cake carriers. “Best I hurry up with your hope chest, boy. Guar-an-teed!”

Tante Lulu had mentioned a hope chest to him back in Coronado. He hadn’t understood then any more than he did now, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

Charmaine’s husband, Rusty, pulled up then with a small horse trailer. Apparently, he was going to take the midget horse off their hands.

“Are you sure you can’t use a pig, a sheep, and a few chickens?” Cage asked him.

“Don’t push your luck, boy,” Rusty replied, a scowl on his face.

Apparently, a midget horse for the ranch hadn’t been his idea.

Two of Remy’s teenagers, a boy and a girl, were carrying a long folding table, along with a CD player.

With perfect timing, Belle and her boys arrived. The boys were carrying a huge cooler between them. For drinks? He hoped there was beer. Or whiskey. Belle grinned knowingly at them and said, “I thought you were going to Francine’s for your father’s birthday.”

“I changed my mind,” Em answered with more vehemence than the question warranted.

Belle just arched her brows. “Maybe you can make some sweet tea then. Yours is so much better than mine.” With those words, Belle was gone, and they were alone again.

Tante Lulu ambled by again, giving him a wink, and came back with another armload of food. This time a basket of breads and rolls. “We’s gonna have us a
fais do do
.”

“A party? A party down the bayou?” he translated incredulously.

“I thought Belle and the boys were going to help Justin clean the yard today,” Emelie remarked.

“The more the merrier! Yep. A work party.” Tante Lulu beamed at them and waddled to the back of the house.

A stunned Emelie looked up at him. Cage was surprised she hadn’t attempted to bolt. Or smacked him silly. He imagined she soon would if he didn’t take matters into his own hands. But actually, once company started to arrive, he’d taken one of Em’s hands in his, the one not clutching the letters again, and he held on tightly. She wasn’t going anywhere until he was ready.

“Em, please stay. We need to talk.”

At the same time, she said, “This was a mistake. My fault. I was feeling weepy, and… well, I wasn’t myself.”

He thought she was very much herself, unlike the cool woman he’d met in her shop days ago. “It was not a mistake. It was the first right thing that has happened in days. Why were you crying?”

She shook her head and tried to disentangle her hand, but he was having none of that. “I’m just stressed out over all the work I have to do for Mardi Gras, and then seeing Miss MaeMae like this, well… I imploded.”

Buuuullllll shit!
He cocked his head to the side. “Why are you here?”

“Miss MaeMae asked me to… I mean, I was passing by and thought I’d stop by to visit.”

“Lots of passing by going on here lately,” he observed, thinking of Bernie. “Em, you always were a lousy liar. Your nose turns red.”

“That’s because I was crying, you fool.”

He leaned down to give her a quick kiss on the nose
to show he didn’t care. She was here; that was all that mattered.

But then, even more visitors arrived. The most suprising visitors of all—Geek and JAM, two of his SEAL teammates—and they were driving Cage’s red Jeep Cherokee, which they honked repeatedly to announce their arrival.

“What the hell?” he said when they walked up with wide grins on their suntanned faces. Geek was sporting whitewalls—a high and tight—but JAM’s long hair was tied back at the neck with a leather thong. They both wore sunglasses, white T-shirts, cargo shorts, and flip-flops. They probably thought going to the bayou was like going to the beach.

The two men explained that they had a few days of liberty coming and decided to bring him his vehicle. Plus, Geek had an already secure computer for him.

Cage’s heart swelled with pride and a deep thankfulness for the friendship that would bring them all this way. And he knew what had prompted the trip. Forget cars and computers. They were here to offer support for him and his dying grandmother.

“F.U. wanted to come, too, but we figured the South wasn’t ready for such a shock,” JAM said with a grin, showing pure white teeth against his dark skin. Frank Uxley was the type of soldier you wanted at your back in combat, and really, he was a primo demolition/explosives expert, but he was the most obnoxious man Cage had ever met, and that was saying a lot in the military.

“Thanks for coming, guys,” he said in an emotion-husky voice. Then he belatedly introduced Em to the two men, who were eyeing her with way too much interest. “Guys, this is an Emelie Gaudet, an old… friend of mine. And, Em, this is Jacob Alvarez Mendozo, or JAM.
And this other goofball is Darryl Good, better known as Geek.”

“JAM? Geek?”

“All the SEALs are given nicknames. Mine is Cage… for Cajun,” he explained.

Em was gawking at his friends like they were eye candy. SEALs had that effect on some women.

“So she’s the one, huh?” JAM said, looking pointedly at his hand, which was still entwined with Em’s.

“The one what?” He actually felt himself blush.

“True love, dumbbell,” Geek said. “The one that got away. The Cajun sweetheart. Soul mate. The bitch that ripped your heart out. Yada, yada, yada.”

“I never mentioned any woman,” he protested.

“You didn’t have to. We knew,” JAM replied and winked at Em. Cage did not like that wink. At all.

The two idiots waggled their eyebrows at him, then had the good sense to walk toward the backyard, where music was already playing, “Knock, Knock, Knock,” a rowdy Cajun song about a man being in the doghouse again. And much laughter could be heard, along with the sound of a machine being powered up. Probably the weed whacker.

“I’ve got to go,” Em insisted, finally pulling her hand free.

But then she soon found out that she had to stay after all. Her van was blocked in by five other vehicles.

“Did you plan this?” she asked, hands on hips, eyeing Cage suspiciously.

“Of course not.” He glanced around and came up with the best answer he could under short notice. “St. Jude planned it all.”

That might even be true. Tante Lulu was “in the house,” after all.

Cajuns will use any excuse to have a party…

Despite herself, Emelie was having a good time. The best time she’d had in ages.

New Orleans was only sixty miles from bayou country, but it felt like six hundred sometimes. Emelie tended to forget her Cajun roots when living in the upscale Creole city. It was hard to forget them here today.

The camaraderie that filled the clearing behind the stilted cottage was pure Cajun. Friendly, teasing, openhearted, close-knit, fun-loving. Even the visiting Navy SEALs were made to feel welcome… honorary Cajuns, according to Tante Lulu, who had her eye on the one called JAM for one of her hope chest enterprises. He clearly had his eyes on Belle, who had her eye on him for an entirely different kind of enterprise. Of course, Justin was first in line for a hope chest, Tante Lulu was quick to assure him, much to his dismay.

Miss MaeMae was sitting on the back porch in a cushioned chair, enjoying the whole spectacle, clapping to the music, answering questions about where she wanted this or that placed. She’d only had to go inside once to take a short nap.

Emelie went up to sit with her for a while, as had just about everyone at one time or another during that day.

“Are you all right, sweetheart?” Miss MaeMae asked her, knowing the condition she’d been in when she fled earlier.

“Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever be all right. Well, that’s too dramatic. This, too, will pass, as they say, but it’s going to take a while for me to understand and forgive my father. It was evil, what he did to you.”

“I forgave him long ago, child.”

Emelie didn’t want to ruin the old lady’s day with all this gloom and doom. So she scanned the yard, where everyone was working industriously. Already there was a huge difference from what she’d seen on arriving here hours ago. “Aren’t people wonderful?” she remarked.

“Yes. I have so much to be thankful for. Especially…” She choked up looking toward Justin, who was standing with his two SEAL buddies, talking and laughing, occasionally jabbing each other in the arm.

Tante Lulu joined them then, huffing and puffing up the steps. “Lawd a mercy! You should get one of them elevator thingees, MaeMae. The kind where you sit down and it scoots you up the steps, faster ’n spit.”

“I’ll think about it,” Miss MaeMae said, but they all knew she wouldn’t. It wouldn’t make sense with the time she had left.

“Get me a sweet tea with ice, will you, hon?” Tante Lulu said to Emelie, easing her little butt down into an Adirondack chair.

Inside the cozy cottage, Emelie was greeted by the singing of canaries and the squawking of exotic birds. When she peered closer at one brilliantly colored one, it said, clear as day, “Hoo-yah!” And the voice was identical to Justin’s. She had to smile. At least he wasn’t teaching it obscene words. Yet.

Emelie had spent so much time in this cottage over the years, until Justin left. Whereas her father would have had a hissy fit if Justin had even dared step over their threshold, she’d been welcome here. And it didn’t seem to have changed at all.

Thinking about her father made her realize they would be celebrating his birthday about now. She didn’t feel
guilty at all about her absence. As soon as she’d decided to stay—or had been forced to stay—she’d called Francine’s number and left a brief voice mail. “Can’t come today. Sorry. Will talk later.” Then she’d turned her cell phone off and left it in the van.

She delivered the iced sweet teas to Tante Lulu and Miss MaeMae. The two women were totally engrossed in some reminiscence about Tante Lulu’s fiancé, who had apparently been Miss MaeMae’s brother. He’d died during World War II. Then Emelie went back to the yard, where JAM motioned her over to help unwind a tangled mess of hoses under the porch. Tante Lulu had told her that he’d studied for the priesthood at one time, something she’d learned after a spirited discussion about St. Jude.

“Have you known Justin long?” Emelie asked.

“We were in BUD/S together. Geek was in the same class.”

At her raised brows, he explained, “Basic Underwater Demoliton/SEALs. The training program for SEALs.”

“It’s hard to picture Justin as a special forces guy. I mean, it must take all kinds of discipline.”

“A wild one, was he?”

“The wildest.”

“He’s a great soldier. The best. I would trust him with my life. I don’t suppose he’s told you how many medals of valor he has?”

“He hasn’t told me anything.” She thought for a minute. “Is that why he’s limping? Did he get injured in some battle?”

JAM laughed. “Nah. He just landed the wrong way on a high-altitude jump.”

She put a hand over her heart. “He jumps out of airplanes?”

“Sweetheart, that’s the least dangerous thing he does.”

At the concern on her face, he asked, “Why’d you let him get away?”

“I didn’t leave him. He left me.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Absolutely.”

“Hmmm.” They worked in silence for a few minutes before JAM asked, “By the way, where’s Cage’s brother, Phillipe?”

“Huh? Justin doesn’t have any brothers. He had an uncle Phillipe who died during World War II. Phillipe Prudhomme was engaged to Tante Lulu before his death.”

“Yeah, we know who Phillipe Prudhomme was. One of the early Navy SEALs.”

“What? I didn’t know SEALs were around back then.”

“Well, the precursors of SEALs. Frogmen, they were called.” They both paused again, taking in all this new information. Then JAM continued, “I could swear Cage told us about his brother who hated catfish and his MawMaw—that’s what he calls his grandmother—giving him this hokey proverb-type advice that ended up with him loving catfish, but all the catfish were gone.”

She shook her head, equally baffled. “Why would Justin tell you he had a brother?”

JAM laughed. “
Pfff!
Cage is always making up these crazy-ass stories about his grandmother and life on the bayou. The ultimate joker! We don’t believe half of his wild tales.”