was Louise’s favorite go-to saint, the patron of hopeless cases. And, whoo-boy, had she run into a passel of hopeless folks in her time! Herself included, especially after…well, a long time ago.
Louise was riding shotgun in the first vehicle, an SUV driven by her youngest LeDeux nephew, Tee-John, “tee-” being a Cajun prefix for small or little. Not so young anymore, Tee-John, a cop from up Lafayette way, was what modern people called thirty-something. And he was far from little anymore, either.
Tee-John’s wife Celine sat in the back seat with their son, Etienne, who was thirteen going on twenty, a rascal just like his daddy had been…and probably still was. Lately, Etienne insisted that his friends call him by the English version of his name, Steven. If Louise heard, “Call me Steve,” one more time when she talked to him, she was going to pitch a hissy fit.
“Ay-T-en is a perfectly good Cajun name, and you’re Cajun ta the bone, boy,” she often told him.
The rascal usually winked at her and said with an exaggerated drawl, “Ah know, auntie. Cantcha tell, ah got mah Cajun on all the time, guar-an-teed!”
As a contrast to their older brother, six- and five-year-old Annie and Rob were in the way-back seat, deaf to their surroundings with headsets connected to games on their cell phones. Etienne was expertly thumbing his way on his own phone, too, even as he talked. A multitasker!
What was the world coming to when children needed their own phones? Knowing Etienne, he was probably looking at nekkid pictures, or sending ones of himself. Lordy, Lordy, the boy was a trial. Girls up and down the bayou best beware when this boy got old enough to really get his Cajun on.
“Do you wanna know what yer surprise birthday gift is, auntie?” Tee-John asked her, once they were on the road.
“No, I wanna sit on my hiney playin’ twenty questions,” she griped. A trip to Baton Rouge was not her idea of fun, even if they went to some fancy pancy restaurant, or visited some historic site, or something else her family had in mind, like they usually did. She’d rather be working in her garden (she had two bushels of figs ready to be picked), or practicing her belly dancing (there was a competition coming up soon that she was thinking about entering), or playing bingo at Our Lady of the Bayou Church hall (where the jackpot this week was a Crock-Pot big enough to hold a small pig).
Ooh, ooh, ooh, an idea suddenly came to her. “Is Richard Simmons in town? Am I finally gonna meet my crush?” Since the exercise guru had disappeared from the public eye in recent years, she’d been worried about him.
Tee-John rolled his eyes, and she heard snickering from Celine. “Who’s Richard Simmons?” Call-me-Steve asked.
She shook her head with disgust. No one understood her longtime fascination with the exercise celebrity. She knew Richard hadn’t been handsome in the traditional sense, even when he was younger, but he had a positive attitude about life that she loved. And he had va-voom if anyone did! His jumping jacks still gave her tingles.
“No, you’re not gonna meet the famous Richard,” Tee-John said. “Your gift is a visit to a reenactment type event in Baton Rouge called, ‘The War Years: A Celebration’.”
“Big whoop! Another Civil War re-enactment! When are Southerners gonna realize they lost that war? And why would ya imagine I’d be interested? You’d think I lived back then, the way some folks keep bringin’ it up. ‘Didja ever meet Jefferson Davis, Tante Lulu? Ha, ha, ha!’ I ain’t that old!”
Etienne muttered something that sounded like “Wanna bet?”
She turned and threatened to swat “Call me Steve” with her St. Jude fan, then told Tee-John, “Besides, ya keep tellin’ me it’s politically incorrect ta refer ta Northerners as Damn Yankees anymore. So, why we gonna celebrate that war again? We, fer certain, cain’t be wavin’ no Confederate flags, ’less we wanna be called big-hots.”
Tee-John was laughing so hard he’d probably be peeing his pants. “You mean bigot, auntie. Not big-hot.”
“I know what a bigot is, fool.”
“Why do you bother correcting her?” Celine asked her husband, as if Louise wasn’t even there.
Actually, Celine, and all the other LeDeux women for that matter—Sylvie, Rachel, Val, and Charmaine—were kind of mad at Louise, claiming that she had put a curse on them to make them all pregnant at this late stage in their lives. All Louise did was make a chance remark to