by Cora Kenborn
“Who do you think knocked out my tooth?” Bam said, pointing to his missing canine.
Chugging the rest of his beer, Duck crushed the can against his forehead and tossed it over the railing. “Anybody who watches The Bachelor is crazier than a shithouse rat.”
Zep threw Duck’s empty can back at him, hitting him right between the eyes. “Not helping,” he hissed.
I had to press my face against Charlee’s head to keep from laughing.
Turning his attention back to the task at hand, Zep pushed his palm against Roland’s chest and forced all his weight on him. Roland coughed and sputtered, gasping for air, but Zep held firm.
Leaning down so they were eye to eye, he smirked just enough to freak him out. “See? I’m crazy as fuck, but I’m betting you’re smart enough not to try me, huh?” As soon as Roland shook his head, Zep slapped his cheek and pulled him to his feet by his tie. “And you won’t sue me for shit because you’re trespassing on private property which makes you an intruder and gives me every right to kick your ass.” Just as Roland opened his mouth to object, Zep shoved him back toward his car. “Good talk. Now, I suggest you leave before I let Bam, here, protect his family’s land.”
In response, Bam-Bam grinned and reignited the blue flame of his precious blowtorch. “It’d be my pleasure, son.”
As Roland backed away, Zep followed him with purposeful steps. “Don’t ever show your face here again, Bordeaux. Don’t call Addie. Don’t say her name. In fact, don’t even think about her. And if you ever come near her or my kid again, I’ll fucking kill you.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Maybe. Are you willing to chance it? I could let my boys have their turn. See, we take care of our own around here, and not only did you disrespect my woman, you disrespected his cousin, his friend, and his sister-in-law.” Throwing a hand over his shoulder, Zep pointed to Bam, Duck, and Pope without even looking.
Roland reached for the door to his car, and no one breathed as Zep blocked his access. The front porch creaked as all five of us leaned in to listen.
Like we were going to miss this.
“I’m gonna let you in on a little secret,” he said, slowly rolling his neck as a thick silence hung in the air. “The whole time you were with her, she was thinking of me. Addie wanted me and settled for you.”
“You worthless, simple—”
Roland’s tirade was cut off as the protesting creak of the front door filled the air seconds before it slammed hard enough to make everyone jump. Before I could react, squeaky shoes shuffled against rough wood, and Babs let out a high-pitched holler that I swore shaved a few years off my life.
“Ya Ya!” Still half-drunk and clad in her orange mumu, my grandmother stumbled past us while being taken for a walk by a very pissed off alligator. “I warn you, cocksipper!” Once they both managed to reach the bottom of the stairs, she jerked out her teeth, hurled them at Roland’s feet, and spat at him with an Olympic-worthy trajectory.
Roland’s eyes widened as he pointed a shaking finger at the four-foot long reptile currently trying to bite through the flimsy leash containing him. “Is that a fucking dinosaur?”
Babs’ cackle sounded downright demonic as she let go of the leash and clapped her hands three times. “Chew dick, Fluffy!”
On her command, Fluffy slithered at warp speed toward Roland, who danced liked fire had shot out of his ass. Slapping the window, he screamed like a little bitch as Fluffy chomped at his heels, ripping the pants leg of his expensive suit to shreds. Finally giving up, he hurled himself onto the hood and slammed his fist onto the metal while yelling at his driver.
“Go, asshole! Get this piece of shit out of here!”
As Babs doubled over in laughter, Bam pulled the toothpick out of his mouth and pointed it toward Roland’s ass as he lay sprawled across the hood of his car. “Reckon he pissed himself?”
Savannah laughed, waving goodbye with both middle fingers. “It’s either piss or his dick sweats.”
We all watched until Roland’s taillights disappeared down the edge of the long dirt road leading away from the property. One by one, everyone broke away, returning either inside the house or challenging another male to a disgusting bodily function contest.
All except for one.
Zep hadn’t budged since his confrontation with Roland. He still stood with his back to us, his arms crossed, and eyes transfixed on the horizon as if daring him to return. To the outsider, he was still furious and ready to lay fists again, but I knew better.
At his core, Zep LeBlanc was a protector. I joked about him being a caveman, but those tendencies were deeply imbedded in him He’d never made a secret of what he coveted most in life. A family of his own. His harsh stance wasn’t about jealousy as much as his own fear.
Fear that someone threatened to take away his forever.
Fear that I would’ve walked away.
Once Babs corralled Fluffy, I handed Charlee to Sav and walked down the steps to stand behind him. His shoulders first tensed then relaxed as I wrapped my arms around his waist and pressed my cheek against his back. “Feel better, Rocky?”
“I’ve been waiting ten years to do that.”
I chuckled as he folded his hands over mine and laced our fingers together. “Was it worth it?”
Glancing down at our entwined hands, he took a long time before answering. “Almost.”
“Almost?” I pulled away to launch into a lecture about how more violence would’ve ended with someone else I loved behind bars. Grabbing me by the wrist, he flipped me around in front of him and had me in his arms before I uttered another word.
Snaking one arm tightly around my lower back, he tugged me hard against his chest. Ensnaring me with those pale blue eyes that never failed to hypnotize me, he wove his other hand around the back of my neck and crushed his mouth against mine for a kiss that left me weak and breathless. The kind of kiss a man gives a woman to remind her where he’s been, where’s he’s going, and where he plans on staying.
Dragging my bottom lip gently through his teeth, he offered me a cocky smirk. “Now it was worth it.”
79
Mary Krismas
Savannah
Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana
“Are you warm enough back there?” Pope asked, catching my eyes in the rearview mirror.
“I think so,” I answered, fussing with Charlee’s blanket for what felt like the millionth time since we hit the road. It wasn’t a long drive, but it felt like an eternity crammed into the back seat of Pope’s jeep. Charlee might be the size of a football, but add in the space shuttle sized car seat, baby bag, backup baby bag, Addie’s breast pump, all of our bags, and the Christmas presents we were hauling, and I was surprised I had room to breathe.
“Pothole!”
The car dipped, and the mountain of gift bags and packages stacked precariously around us slipped and crashed. Addie and I crossed our arms over the front of Charlee’s car seat to fend off the barrage of crap sliding around the back seat.
Zep twisted around from the passenger’s seat and quirked an eyebrow. “Remind me why we didn’t take two cars?”
Addie rolled her eyes and elbowed a gift bag back into place. “Because my pickup broke down and yours doesn’t have a middle seatbelt. Since I’m not interested in subscribing to Babs’ brand of infant automobile safety, my child will be securely fastened in any and all moving vehicles.”
Zep turned around in a huff. “A seatbelt isn’t going to save her from suffocating under an avalanche of Christmas presents.”
“Do I even want to know what Babs’ interpretation of child safety is?” Pope called back to us, earning him a glare from Zep.
I could only see half his face from the side mirror, but I had no doubt he was pouting. My big, tattooed, Grizzly Adams-looking, almost brother-in-law was pouting like a two-year-old.
“According to family lore, she used to put our father in a plastic laundry basket on the floorboard,” I answered,
only half listening.
Addie laughed and shoved my shoulder, making me drop my phone and completely ruining my covert snapshot of the sulking lumberjack.
Rude.
“I was going to use that for next year’s Christmas card,” I hissed as I searched blindly for my phone between the mess of tissue paper and ribbon at my feet.
She adjusted Charlee’s hat and snorted. “We don’t send out Christmas cards.”
I curled my lip into a sneer. “Well, maybe I was going to start.”
“With a picture of my baby daddy looking like someone let Kevin shit in his shoes?”
“Ah-ha!” I held my phone in front of her face triumphantly. “Maybe I wanted to start a new tradition. Did you think about that?”
“When was the last time you used a stamp, Savannah?”
“When was the last time you were home for Christmas, Adelaide?” I countered, knowing full well this would be the first Christmas she’d spent with our family in over ten years. Once Shit Stain sank his claws into Addie, she’d spent the holidays with his family at the plantation in some fucked up Southern Norman Rockwell set up.
My big sister wrinkled her nose at my question. “Do you think Bam-Bam and Duck managed to get the decorations up?”
Normally, I wouldn’t let her get off so easily with the subject change, but the image her question conjured in my head was enough to have me laughing so hard I feared for my bladder. I could just imagine the two of them burning through a case of beer while trying to fix broken bulbs on the tumbleweed of Christmas lights Babs had stuffed in the shed for the past decade.
“Did they really have to arrive two days early? I mean, how hard could it be to string up a few lights?” Pope asked as he pulled off the main highway and onto the dirt road that led to Babs’ house.
The cackle that fell from my lips echoed in the cramped cab of the jeep. “They probably spent most of the time drinking and got one string of lights up, which means you two will probably be spending the majority of the night on the roof.”
Pope and Zep shared a dubious look as we bounced around the last curve in the road that led into Babs’ driveway.
The sight that greeted us as we cleared the trees made me choke. Reaching forward, I smacked at Pope’s seat and pointed at the monstrosity before us. “Sweet baby Jesus in a manger!”
“Oh God, what the fuck did they do to Rudolph?” Addie sputtered, her face squished up against the window.
I followed her line of sight to the giant white oak tree we used to climb when we were kids. “Duck…” I breathed, taking in the scene. He was the only one demented enough to string a lit reindeer up by its hind legs and trail a string of red lights from its neck to pool on the ground resembling blood. He’d slaughtered Rudolph and hung him up to bleed out.
Only in the swamp.
“Oh shit, don’t look at the roof,” Zep mumbled as we rolled to a stop in front of the house.
Babs was at her usual place on the front porch, rocking away while Bam-Bam and Duck flanked her on either side. The excitement on their faces was undeniable—they were proud.
Addie sprang out of the back seat like a demented jack in the box. “We sent you to put up a few lights for Christmas, not turn our grandmother’s house into the redneck Griswolds!”
I hurried around the jeep to stand beside Addie, more for the boys’ protection than a stand of solidarity. In all honesty, I was pretty impressed with how badly they’d screwed it up. There were Christmas mishaps, and then there was this, which looked more like a shrine to the hillbilly version of Krampus.
“Isn’t it great?” Duck asked, reaching over Babs’ head to knock his can of Natural Ice against Bam-Bam’s.
Addie’s face resembled an old-fashioned thermometer as the blush of rage climbed up her neck and face. “You murdered Rudolph, you homicidal maniac!”
A glass-shattering wail pierced the air, and I spun around to see Zep trying to unhook Charlee’s carrier from the car seat base. From the sound of her shrieking, he’d woken her up, and she was none too happy about it.
“You woke her up?” Addie growled, her head turning slowly around in time to see Zep finally emerge from the back seat looking chagrined.
Why hello, Satan.
If there was one thing I’d learned since the birth of my sweet, beautiful, demonic niece, it was that no one, and I meant no one, got away with waking her up. If she were an adult, I was sure she’d have donned blue face paint, and there would’ve been bloodshed accompanying her infant war cry. Since she was too tiny to do any real damage, the burden of the avenging angel of death fell upon her mother, who at the moment, glared at her baby daddy with the look of the antichrist.
“Don’t get blood on the interior!” I called out as Addie stomped back over to the jeep to dole out some vigilante justice.
Turning my attention back to a massacre of a different sort, I squinted as I scanned the mess of holiday décor. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. None of the lights even matched; it was like they were trying to fuck it up. They’d strung icicle lights up alongside giant multicolored bulbs and wrapped every porch support beam in either rope lights or a hodgepodge of different colored garlands.
Strong arms wrapped around me from behind and a sense of comfort settled my thoughts. Nothing mattered as much as my husband’s arms around me. Nothing held more truth than the love we shared, and nothing could ruin our first Christmas together.
Pope rested his chin on my shoulder. “Is that Santa standing on the chimney and peeing off the roof?”
Letting out a violent snort, I doubled over laughing. “Shit on a shingle, how drunk were they when they did all this?” I wheezed, wiping tears from my eyes.
“Yippee-ki-yay, motherfuckers!” Duck screamed as he took a running jump off the front porch, posing mid-air in a drunken Karate Kid-like move before crashing to the ground in front of us. “Ah shit, mah beer,” he grumbled, rolling onto all fours in the dirt.
Bam lumbered down the steps shaking his head at his outrageous friend. “Y’all need help with your bags?”
Sidestepping to block his path, I pointed an accusing finger at my lovably dense cousin. “Forget the bags, buddy. Tell me what the fuck happened to the house.”
He grinned and turned his attention back toward the house. From the expression on his face, he obviously thought he’d painted the next Sistine Chapel. “Fluffy got into all of Babs’ old decorations, so we had to make do with what we could salvage and what was left at old man Carter’s hardware store. I think we did a pretty good job.”
In an incredibly distorted way, it was kind of sweet that they went to all that trouble to bring a little festive cheer into Babs’ life, even if it made her look more serial killer-like than normal. “So, you came up with the peeing Santa all by yourself?”
Bam just shrugged as Duck scrambled to his feet and dusted off his cut-off shorts. For a skinny man, he seemed awfully fond of sleeveless shirts and cut off shorts in the middle of winter. Not that Louisiana winters were all that harsh, but it was still below fifty, which called for a heavy coat and scarf in my book.
“Aren’t you cold?”
The man-child in question held up a finger, indicating that I needed to hold on. I was about to take that finger and show him where he could stick it when he spun and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Beer me, Babs!”
Without looking up from her whittling, my geriatric grandmother reached down into the cooler beside her rocking chair and hurled an aluminum can in the general direction of Duck’s voice. Unfortunately, her throw went high, and with agility I didn’t know he was capable of, Duck braced a hand on Bam’s shoulder and leaped into the air, catching the beer with a howl of victory. By the time Duck finished his touchdown dance, Addie and Zep had rejoined our merry little band of horrified holiday guests.
“Did ya see the roof?” Duck asked, giving Addie a toothless smile.
Bam gave Duck’s shoulder a playful shove. “What’d I tell ya about smi
lin’ without your teeth in?” Years ago, he’d lost his front four teeth in a bar fight and had to get a partial set of dentures, which wouldn’t be a big deal if not for the fact that Duck seemed incapable of remembering where he left them.
Duck gave him an unimpressed look but kept his lips pressed together. “That it scares the womenfolk?”
Bam-Bam nodded emphatically.
Throwing his hands on his hips, Duck tapped his foot. “Now wait just a minute. These two are taken. There ain’t no reason I need to look all fancy with my teeth in around ‘em, now is there? That rule s’posed to only be for the single ladies.”
“Did someone say, single lady?” Babs asked as she stood up and started gyrating on the front porch.
“Is she…” I asked, trailing off because I didn’t know how to translate what I saw into words.
Addie groaned and let her forehead fall to my shoulder. “I think that’s her version of Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ dance.”
I winced at the realization that my sister was right. “Oh shit, she’s going to start doing the rump shake. Come on, let’s get inside before she permanently scars Charlee.”
Addie nodded, and the four of us left Duck and Bam arguing over missing teeth etiquette on the front lawn. I finally looked up as we approached the house and almost faltered when I made out “Mary Krismas” scrawled in lights across the entire length of the sagging roof.
Only in the swamp.
Duck wandered out from the hall into the living room yelling at the open laptop he carried. “Baby, can you hear me?”
“What the hell is he doing?” Addie asked, adjusting the blanket she had over her shoulder before settling Charlee against it.
I rolled my eyes at my sister and propped my feet up on Pope’s lap, attempting to get comfortable on the plastic covered couch, unlike Kevin who was comfortable as could be snuggled in a blanket on my lap. “I think he’s trying to Skype Heather.”
