by Cora Kenborn
“Do you like it?” he asked, uncertainty in his tone.
“It’s perfect.”
His smile lit up the room. Bringing my hand to his lips, he first kissed my newly engaged finger, then pulled me against him again and kissed me. Zep’s kisses were never chaste, so he quickly pulled back, respectful of where we were.
Dragging his lips against my ear, I shivered as he whispered, “Later tonight, I’m going to show you how happy you’ve made me.” Lifting my hand, he ran his thumb over the stone in my ring. “And this is the only thing you’ll be wearing.”
My face warmed, and his low chuckle intensified it. “I’ll never stop blushing at the things you say, Zep LeBlanc.”
“I’ll never stop giving you a reason to.”
A distinct scent of vodka appeared beside us, as Babs slapped Zep’s ass and motioned us both back toward the living room. “No more sexy. We toast.”
Taking Charlee from Savannah, Zep and I cuddled on the couch as Babs passed out a shot of her Christmas present to everyone. Once satisfied everyone was fully prepared, she stood in the middle of the room so that her red pantsuit, adorned with dozens of jingle bells, didn’t interfere with her toast.
“First Christmas without my Charlie. Holiday always his favorite time of year. He always curse like sailor when he put up tree. We argue about right way, and he tell me to go suck on antler, but no man in world would put up with wife like me. He would be happy to see whole family together, and especially baby.” Wiping a rare tear from her wrinkled eye, Babs motioned to Charlee, happily asleep in Zep’s arms. “So, everyone raise glass.”
No one spoke a word as we lifted our shot glasses. Kevin and Taylor paused their rooting to respectfully sit on the floor in silence. Even Duck looked solemn as he waited for Babs to finish. Finally, she stepped into the middle of our circle and raised her glass along with everyone else’s.
“Life go on, but family never forget.” Pointing systematically to Savannah, Pope, me, and Zep, she ended the toast in a way only Babs DuBois could. “Must always promise to toast at Christmas with good vodka. No cheap shit, or I not let anyone piss under mistletoe.”
We all exchanged glances, wondering if we should even try to correct her.
Meh, it’s Christmas.
We all agreed, and everyone raised their glasses in unison. “To Pappy.”
I tilted my head to just the right angle and squinted. “You know? The more I stare at it, the more artistic it becomes.”
Savannah paused mid-puff off the end of her joint and stared at me like I’d lost my mind. “And that would be the blinking lawn deer dangling by its feet above a puddle of red lights?”
“Yep.”
“The one you called a ‘revolting display of tasteless fuckery’ not twenty-four hours ago?”
I nodded, tightening my hold on the vodka bottle I’d been sucking down like water, prepared to bite her if she tried to take it away.
Instead, she shrugged and lifted the joint back to her lips. “Works for me. Have a few more, and you’ll swear the roof-pissing Santa is a Picasso.”
My eyelids drooped, but I refused to let the evening end. Everyone had either gone home or called it a night. Mama and Daddy had long said their goodbyes, but not before making us promise to stop by the house for breakfast before heading back to New Orleans. Bam and Duck hugged everyone and announced they had a couple of other presents to unwrap. While Pope and Zep grinned at them, Sav and I cut them off mid-sentence. Hearing about our cousin’s sex life was nauseating enough, but imagining Duck’s naked ass almost ruined Christmas. Besides, Pope would have a coronary if he knew whose wrapping Bam was about to tear off.
Some things are better left unsaid.
Now, Pope and Zep were half awake and sprawled out on Babs’ furniture, snuggled up with their human and swine babies.
With Babs in her famous blue slippers and housecoat, the three of us had snuck out to the one place that had seen skinned knees, teenage angst, broken hearts, and missed curfews. The place belonging to a woman who had never lost faith that the people in her life would all return to it someday.
Blowing a long line of smoke into the clear night sky, Savannah rolled her head against the worn wood of the house and grinned. “This is where it all started, you know.”
“Where what started?” I mumbled against the bottleneck. I hadn’t had alcohol in a long time. Three drinks and Sav was right—Santa’s roof piss was starting to look classy.
“When we came back to town. You, from Shreveport and me, from Texas. The first place we came to was this front porch.” Pressing her palm against the faded wood, she patted it gently. “It’s always the first place we run to in a crisis. Somehow, the answers are always easier to figure out here.”
Babs cackled as she pushed off the toe of her blue bedroom shoes and snapped her fingers at me. I handed over the vodka bottle, and after wrapping her fingers around the neck, she rocked back while taking a long swig. “Not porch, milochka, wisdom come from hootch.”
A contented laugh bubbled up from my chest. “A lot has happened in a year, huh?”
Savannah giggled, as she waved what was left of her joint in the air. “Yeah, one of the first nights back, we sat here plotting how we were going to go back to Shreveport and get your shit. Now, look at us. I’m married, and you’re engaged with a baby. Life’s funny.”
“How so?”
“Well, if we’d never gone to Shreveport, I would’ve never met Pope. If I’d never met Pope, I would never have dragged you to Mardi Gras in hopes of meeting up with him, and you would never have run into Zep and puked all over his apartment.”
I tried to glare at her but ended up laughing. “Thanks for the reminder.”
Sitting up in a cross-legged position, Savannah stared off into the distance, the lights from the antlered gators reflecting in her half-closed eyes. “What I’m saying is maybe that crack-pot fortune teller was right. Maybe life is all predestined and shit, and things happen the way they’re supposed to.”
“Wow, how many joints have you smoked tonight?” I joked. Attempting to poke her ribs, I missed completely and almost toppled over.
“I’m serious,” she laughed, giving me a half-hearted slap on the arm and righting me back on my ass. Turning her attention toward the still creaking rocking chair, she tilted her chin. “Do you believe in destiny, Babs?”
Babs remained quiet for a moment, and Sav almost repeated herself when the chair came to a halt, and our grandmother leaned forward. “Destiny only map. Decision is road.”
Sav and I exchanged shocked glances.
“Shit, that’s deep, Babs,” Savannah sputtered, slumping back against the side of the house in a daze.
Shrugging, Babs lifted the bottle and chugged. “Vodka make me wise as fuck.”
We all giggled, but she wasn’t wrong. She’d proven that over and over. In fact, maybe vodka made all Dubois women wise as fuck. No one spoke again as the sounds of the bayou filled the night air. Frogs, crickets, and the occasional splash of a gator returning to the swamp did little to rattle my nerves. I’d grown up with them, and they were a part of me. They would be a part of my children. They would be a part of my children’s children, and if I had anything to say about it, we’d all still be sitting right here on this porch.
With my legs straight out in front of me, and my best friends by my side, I sat musing over how my life had come full circle. I ran away from this town and away from Zep to find more. To be more. To have more. But more wasn’t what I needed. I had everything I ever needed at seventeen years old. It just took me a lifetime to see it.
And then there was Babs.
I watched her rock, the pride evident on her face as her family gathered around her. There was wisdom in her eyes and a hidden strength in the aged body that deceived so many people. She was my hero, and I prayed that my daughter would have the time as a teenager to know her the way I did.
The real Babs.
“You okay, Ads?” Sav
annah asked, gently nudging me out of my thoughts.
Wiping the wetness from my cheeks, I nodded and reached into my coat pocket, pulling out three shot glasses from our earlier toast. “I thought we might need these.”
Savannah grinned. “Crafty, sis.” Taking the vodka bottle from Babs, she filled up all three and passed them out. “What should we toast to?”
I didn’t hesitate as I held up my glass. “To coming home.”
“To gators,” Babs offered, rocking forward to meet my glass.
Savannah’s lips quirked as she clinked hers in the center. “To diapered pigs.”
I grinned. “To pink lines.”
“To Vegas, baby!” Babs shouted.
Sav threw her head back and laughed. “To jailhouse weddings!”
A pause hung in the air as all three of us lifted our glasses, pushing them together as tightly as we could, and in unison, we toasted to our oldest friend.
“To front porches.”
82
Back To Basics
Savannah
Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana
Seven Years Later
“Jesus, do they ever stop?” Addie asked from her perch on the porch railing.
“Did we ever?” I countered, staring out into the yard where my precious baby girl argued with her older cousin.
It was Sunday afternoon, and we were spending it the same as we did every week—drinking Babs’ stash of vodka on the front porch. Since Willow was born, she and Charlee had been inseparable. They were more like sisters than cousins, and despite not living together, they were practically growing up on top of each other. Addie and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
As any pseudo-sisters did, they fought like a gator in a net. However, the trail of destruction that was left in the wake of our little girls at ages seven and five and a half was nothing compared to the terror that followed Bam-Bam and Kat’s twin toddlers. Barely two years old, it was obvious those boys were a carbon copy of their father in every sense. The twins were two bulldozers with nothing but boobs on the brain. Although to be fair, their affections for the female anatomy were still mostly centered on nourishment. However, I was confident that would change sooner rather than later.
“Where’s Beau?” I asked, scanning the yard. Addie and Zep’s son was sneaky as hell. The little shit could get pulled over in a stolen car at the ripe old age of four and get off with a flash of a dimple. With Zep’s charisma, Addie’s intelligence, and Babs’ knack for getting out of sticky situations, I was slightly terrified of the little tyke.
I babysat Charlee and Beau while their parents went away for their anniversary last year, and the experience almost drove me straight to the looney bin. A three-year-old Beau had snuck out of the house in the middle of the night and walked—yes, walked—a mile up the road to Addie and Zep’s place to sleep in his own bed…twice. I nearly had a heart attack when I walked into the guest room the next morning to find his bed empty.
Um, hey, Ads, so I kinda, um, lost your kid.
Yeah, that would’ve gone over real well. Thankfully, Charlee was used to Beau’s nocturnal habits and put us out of our misery with an eerily familiar roll of her eyes. A year later, I still wondered how he managed to shimmy his pull-up clad ass out a window that sat a good five-feet off the ground. As Babs always said, “Don’t swim naked in swamp if don’t want to know how gator love feel.”
Or something like that.
Addie hooked her bare foot around the post to balance herself and leaned almost completely over the porch railing. “He’s under the house probably trying to tunnel to China or something. He’s fine.”
If seeing my sister walk around outside barefooted was shocking, the laid-back attitude she’d adopted after Beau was born was damn near aneurism-inducing. She was still particular about the kids being nicely dressed and tidy while in public, and manners were a must, but at home she let them run wild as long as nothing was on fire and no one was bleeding. When I’d questioned her about it, she just shrugged and said man-on-man offense was hard enough without her losing her shit every time she found a handful of worms in someone’s overalls.
“Maybe I should get him a headlamp for Christmas,” I offered, reaching over to top off Addie’s glass of vodka sweet tea.
She rolled her eyes, running her hands through her hair in frustration. “Just because I’m not fighting him on it doesn’t mean I want to encourage his behavior. You know he tried to bury our cat the other day?”
I choked on a gasp. “Abba died?” I watched as my sister’s eye twitched at the mention of her cat’s name. She’d fucked me over with Kevin’s girlfriend, so I was well within my rights to get her ass back by naming her cat after the most obnoxiously fantastic 70’s band of all time. In the four years since they’d owned the cat, Addie had yet to call it by name.
She’d give in eventually.
“Nope,” she said before taking a long swig.
My eyes narrowed in confusion. “So how…”
Addie snorted, her shoulders shaking with barely contained laughter.
I felt my eyes widen, and my mouth fell open. “He tried to bury her alive?”
The laugh she’d been holding in burst out. “Yep,” she wheezed, trying to catch her breath. “We think Zep caught him before any serious damage was caused. However, it’s possible we’re raising a serial killer.”
It was my turn to snort, causing the sip I’d taken of my drink to shoot through my nose, the vodka burning my sinuses and bringing tears to my eyes. My hysterics were interrupted by a loud banshee-like screeching noise coming from the front yard that commanded our attention.
The girls were at it again.
Willow stomped her saddle-shoed foot in the dirt, causing a plume of dust to drift up around the pink skirt of her dress. “Kevin is not for riding, Charlee!”
Charlee popped her overall-clad hip to one side and folded her bony arms. “Says who?” The girl was all elbows, knees, and attitude. She might as well have had a giant neon sign above her head that said “TROUBLE” in hot pink.
I kind of felt bad for my sister, but when my gaze flicked to my own daughter in her Little Bo Peep get up and the saw the indignant set of her jaw, I realized I was just as screwed. Willow was a straight arrow—too straight. Like when the little snitch turned me in to the manager at the Piggly Wiggly for eating a couple of grapes while I was shopping. She was always calling me out, and she was only five. I shuddered to think about what trouble she’d be when she was older.
Willow mimicked her cousin’s posture, lifting her chin in defiance. “He’s a pig, not a horse!”
Charlee narrowed her eyes and leaned in close. I could practically hear the moment she decided to double down. “I dare ya.”
Oh shit, this is getting good.
I stood and walked over to where Addie leaned against the railing watching the drama play out.
“This is better than TV,” she whispered.
“Our own personal soap opera starring the fruit of our loins,” I snickered.
“Ew,” Addie groaned, shoving my shoulder.
“That’s childish,” Willow declared, wrinkling her nose and flipping her perfectly straight blonde hair over her shoulder. The move made me groan. She was five going on forty.
“Nuh-uh! Uncle Bam dares Uncle Duck to do stuff all the time!” Charlee countered.
I nudged Addie with my elbow and spoke low so as not to interrupt the saga playing out in front of us. “Not exactly a glowing example of maturity.”
Willow threw her hands into the air in exasperation. “How many times do I have to tell you that Duck is not our uncle, and Bam is your second cousin?”
The faceoff between the two of them was comical—Charlee with her tomboy style and attitude versus Willow with her pristine princess dress and sharp tongue. It was a battle royale, and there was no telling who’d come out on top.
Charlee sneered, her eyes narrowing into slits. “How do you even know what a second cousin is?�
��
“My Nana Pope taught me,” Willow explained without pause.
“Did she teach ya to be stuck up too?” Charlee shot out.
Ouch, direct hit.
I was about to step in, but Willow didn’t miss a beat and volleyed back. “No, she taught me to be proper. It’s called etiquette, Charlee. You could use some lessons.”
“If you’re so proper, then why do you call him Uncle Bam too?” Charlee countered, looking smug.
“Because he’s my uncle and my second cousin,” Willow sniffed as if she’d just laid a truth bomb of epic proportions.
Charlee snorted and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, not sure that’s somethin’ you wanna go tellin’ people.”
Both girls glared at each other for a solid minute before Kevin came barreling around the house with Taylor close on his heels.
“He’s got my shoe!” Charlee screamed and tore off after him with Willow speeding after her.
Addie and I settled back down to our regular positions on the porch and watched as the girls chased the pigs through the bushes and around the yard, all previous arguments forgotten.
“They’re just like us,” Addie said, a wistful smile playing on her lips.
Sighing gently, I let my eyes wander back to the girls. “Their last names may be LeBlanc and Pope, but they’re Dubois through and through.”
Epilogue
Charlotte
Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana
Ten Years Later
“This isn’t rocket science, Rod. Don’t be such a little bitch.” I’d lost count at how many times I’d rolled my eyes at my cousin as I palmed my forehead and sighed.
