Free Low Tide by Dawn Lee McKenna Page A

said.
    “Mornin’, baby,” Miss Evangeline answered, her voice like yellowed rice paper.
    “Morning, Miss Evangeline,” Boudreaux said.
    “So you say,” she said back.
    Bennett stood and pulled back the chair across from his place, watched her make her way to the table.
    Miss Evangeline was more than ninety years old and she looked every hour of it. She stood just under five feet tall, and her light-colored skin grasped her bones with no apparent flesh between the two. She wore her usual flowered house dress and straw slippers, and her shoes made sounds like sandpaper on wood as she slowly made her way to the table.
    Miss Evangeline had been his father’s housekeeper, but she might as well have been Bennett’s nanny. His mother had been “delicate” and died when he was seven. His father had been too busy raising a business to raise a son. His father had left Miss Evangeline behind when he’d moved to Apalach, but when Bennett had finished college and started his business in Houma, he’d hired both her and Amelia. Now they were all here.
    Amelia’s job was to cook and clean and take care of her mother. Miss Evangeline’s job didn’t exist anymore, but she did it anyway.
    Once she was abreast of him, Boudreaux leaned down and kissed both of her papery cheeks, then walked back to his seat.
    Miss Evangeline slowly made what added up to a seven-point landing in her chair, and Boudreaux sat back down.
    Amelia stepped away from her stove long enough to bring her mother a cup of tea. Boudreaux went back to his paper. Once settled, Miss Evangeline gingerly took a sip of the tea and then peered across the table, her eyes magnified behind her glasses.
    “What in the papers today?” she asked.
    Boudreaux looked at her over the top of the paper, then turned the page.
    “Tropical Storm Claudette’s not coming, Save the River’s having a pancake fundraiser, and we’re thanking everybody for their condolences on the halfwit.”
    “You don’t keep talking ill of the dead. It’s bad juju.” Her hand trembled as she put the cup back in its saucer.
    “Juju doesn’t get Roman Catholics, Miss Evangeline; karma does.”
    She pointed a bent finger at him, the nail long and yellowed.
    “Juju gets what it gets.”
    Boudreaux winked at her over the paper. “You keep trying to scare me with your voodoo and I’m gonna yank those tennis balls off your walker.”
    “Go on sass me, Mr. Benny. Sass me some more and I pass you a slap.”
    Amelia brought a plate of eggs and bacon to the table and set it down in front of her mother. The old woman looked at the plate, then looked over at the kitchen island.
    “Where his food is?”
    “He said he don’t want anything,” Amelia said, taking the skillet to the sink.
    Miss Evangeline turned her gaze back to Boudreaux. She sat there a good minute, glaring at the newspaper in front of his face.
    “Stop staring at me,” he said pleasantly.
    “Man ’sposed to eat.”
    “I eat.”
    “Mama, go on eat your breakfast,” Amelia said from the sink. “I got to pass the mop before herself come down.”
    “Don’t worry about her, Amelia,” Boudreaux said. “She’ll be down late. She’s got several new black ensembles to try on before she decides what she’s wearing to the funeral.”
    “I laid out your suit,” Amelia said.
    “Thank you. I saw that it was appropriately mournful.”
    Amelia grunted, then headed out of the kitchen.
    Miss Evangeline put a morsel of scrambled egg into her mouth and chewed it as best she could while she stared across the table. After a minute, Boudreaux put the paper down.
    “What?” he asked.
    “Juju.”
    “Juju’s what got Gregory, Miss Evangeline, and I’d say it was about time.”
    “Watch your mouth,” she said, pointing her fork at him.
    “He didn’t become a better person because he’s dead, old woman. We’re not going to pretend he was a saint now.”
    “All the same, you got to hold your tongue.”
    “I did, Miss