Free Fran Rizer - Callie Parrish 06 - A Corpse Under the Christmas Tree by Fran Rizer Page A

wouldn’t make it,” was Frankie’s answer.
    Tyrone arrived at the table with eight glasses of sweet iced tea and asked, “Are you ready to order?”
    “Not yet,” Daddy said. “Does Rizzie have a special today?”
    “Yes, she calls it the ‘Split Po Boy.’ ” Tyrone paused.
    “What’s that?” Daddy asked.
    “It’s a twelve-inch sub on crusty French bread. What makes it a split is that she puts oysters on one end and catfish on the other. You can get it dressed with lettuce, tomato, pickles, and onion or undressed with just meat and either tartar sauce or remoulade sauce.” Tyrone delivered this in a monotone, making it obvious that Rizzie had made him memorize it.
    “What’s remoulade?” my nephew asked, mutilating the pronunciation of the name of the sauce.
    “It’s a special mayonnaise kind of thing that Rizzie makes. It has a little mustard and pickles and something that makes it pinkish-colored. Oh, and horseradish, definitely has some of that in it.” Rizzie clearly hadn’t rehearsed him on that.
    Most of us decided to try the Split Po Boy but Johnny and Megan both asked for hamburgers.
    After turning in our orders, Tyrone came back to our table. “You should have been here yesterday morning,” he said to everyone. “Callie helped deliver a baby.”
    “What?”
    “Callie and Pork Chop Higgins helped Misty Bledsoe have her baby right here in the diner. It’s a boy. Billy Wayne came by while ago and said he was on the way to the hospital to pick them up.”
    Megan screwed up her nose and made that “eeuhh” sound teenaged girls sometimes use to express distaste. “We’re not eating at the table where she had the baby, are we?”
    “Nah,” Tyrone answered, “Misty was actually lying on the floor over there by the first booth.”
    Thank heavens Rizzie called him then to pick up an order. I really didn’t want a blow-by-blow description of birth from a fifteen-year-old. Johnny’s the same age though, and I could see that he was interested.
    Our food was scrumptious, and the only thing wrong with a Split Po Boy is that it’s impossible to tell which side tastes better—the catfish or the oysters. Rizzie came to the table just as we all finished eating. “How about dessert? I have some homemade fruit cake and several kinds of cookies.”
    The adults all ordered cake, and the kids wanted cookies. “Granpa wouldn’t let us eat any of the bourbon balls,” Megan said as she licked the frosting off a bell-shaped sugar cookie. Then, with a proud as punch expression, she said, “But he’s making Aunt Cutie’s Peanut Butter Blossoms for us tomorrow.” I grinned at that and made a mental note to go by Daddy’s tomorrow. Those were my favorite cookies growing up.
    “Don’t be offended,” I answered her with my mind back on the Bourbon Balls. “He won’t let me drink beer at his house and probably wouldn’t let me eat bourbon balls either.”
    Daddy grinned. “Start sharing my bourbon balls with everyone, and I might run short after I take some over to Miss Lettie. Did you know that woman ran that farm by herself since the Vietnam War?”
    “Better be careful,” Frankie said. “From the way she behaved last night, Miss Lettie may already be noshing on some bourbon balls.”
    “I think maybe the doctor had given her something to keep her calm,” John defended his friend’s mother. “Until Jeff moved, she was really a paradox. She was very demanding and strict, yet she smothered him, too. I hadn’t seen her in years until last night, but this has to be as awful for her as her husband’s death was, and that was a major subject at their house the whole time Jeff and I were growing up.”
    “Losing a spouse that you love isn’t something a person ever gets over,” Daddy said. “Then to have a child die has to be dreadful.”
    “And Jeff was her only child,” John commented.
    “That don’t matter a whole lot,” Daddy said. “Do you think I’d grieve less for one of my