Free Snow on the Bayou: A Tante Lulu Adventure by Sandra Hill

pistol tucked into the back of his jeans. “Well, actually… yeah, I am,” he admitted, figuring it wouldn’t hurt for a couple of kids to know what he did for a living.
    “Man, that is so cool!”
    “Awesome!”
    “Bet you have women crawlin’ all over you,” Max said wistfully.
    “Oh, yeah. Like lice.”
    “Huh?” Max blinked at him.
    “Just teasin’.” And actually, the kid was right. Women did want to hook up with SEALs. Like rock stars, SEALs also had their groupies. Even obnoxious guys like their teammate Frank Uxley, appropriately named F.U., had no trouble getting a date.
    “I saw
American Sniper
last year with Bradley Cooper. Man, you SEALs can kick ass and take names without blinking,” Mike said.
    Oh, God! Another movie that was almost a parody of SEALs. Rarely were those flicks vetted by anyone with military creds. Although he had to admit,
American Sniper
was better than most, recounting the life of a true American hero, Chris Kyle.
    “Do you know Bradley Cooper?” Max wanted to know, a hopeful expression on his young face.
    What? Did he think they were good buds, that thefamous actor was just sitting outside in Cage’s car, slumming the Quarter? He laughed. “No.”
    “Oh, I just thought of something,” Mike said, his face bright with whatever new thought had popped into his young head. “Did you kill Osama bin Laden? I mean, were you one of the SEALs that took him out?”
    Everyone asked him that.
    The boys were gazing at him now as if he was some kind of superhero.
    “No. I was in Somalia at the time.”
    A young couple came in then, and the boys reluctantly moved off to wait on them.
    Cage felt like he had dropped down into some rabbit hole, an alternate universe, where he met up with the sons of a woman… okay, a girl… he’d once loved. Sons that could have been his. They even looked a little bit like him.
    After meeting with MawMaw’s doctor, he wasn’t sure how many more shocks he could take today. He should leave. Forget Em and her new life. Let old dogs… rather old loves… die.
    The young couple purchased a booklet about Mardi Gras and a poster that could later be framed when they got back to Kentucky. The boys turned back to him.
    “You oughta check out those doubloons over there. Some of them are, like, a gazillion years old,” Max said, pointing to the glass case on the other side of the room.
    Cage walked over and pretended interest, trying to get his emotions under control. Never a problem before, or not for a long time.
    “You’re limping,” Max remarked. “Didja get hit by an AK-47 or somethin’?”
    Son, if I got hit by an AK-47, I wouldn’t be here.
“Naw, just landed the wrong way in a Halo jump.”
    The slack-jawed boys stared at him as if he’d said he just invented the latest video game or, better yet, told them he knew the model on the cover of the latest
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue.
    “So you live here in N’awlins?” Cage inquired with seeming casualness. Meanwhile his heart was beating like a drum.
Ka-thump. Ka-thump. Ka-thump
.
    “Yep. With our mother. We have a little house on the outskirts of town,” Mike said. “Do you wanna see any of those tosses up close?”
    “Tosses?”
    Mike pointed to some of the items in front of Cage in the glass case. “Things that get tossed during parades. You know, beads, medallions, coins, and stuff,” Mike explained.
    He used to know what tosses were. He’d forgotten. What else had he forgotten, deliberately or not? “Nah, I’m just looking. A little souvenir for my grandmother,” he said but then his tongue developed a mind of its own. “So you mentioned a little house and your mother. How about your father?”
    There was a silence behind him and he turned to look at the boys.
    “We don’t have a father,” Max said.
    “Of course you have a father,” Cage told him. “Everyone does.”
Good Lord! I sound like an absolute moron.
    “Not us. At least not one our mother ever admitted