“You know, Patricia Anne, I’ve been married to that woman for over forty years and I’ve never messed around with anybody else in all those years except one time at a convention in New Orleans.” He sighed. “Well, maybe twice, but the second one was hearsay.”

I didn’t want to hear this, but he wasn’t going to spare me.

“We had our ups and downs, but who doesn’t? Did I say one word to that woman when she did the hootchie-kootchie at the club that New Year’s Eve?” Another sigh. “She did stuff like that, Patricia Anne. Stuff like the hootchie-kootchie.”

The hootchie-kootchie? Best not ask. Carmen Miranda, Charo, and bananas came to mind.

The streaks across Luke’s cheeks were turning a bright red. I tried to change the subject.

“Maybe tomorrow you’ll feel like going to see Debbie’s new baby. He’s precious. They’re going to call him Brother.”

It didn’t work.

“I ought to just tell that Crawford guy ‘Here she is and welcome to her.’ See how he likes it when she starts hootchie-kootchying up there in his church.”

“He’s dead, Luke,” I reminded him.

“That’s beside the point. The point, Patricia Anne, is that if Virginia wants to sow her wild oats in somebody else’s field, then maybe I’ll just find another field to sow my own wild oats in.”

A little confusion here, but I knew where he was coming from. He was hurt, worried, and angry, but, personally, my sympathies were on Virginia’s side of the fence. How many wild oats did one have left to sow at sixty-four? How many hootchie-kootchies?

I passed the pickup and shot the startled driver a bird.

You go, girl.

Chapter Twelve

Chapter
Twelve

“Thomas Benson? Sure I know him. He owns the feed store up in Steele. Still shows up most days for work, but his son’s running the business now because of Thomas’s health problems. Good old fellow.”

Virgil Stuckey stretched his legs toward the fire. One more stretch like that and he would be out of the chair and on his butt on the floor.

The six of us, Virgil, Luke, Richard, Sister, Fred, and I were sitting in Sister’s den surrounded by dirty dishes and cartons of Chinese takeout. The smell of sweet-and-sour shrimp battled bravely with the giant arrangement of flowers, mostly purple, on the table behind the sofa. Through the glass wall of the adjoining sunporch, we could see the whole city of Birmingham crisscrossed by the yellow-white ribbons that were interstates. Airplanes took off and landed at the airport, flashing lights. And to our left, the giant statue of Vulcan held up a green torch that looked exactly like a huge lime popsicle, green because there had been no traffic deaths within the city limits in the preceding twenty-four hours. A death warrants a cherry popsicle.