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“Maybe she’s feeling better,” Pris said. Mae Beaumont had suffered inconsolable grief when her son, Rodney had died, her husband soon after.
“We’ll see. We’d better get our swamp clothes on, anyway.” He looked down at Katrina’s feet. “I don’t see Louboutins at my mother’s house.”
They squeezed into the Porsche. “I’m trading this in for an SUV tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’m getting Lola’s car this week.”
“We need two anyway,” Katrina answered. “I don’t have time to play car jockey with you.”
“Whatever you say, my queen.”
They laughed at Alphé, who wasn’t known for his humor. Katrina’s no-nonsense demeanor brought out the best in him.
After changing into clothes for Mae Beaumont’s, they piled in the truck, with Rumor in between Alphé and Katrina, and headed over the creek to the marsh where the previous generation of the Beaumont children had been raised.
There was a muddy serpentine path that wound through the cypress forest and a small area of gravel where he could park the truck. There was a huge luxury SUV on the gravel.
“Nice car,” Katrina said.
“My sister Shawna is here,” he announced, surprised. “She’s married to a dentist, hence the car. I haven’t seen her in a year.”
“Does your mother know I’m coming?”
“I have a feeling this get-together is for your benefit.”
“Oh, well, isn’t that nice.”
“You’d better be on your best behavior, Kat,” Noel said through the little window between the cab and the bed of the truck. “My grandmother uses a strap.”
“He’s kidding,” Alphé said, shaking his head.
The children jumped out of the back of the truck and ran up the elevated wooden walkway to the house.
“Wow, this is really an old Louisiana swamp house. I’ve seen nothing like it.”
Stunned at what stood before her, the house was a multistoried, jerry-built wooden structure where rooms had been added on haphazardly as needed. Multiple metal pipe chimneys stuck out at various levels. Ladders provided egress to the upper floors; no interior staircase existed. The fire hazard seemed extraordinary, but so far, they’d been lucky.
“She’s got no electricity, just so you know. Her palm reader sign is solar.” Alphé barked out a laugh at the incongruity of it. “The spirits don’t provide power. I got her a solar panel a few years back so she can have a fan and a refrigerator at least.”
“What about plumbing?”
“She’s got a cistern and a cesspool. Rustic.”
“You grew up here?”
“Born and raised. There she is, waitin’ on us at the door.”
She’d never given much thought to Alphé’s mother before, but from a distance, seeing Mae Beaumont’s formidable stature, she understood what it must have taken to raise a large family in this behemoth, without electricity, with rustic plumbing and a fisherman for a husband. The children had run to her, and she was animatedly giving out love and attention, aware of their mother’s recent departure.
Mae gave the impression of being statuesque, but when Katrina got up to the porch, she realized Mae was rather short, less than five three, and smallish, around one hundred twenty. Katrina could see immediately that Alphé looked like his mother; those eyes, especially.
But for all her backwoods lifestyle, she was fresh out of the beauty parlor, her hair done recently in a smooth, jet-black classic French twist with just enough silver strands running through it to announce it was really her natural color. Huge blue eyes made up professionally with perfect liner, false lashes, and beautiful eyebrows balanced her full, red-lipstick-painted mouth. Mae Beaumont must have been a knockout in her youth.
“Ma, meet Katrina.”
The little woman threw her arms around the much taller Katrina and gave her an enormous hug, nearly lifting her off the floor.
“Someone finally treat my son like he deserve.”
