“I’m a born-again virgin.”

Charmaine LeDeux made that pronouncement with a faint feminine belch after downing three of the six oyster shooters sitting on the table before her at The Swamp Tavern. She was halfway to meeting her goal of getting knee-walking buzzed.

The jukebox played a soft Jimmy Newman rendition of “Louisiana, The Key to My Soul.” The jambalaya cooking in the kitchen filled the air with pungent spices. Gater, the bald-headed, longtime bartender, washed glasses behind the bar.

Louise Rivard— better known as Tante Lulu— sat on the opposite side of the booth from Charmaine. She arched a brow at the potent drinks in front of Charmaine compared to her single glass of plain RC cola and looked pointedly at Charmaine’s stretchy red T-shirt with its hairdresser logo I CAN BLOW YOU AWAY. Only then did the old lady declare, “And I’m Salome about to lose a few veils.” In fact, Tante Lulu, who had to be close to eighty, was wearing a harem-style outfit because of a belly dance class she planned to attend on the other side of Houma that afternoon. In the basement of Our Lady of the Bayou Church, no less! But first, she’d agreed to be Charmaine’s designated driver.

“I’m sher . . . I mean, serious.” Charmaine felt a little woozy already. “My life is a disaster. Twenty-nine years old, and I’ve been married and divorced four times. Haven’t had a date in six months. And I’ve got a loan shark on my tail.”

“A fish? Whass a fish have to do with anything?” Tante Lulu sputtered.

Sometimes Charmaine suspected that Tante Lulu was deliberately dense. But she was precious to Charmaine, who teared up just thinking about all the times the old lady’s cottage had been a refuge to her whenever she’d run away from unbearable home conditions. Being the illegitimate daughter of a stripper and the notorious womanizer Valcour LeDeux had made for a rocky childhood, with Tante Lulu being a little girl’s only anchor. She wasn’t even Charmaine’s blood relative; she was blood aunt only to Charmaine’s half brothers, Luc, René, and Remy.

So, it was with loving patience that Charmaine explained, “Not just any fish. A shark. Bobby Doucet wants fifty thousand dollars by next Friday or he’s gonna put a Mafia hit on me; I didn’t even know they had a Mafia in southern Loo-zee-anna. Or maybe they’ll just break my knees. Jeesh! Yep, I’d say it’s time for some new beginnings. I’m gonna be a born-again virgin.”

“What? You doan think the Sopranos kill virgins?” Tante Lulu remarked drolly. “And, yeah, there’s a Mafia in Louisiana. Ain’t you never heard of the Dixie Mafia?”

“The born-again-virgin thingee is a personal change. The loan-shark thingee would require a different kind of change . . . like fifty thousand dollars, and it’s going up a thousand dollars a day in interest. I gotta get out of Dodge fast.”

Tante Lulu did a few quick calculations in her head. “Charmaine! Thass 10 percent per day. What were you thinkin’?” Tante Lulu might talk a little dumb sometimes, but she was no dummy.

Charmaine shrugged. “I thought I’d be able to pay it off in a few days. It started out at twenty thousand, by the way.”

“Tsk-tsk-tsk!”

“I don’t suppose you could lend me the money?”

“Me, I ain’t got that kind of money. I thought yer bizness was goin’ good. What happened?”

“The business is great.” Charmaine owned two beauty shops, one in Lafayette and the other a spa here in Houma. Both of them prospered, even in a slow economy, or at least broke even. Apparently, women didn’t consider personal appearance a luxury. Nope, her spas were not the problem. “I made a lot of money in the stock market a few years back. That’s when I bought my second shop. But I got careless this year and bought some technology stocks on margin. I lost more money than I put in. It was a temporary problem, which spiraled out of control when I borrowed money from Bucks ’r Us. Who knew it was a loan-shark operation?”

“Well, it sure as shootin’ doan sound like a bank. Have you gone to the police?”

“Hell’s bells, no! I’d be deader’n a Dorchat duck within the hour if I did that.”

“How ’bout Luc?” Lucien LeDeux was Charmaine’s half brother and a well-known local lawyer.

She nodded. “He’s working on it. In the meantime, he suggested, maybe facetiously, that I hire a bodyguard.”

Tante Lulu brightened. “I could be yer bodyguard. Me, I got a rifle in the trunk of my T-bird outside. You want I should off Bobby Doucet? Bam-bam! I could do it. I think.”

Off? Where does she get this stuff? Charmaine groaned. That’s all I need . . . a senior-citizen, one-woman posse. “Uh, no thanks.” With those words, Charmaine tossed back another shot glass filled with a raw oyster drowning in Tabasco sauce, better known with good reason as Cajun Lightning, then followed it immediately with a chaser of pure one-hundred-proof bourbon. “Whoo-ee!” she said, accompanied by a full-body shiver.

“Back to that other thing,” Tante Lulu said. “Charmaine, honey, you caint jist decide to be a virgin again. It’s like tryin’ to put the egg back together once the shell’s been cracked. Like Humpty Dumpty.”

Hump me, dump me. That oughta be my slogan. Oughta have it branded on my forehead.

A more upbeat song, “Cajun Born,” came on the jukebox, and Charmaine jerked upright. Shaking her fifty-pound head slowly from side to side, she licked her lips, which were starting to get numb. “Can so,” she argued irrationally. Or was that rationally? Whatever. “Be a virgin again, I mean. It’s a big trend. Some lady even wrote a book about it. There’s Web sites all over the Internet where girls promise to be celibate till their wedding day. Born-again virgins.”

“Hmpfh!” was Tante Lulu’s only response as she sipped on her straw.

“Besides, I might even have my hymen surgically replaced.”

Tante Lulu was a noted traiteur, or healer, all along the bayou, and she was outrageous beyond belief in her antics and attire. For once, Charmaine had managed to shock her. “Is hey-man what I think it is?”

“It’s hi-man, and yes, it is what you think.”

“Hey, hi . . . big difference! You are goin’ off the deep end, girlie, iffen yer thinkin’ of havin’ some quack sew you up there.”

Deep end is right. “I didn’t say I was going to do it, for sure. Just considering it. But born-again virgin, that I am gonna do, for sure.”

“Hmmm. I really do doubt that, sweetie,” Tante Lulu said, peering off toward the front of the tavern, which was mostly empty in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday.

Frankly, I shouldn’t be here, either, Charmaine thought. She should be at one of her shops, but she was afraid Mafia thugs would catch up with her in advance of the deadline.

“Seems to me that all yer resolutions are ’bout to melt,” Tante Lulu chortled.

Charmaine turned to see what Tante Lulu was gawking at with that strange little smirk on her face. Then Charmaine did a double take.

It was Raoul Lanier, her first ex-husband. Some people called him Rusty, a nickname he’d gained as an adolescent when his changing voice had sounded like a creaking, rusty door. She’d preferred his real name in the past. He always said he liked the way it sounded on her tongue, slow and sexy, especially when . . .

She’d been a nineteen-year-old student at LSU and former Miss Louisiana when she’d married Rusty. He’d been twenty-one and a hotshot football player and premed student at the same school. As good as he’d been at football, which earned him a scholarship, his dream had always been to be a veterinarian. His last words to her before they’d parted had been, “Once a bimbo, always a bimbo.” She would never forgive or forget those words. Never.

Charmaine had been avoiding Rusty for weeks, ever since he got released from prison. And, yes, she was bound and determined to think of him as Rusty now. She thought about ducking under the table, but he’d already seen her. And he had a look in his dark Cajun eyes, unusually grim today, that said, “Here I come, baby. Batten down the hatches.”

Man-oh-man, her hatches had always been weak where Rusty was concerned. All he had to do was wink at her, and she melted. He wore faded Wrangler jeans with battered, low-heeled boots, a long-sleeved denim shirt, and a cowboy hat. He was six-foot-three of gorgeous, dark-skinned, dark-haired Cajun testosterone. Temptation on the hoof.

Good thing she was a born-again virgin.

Copyright © 2004 by Sandy Hill