After searching behind the stage and in the cafeteria’s kitchen, Adèle found her husband on the floor in the auditorium setting up an extra row of metal folding chairs. Ticket sales had picked up after the boat parade, resulting in a sellout.
“Bernard, you have to run to the Sea Mist. Right now.”
“Now?”
She nodded her gray head. “Now. We need wine.”
He arched a wooly brow. “Don’t tell me those kids have driven you to drink?”
“Ha-ha. I’m not going to drink it, but we need to get it before the restaurant shuts down for the night.”
“Why not the market?”
“Because the Sea Mist serves a higher quality.” It might not be up to the standards of what her son and daughter-in-law had carried at Bon Temps when they’d run the family restaurant, but it was definitely above what the small local market offered. “I’ll call ahead and tell them you’re coming. And get some champagne. The best they carry.”
“Okay.” Fifty-plus years of marriage had taught Bernard that going along with her was often the best way to get along. “Am I allowed to ask why?”
“I just offered Kelli the cabin for the holidays.”
He tilted his head while rubbing the back of his neck. “You do know that Lucien and I already suggested Cole go there? And that he took us up on the idea after the boat parade?”
“Of course I do.” She put her hands on the hips of her green and red plaid wool skirt. “Surely you don’t think I’d send the girl out into the woods all alone? With a major snowstorm in the forecast?”
“Aha.” He flashed a quick grin, catching on to her plan. “That’s downright sneaky.”
“I’m merely helping out two people who are very dear to me get through the holiday blues.”
There was also the fact that she wasn’t getting any younger and thought it high time one of her grandsons provided her with some great-grandbabies to spoil.
“Now, go.” She made a shooing motion with her hand. “I need to call the Sea Mist and then I need to get hold of Doris and Dottie down at the Dancing Deer Two.”
“Why them?”
“So they can gather together some decent clothes for the girl.”
Bernard’s gaze moved to the stage, where Kelli was on her knees, using black electrical tape to mark X’s on the polished wooden floor. “I think she looks great.”
“Well, of course she’s always lovely. But she’s wearing another of those silly Christmas sweaters.”
Two days ago, a holiday toy train filled with presents had decorated a red sweater. Yesterday’s was plaid, with a black Scottie dog wearing a red velvet ribbon around its neck. Today’s was even worse.
“It’s Christmas. And the kids seem to like the sweaters,” Bernard said.
“Of course they do,” she huffed with frustration. “They’re five years old.”
Honestly, men could be so clueless. Time was wasting; she couldn’t stand here and explain every little thing to him.
“Since I don’t remember her having such deplorable taste when she was younger, she no doubt bought them to brighten the holidays for her students. Which is a very sweet thing to do . . .
“But think back to when we’d started courting. Would you have ever even thought about tumbling me if I’d been wearing a red sweater with a Christmas tree that lit up?”
This time his grin was slow and, even after all these decades together, had the power to warm her the same way it had when she was an eighteen-year-old bride. “Like the song says, you can’t hide beautiful,” he said, the Louisiana delta drawl that he’d never entirely lost from his voice thickening like warm honey.
“I’d have wanted to tumble you even if you were wearing a burlap sack from Comeaux’s Feed and Seed,” he said. “But if you had been wearing a light-up sweater, I would’ve paid it no heed, because you sure as heck wouldn’t have been wearing it long.”
She felt the color rising in her face. “You shouldn’t talk to me that way in public.”
“Okay,” he said, a bit too agreeably. He lowered his voice and leaned toward her, his lips against her ear. “I’ll wait until we get home to continue this conversation. In private.” He nipped at her lobe. “In bed.”
“Oh, go on with you,” she said, even as her toes curled in that old familiar way. “You have shopping to do, and I have calls to make. On your way home from the Sea Mist, stop by the dress shop. Doris and Dottie will have the gift-wrapped boxes waiting. Then, because I don’t want things to be too obvious, drop them by the Carpenters’ house. It’ll seem more natural for them to be gifts from Kelli’s mother.
“The freezer at the cabin’s already well stocked with meals. While you’re out, pick up some things for a traditional Christmas dinner from the market. Then, right after Kelli’s class finishes their part of the program, you and Lucien can run the things up there and make sure everything will be ready and in place when the two of them arrive tomorrow.”
“If the president had put you in charge of planning military actions back when I was fighting in Korea, Del darlin’, that war would’ve been over and I would’ve been back home in two days.” He brushed her cheek with his lips, snapped a brisk salute, and headed up the aisle.
As Adèle allowed herself the luxury of watching him make his way toward the door at the back of the school cafeteria, she thought, not for the first time, how lucky she’d been to have met this man while home on summer vacation from convent school in New Orleans.
The moment he’d walked into the ice cream parlor—where she’d just bought a strawberry cone—romantically backlit by a late-June sun streaming in the window, the idea of becoming a nun had paled in comparison with marrying the handsome young fisherman and having his babies.
Decades later, Bernard was not only the love of her life, but her very best friend in the entire world.
Her grandson and Kelli were already friends. Or they had been until that boneheaded move he’d pulled last Christmas. Fortunately, he’d escaped a marriage that anyone with the sense God gave a duck could have seen would be declared dead on arrival at the altar.
Feelings had been hurt on both sides, but all the two young people needed was a little time away from the outside world for him to realize what everyone else in the family knew. That Kelli was not just a pretty, sweet girl.
But a keeper.
A best friend for life. The same way she and her Bernard were. And if Cole and Kelli needed a little push to make that happen, loving them both as she did, that’s precisely what Adèle would do.
Now that she’d put her matchmaking plan into motion, she took her phone out of her skirt pocket and moved on to step number three.