“What about the settlement money?” Sylvie questioned through thinned lips, still unable to speak normally because of her masked face.
“The five-million-dollar settlement is all well and good, but who knows when we’ll actually receive it. Could be years. In the meantime, there are some families in dire need,” René explained.
“We expect you all to be there,” Remy pronounced. “If I can be bulldozed into helping, the least you all can do is show up.”
Sylvie wanted to ask if Luc would attend, but her pride still stood in the way.
“You, especially.” Remy stared pointedly at her.
“Me?” She put a palm over her heart.
“You,” Remy emphasized. “You owe us after what you’ve done to our brother. He’s actually turned”—Remy paused to shudder—”respectable.” You’d think respectable was a dirty word by the way his upper lip curled with revulsion.
“Huh?” all the women said.
“Not only did he get a haircut, but he wears suits all the time. Doesn’t drink. Works eight hours a day. Says he doesn’t like booze anymore, except of course for beer, which doesn’t count. And he even went to church with Tante Lulu last Sunday. Father Phillipe almost swallowed his tongue in the middle of his sermon when he recognized him,” Remy elaborated.
“He’s talkin’ about tradin’ in his Jeep for a BMW,” René noted with horror.
“Sonofabitch! A coonass in a yuppiemobile!” Remy exclaimed, then immediately added, “Excuse me, ma’am”—a blanket apology to all the women.
“Don’t you just melt when he says ma’am?” Claudia whispered to Sylvie.
“I was with him all day yesterday and he didn’t swear, not even once,” René remarked with a meaningful grimace.
“Bottom line, he’s become boooring,” Remy concluded.
The other women were laughing, but Sylvie started to weep. Big fat tears that no doubt made rivulets in her mud-caked face.
‘”What? What?” Remy appeared affronted that he might have caused her to fall apart. “You’re crying ’cause Luc doesn’t swear anymore?”
“No,” she wailed, “I’m crying because Luc cut his hair.” She felt her face crack then. What a sight she must be!
“Oh, well,” Remy said, and everyone nodded, as if that was perfectly understandable.
After Remy and René left, Sylvie went to the bathroom to repair her face. It was a hopeless task. After washing off the mud mask, she just gave up.
As she passed St. Jude on her way back, she gave him a pat on the head and offered up a silent prayer. “Please, St. Jude. If there ever was a more hopeless case, I can’t imagine who it could be.”
When she plopped down into her chair, Blanche, Claudia, and Charmaine beamed at her.
Uh-oh!
“We have an idea,” they all said at once.
Uh-oh!
“It involves dancing,” Blanche announced.
Uh-oh!
“And spandex,” Charmaine added with a gleam in her eyes. “Red spandex, and poufy hair.”
Uh-oh!
Blanche squeezed one of her hands reassuringly. “And Luc.”
Thank you, St. Jude! Sylvie thought then, immediately followed by I think. And another Uh-oh!
“This is the most half-baked idea you’ve ever talked us into,” Luc grumbled to René. They were standing behind the stage at the community outdoor arena waiting their turn in the talent show. “There are five hundred people out there who are going to laugh their bloody heads off… at us!”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Remy snarled at René, “I’m not dancing, or swinging my hips, or pretending to have sex with a metal pole, or nothin’. I’m standing still, pretending to sing, that’s all.”
Luc’s eyes swept over Remy, and he decided things could have been worse.
“Don’t… you… say… a… word,” Remy gritted out to him.
Luc was annoyed with René for involving them in another of his shenanigans, but Remy was really pissed off. With good reason.
Luc was wearing his usual lawyer’s suit, though his shirt was unbuttoned down practically to the navel, and there was a fake earring in one ear, while Remy was wearing tight jeans with cowboy boots and hat and a leather vest, sans shirt. Even Luc thought his brother looked sexy, and he was a guy… a heterosexual guy… though you wouldn’t know it by the lack of women in his life.