Rescued By A Kiss (The New Orleans Go Cup Chronicles Book 1) Read Free

mutt.” She left with the big shopping bag she carried around with her like a purse. Woozie lugged it around with her everywhere she went. The only thing I ever saw her take in or out of the shopping bag was a deck of Tarot cards.
    Woozie read the Tarot every time she came to clean. It seemed she made up the predictions depending on what was happening that day. If we doubted something in the cards, she pulled out a crystal on a silk cord and let it circle around a few times by way of confirming her reading. While none of us put any stock in Woozie’s superstitions, we minded not to tell her as much.
    I hoped her comments about the dog were being drowned out by the ruckus at the front of the house. Someone was hammering away on the front door and it set the dogs off barking while I tried to sneak in the back. Maybe my mother hadn’t heard us. From the hall I could see the drama unfolding in the living room.
    “Come in, it’s open,” Dad bellowed from his Lazy Boy command center over the yapping dogs.
    Julia entered in broadcast mode and could be heard throughout our house. I stood in the hallway and tried to get Julia’s attention without alerting my mother. Julia fired off questions, asking how they were, were they going to the parade, was I home yet and was this all the dogs I had rescued? Her questions ran together like they were all somehow related. She asked the dogs questions, too, and didn’t wait for anyone to answer her. “Get back, you little wild Nicki Hokies. I’m not chasing you up the street in these four-inch heels. Gawd, it is cold tonight.” She stood five foot eleven inches before you added the four-inch heels and big hair.
    Julia and I had worked together in sales at the phone company until a month ago when she was laid off. When I asked her what was a Nicki Hokie she responded it had to do with her Indian heritage and that was her tribe. Her outfits, too tight, too low cut, and too short for my mother’s approval, always met my dad’s. Tonight’s ensemble was a combination of animal prints. She looked like Peg Bundy slammed into Chris Owens on Bourbon Street. I tried to get Julia’s attention.
    “If you covered your chest in clothes made for this weather you might not be so cold,” my mother admonished Julia. My mother expressed her dissatisfaction with a look that could cut through cinder block. Julia ignored her. Seeing them spar reminded me of lady wrestlers circling each other vying for the best position to strike.
    “If I covered my assets, I wouldn’t catch any beads. Y’all going to the parade with us?” Julia asked my dad, as she glared at me standing in the hall holding the crate.
    “Brandy parked in the back. I heard her sneaking in the back door with another dog when Woozie left,” my mother told her. Except for vital exchanges of information or a chance at a back-handed insult, my mother and Julia ignored each other.
    Great, she knew. So much for the element of surprise, I thought.
    “C’mon, I need to change before we leave,” I said to Julia. Dad got up and followed saying, “You two better step on it. I just saw the trouble truck through the front window go by right before you knocked.” Dad took his self-appointed job as parade monitor seriously. From his Lazy Boy Operations Post in front of the Camp Street window, he could see when the parade’s trouble truck passed. Spotting this truck allowed him to announce the parade’s estimated time of arrival. The trouble truck, outfitted with a pole indicating the tallest point of the parade, assessed overhead clearance for the floats to pass safely along under a tree, power line, or bridge. Once the truck passed, the parade was just minutes away. At any moment we would hear motorcycle sirens blasting, clearing people out of the street to make way for the beginning of the parade. We would have to hurry to get there for the start of it.
    My apartment sat in back of the main house down the hall from the living room, and