The Convent Rose (The Roses) Read Online Free Page B

like that, now do you?”
    “I’d marry someone exactly like Noreen as soon as she’d have me.”
    “Sucker,” Bodey said and meant it.

Chapter One
    Rainbow, Louisiana
    Fifteen Years Later
    Who would have thought the great Bodey Landrum would be spending his thirty-third birthday alone? Rich and famous with that segment of the population who followed rodeo, here he sat in a mansion smelling of mildew looking out over an empty swimming pool with cracks in the bottom. Compared to last year’s blowout when he treated his friends to thick steaks, all they could drink, and the cowgirl of their choice, this was pretty damn pitiful.
    He found retirement hard to take—even if his bum knee and his bad back had been begging him to quit for the last several years. On this damp Louisiana day, all the bones he had broken during his bull riding career ached. A storm was coming for sure. Since his first action upon arriving back at the old Three B’s had been to stock the bar from Plato’s Liquor and Food Store in Rainbow, a remedy stood ready and available, but a man who drank alone was a sad case, a very sad case.
    The avocado green refrigerator in the kitchen still worked. He had stuffed it with milk, bread, butter, beer, cold cuts, eggs, a couple of pounds of hamburger, and an entire flat of Ponchatoula strawberries that looked so red and ripe at the roadside stand, he’d bought too many. Thinking back on his grocery purchases, Bodey decided to eat out.
    He hadn’t noticed much action in Rainbow on his first trip into town. The convent school still dominated Main Street from behind its iron gates. The mellow brick buildings, lawns, and oaks had the same air of serenity they had always possessed. The female students still wore the ugly blue plaid skirts and white blouses of which he had some fond memories. The graveyard remained as quiet as ever.
    Rainbow itself had changed. Peeling white frame cottages were overlaid with pastel siding, pink, pale yellow, and blue. The small front yards running almost to the blacktop blossomed with mixed spring bulbs set in front of new picket fences. Screening had been ripped from the old porches that now held rockers painted to match the siding instead of old car seats and moldy sofas with the stuffing coming out.
    Bodey heard the town council had voted to change the spelling of the name to Rainbeaux in order to cash in on the Cajun culture craze. Mayor Plato vetoed the plan and won support by telling the old story about the miraculous founding of the place under the sign of a real rainbow. So instead, the Chamber of Commerce backed writing grants to paint all the houses in a rainbow of colors and clean up the front yards. Evidently, they had gotten the money. Sometimes, being a dirt-poor place helped. Rainbow had weathered the oil bust with hardly a notice and now prospered in a new way.
    The ancient Rainbow Café, once a shanty with a crudely painted rainbow on the side and not a place you’d take your mother out to dinner, had been increased in size and yuppified. They’d added a new porch where large parties waiting for tables could sit on cypress benches among the planters of asparagus fern and purple petunias and smoke if they must. Smoking was now banned where once the people not only lit up, but chewed and spit as well. Ja’nae Plato had threatened to fix the place up years ago, and now she’d done it. Bodey just prayed to God the café still served great ribs.
    As a single, almost immediately he got an odd-shaped table with only three chairs wedged into a corner. Ja’nae Plato, serving as hostess, had a paler complexion than many of the Cajuns eating in the place. Only in Rainbow would she still be considered black. Bodey wondered why she didn’t leave. She had been cordial enough, remembering him not as a rodeo star, but as a friend of her brother’s and fellow graduate from the high school in Opelousas, which was nice, he guessed.
    That the Rainbow Café even had a hostess