Page 83 of My Best Friend's Mardi Gras Wedding

“Heisa college boy,” Owen said.“And a law school boy.”

“Fuck off,” Josh told them both.

Gabe chuckled.“I think you’re okay.After all, his balls are in Paisley Darbonne’s pocket, so you’ve got that.”

“Why do you think that?”Josh asked, surprised Gabe even knew who Andrew was engaged to.Of course, it was possible it had been in the local papers, he supposed.

“Andrew and his buddies were in here the other night and I heard them talking,” Gabe said with a shrug.

“They were inhere?”Josh asked.“When?”

“Mardi Gras.”

“They were here onTuesday?”Josh had been running in and out of the bar, completely distracted by thoughts of Tori, so it was very possible he’d missed seeing Andrew.Then again, he hadn’t known who Andrew was on Tuesday.He could have seen the other man, but not reallyseenhim.He could have pushed the groom-to-be a beer or two and never really looked at his face.

“They were.Nice big tab and good tippers,” Gabe said.

“But he was bitching about Paisley?”Owen asked.

“Just that she was pissed off about how things were going and that he needed to figure out a way to smooth it all out.And one of his groomsmen asked when anything was going to be about Andrew and Andrew said, ‘When Paisley tells me it can be.’”Gabe and Owen laughed at that.

Josh just continued to watch Andrew and Tori together.Andrew was disgruntled with the wedding planning?He hadn’t known that.

“So you’ve been showing them the sites, huh?”Gabe asked.“You know your way around on concrete and not just swamp water?”

“Oh hell,” Owen said.“You give this guy a captive audience and some stories to tell and he’s in heaven.Doesn’t matter what the vehicle is or if the stories are true or pure bullshit.”

“I like to fall somewhere in between those,” Josh said with a grin.He couldn’t deny that he’d had a great time showing this group around.

“You showed them Preservation Hall and the Cathedral and the streetcars?”Gabe asked.

“Yep.”

“And you handed out pralines and told them why we call it Canal Street?”

“Yep.”

“And you took them to the World War II museum?”

“Took ’embyit,” Josh said.“That’s a whole day thing to really appreciate it.But we did stop in at Mardi Gras World.”

Gabe grinned.“And they fed them King Cake?”

“You bet.”

Mardi Gras World was one of the big old warehouses where they created and stored a lot of the Mardi Gras floats.It was a little bit cool and a little bit crazy.The amount of work that went into the floats was amazing and seeing them up close was always fun, especially for people who hadn’t ever been to a real Mardi Gras parade.The sampling of King Cake was a part of the tour at the facility and again, was often a first for out-of-towners.The Iowa group hadn’t really understood the whole bit about the plastic baby being hidden somewhere in the cake, but they’d liked their samples.

“We went up and down Canal Street and St.Charles Avenue,” Josh said.He’d showed off the mansions of the Garden District, talked about the streetcars, and they’d done a loop through Audubon Park where he’d told them about the insectarium and the aquarium and the Tree of Life, the old oak estimated to be between one hundred and five hundred years old and that had a spot in its branches with a view of giraffes.The ones in the zoo not too far from the tree.

“But we gave them a…unique tour too,” Owen said.

He and Josh shared a grin.

“What’s that mean?”Gabe asked, lifting a brow.

“Well, we told them all about Katrina and a bunch of the stories we know and have heard in here,” Josh said.He’d only been fifteen when the hurricane had ravaged the area, but everyone knew someone who had a story and a lot of people loved to tell those stories.The first responders who frequented Trahan’s from Engine 29, the firehouse just a few blocks away, had a trove of stories, some that they’d experienced themselves and some they’d heard from others.

Josh knew that some, or even most, of those stories had grown over the years since the storm and that there were some urban legends mixed into the recounting of the hurricane and the aftermath.But the destruction had been very real, the lives affected had been countless, and the effects could still be felt around the city.It was easy for him to get impassioned about it.

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