by Dan Dillard
*****
“You’re early,” said Aggie.
“Yep. Guess folks are livin’ longer than they used to,” he said and kissed her on the cheek.
She smiled and hugged him. That very conversation had been their daily ritual for the past thirty-five years.
“Anything interesting today?” she asked.
Levi pulled a beer from the refrigerator and twisted off the screw cap, taking a swig.
“Yep. For a change, there was,” he said and recounted the story.
She reacted with her usual calm grace, “Bondye? Never heard of it. Never heard of Demonde either. He from round here?”
Levi looked as if he hadn’t considered it before.
“Not likely, he had a strange accent. Caribbean maybe.”
Aggie sat down at their computer and typed the word into a search engine.
“Says here ‘Bondye’ is a Creole word for ‘Good God’. Maybe he dropped it,” she said.
“Creole? That fits the accent, I guess. I’ll give it back to him when and if he stops back by. Told me he’d be back in the morning,” he said.
He tossed the empty brown bottle in the trash and reached in for another.
“Mm hmm,” she said. “You hungry?”
“You know it.”
They sat down to dinner and then some television before bed time. Levi didn’t give Demonde a second thought.