Excerpt: A Dunce of the Confederates

Crusty was zipping up an old pair of jeans and slipping her toes into a pair of faded flip-flops when the phone rang again.
“Hello.”
“Christine, I’m downstairs.”
She didn’t reply to her aunt, and instead merely hung up the phone, put a tube Carmex in her pocket along with the folded twenties, and headed out the door. She rode the elevator down the four floors to the lobby where Sunny, the Nigerian man who worked as day concierge, sat dozing at his desk. As always, he shifted upon hearing the sound of the opening elevator, and made a feeble attempt to look alert . “Good afternoon, Miss Crawford.”
“Hello, Sunny,” she answered absent-mindedly. She’d never liked the man, but felt it her obligation to be polite to him, since she never knew when she might need his help. He got out of his chair to open the front door for her.
“No, really, Sunny…” which is what she always said to him when he made his irritating and needless accommodation required by his job description.
Auntie Joy’s Crown Vic sat purring and gleaming in the curved drive at the front of the building. Sunny quickly moved in front of Crusty and opened the car’s passenger door. “Thank you, Sunny,” she replied, without looking at him. He shut the door and she turned to fasten her seat belt.
Her aunt looked at her critically. She thought she’d made a joke when she told her niece about dressing in “her usual attire,” but much to her chagrin, the girl had taken her at her word. The kind citizens who might be at the Astrodome helping those less fortunate would most assuredly mistake her niece for an evacuee! “Did you at least take a shower?” she asked, sniffing the air.
“Yes, Auntie Joy. I took a shower,” Crusty replied sarcastically.
“Well, you don’t smell fresh to me,” Joy sniffed haughtily.
Crusty lifted her left arm and hissed, “Well, why don’t you stick your nose in my pit and take a deep one to really find out?”