Honky Tonk Christmas (20 page)

“I doubt it. I’m too old and set in my ways to do much changing,” he said.

“So tell me, if I gave you my phone number would you call me sometime?” she asked.

“Didn’t Molly tell you? I’m involved with another woman right now.”

“Who?”

“A lady I met in Mingus.”

Dorie scooted in close enough to him that her body was glued to his side. “Does she have children?”

“No, she’s never been married,” Holt said.

The woman toyed with his fingertips and yet there was no friction. Not a single spark. No jolts that shot desire through his veins. Just a nice smelling body next to his that didn’t put his nerves on edge.

Dorie pulled a pen from her shirt pocket and wrote her number on his palm. “Well, she’s a lucky lady but just in case, you can always call me if things go south between you and her.”

Judd and Waylon sprang through the trees like windup toys with Ruth and John right behind them. “Hey, guess what, Uncle Holt. Creed and Christina are putting saddles on two horses and they’re going to let the little kids ride ’em. And guess what, they’ll be leading them so we won’t have a runaway and can we ride ’em. Please, please, please?” Judd said in a whoosh.

“We want to ride too, Momma. Creed said me and Judd can ride together. Did you ever know another girl named Judd? I like her name, don’t you, Momma?” Ruth said.

Holt could have kissed every one of the four kids.

“Where’s Sharlene? I thought she was going to watch you while I came to see the creek?”

“I’m right here,” Sharlene said.

He looked up to see her leaning on a willow tree not ten feet away. Good grief! What all had she heard and how would she interpret it?

Sharlene covered the distance between them in a few easy strides. She’d heard enough to know that Dorie had changed drastically. Dorie would have never, ever said those things back when they were best friends.

“They ran on ahead. It’s almighty important to get your okay. I wouldn’t give them permission without asking you, and I couldn’t let them come running down here without me. Wasn’t sure which part of the creek Dorie would take you to. So can they ride or not? If so, we’ll get on back up to the barn. If not, you can deal with them.” Her voice was even but cold.

“Of course they can ride,” Holt said.

“You can too,” Dorie told her children.

Four shouts went up and they tore back toward the house in a flurry of little legs chasing through the pasture grasses.

“That’s good.” Sharlene turned around and started after them.

“Wait,” Holt yelled.

She stopped and slowly looked over her shoulder. He was standing up and offering his hand to Dorie, who looked as if she could put his hand against all her beautiful cleavage and enjoy every minute of what it might do there.

“I want to see their faces when they’re on a horse for the first time,” he said.

Dorie latched on to his hand and hung on when she was on her feet. “Me too. Of course, my kids have ridden all their lives but I’d like to see yours.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” Sharlene asked bluntly.

“Don’t be testy,” Dorie said.

Sharlene looked at Holt and almost giggled. He looked like a cottontail rabbit already caught between the jaws of a starving coyote. His expression pleaded for mercy and begged her to rescue him from Dorie’s claws.

“They’ve got a head start on you, Holt. If you want to see them you’d best put on your running boots. You’ve got longer legs than either of us and you don’t want to miss Judd’s squeals, so get to running. We’ll come along behind you,” Sharlene said.

Holt dropped Dorie’s hand and took off in a jog.

“That was just plain mean. He’s just what I’ve been looking for and you’re being hateful. You can’t have him. You are a bartender. For God’s sake, Sharlene, why did you buy a beer joint? Didn’t you embarrass your family enough by joining the army?”

Sharlene set her jaw and said through clenched teeth, “Holt would never be happy in Corn and you aren’t leaving that farm and your family and moving to Mingus, so why are you doing this? And I did not join the army or buy a beer joint to embarrass my family.”

“How do you know what will make him happy or make him move either one? At least I’ve got a farm that looks pretty damn good compared to a beer joint,” Dorie said.

“That’s a low shot,” Sharlene said.

Dorie gave her a go-to-hell-on-a-silver-poker look. “It’s the truth. What happened to you? When we were in high school we were going to marry our sweethearts. You broke David’s heart when you turned him down. It was only last year that he finally gave up waiting for you to come to your senses and married. Now you are a bartender. God Almighty, Sharlene!”

Sharlene shrugged her shoulders. “I wanted more.”

“Why? What is out there that’s better than the love of a good man?”

“Life,” Sharlene answered.

Dorie took two steps, stopping only when her nose was inches from Sharlene’s. “I love Molly and Claud. I should’ve been their daughter instead of you. And I know a good man when I see one. He won’t have you anyway. No decent man hooks up with a cheap barmaid.”

That said in a voice so cold it would have kept icicles frozen in Hades, she stormed past Sharlene, leaving her standing there beside a willow tree.

“You only met him two hours ago. How do you know he’s such a good man?” Sharlene yelled.

Dorie spun around and pointed a finger at Sharlene. “I know what I want when I see it. I don’t have to go to Iraq and back and still not know.”

Sharlene slid down the backside of the tree and sat on the ground. Dorie
should
have been the Waverly daughter instead of Sharlene. She had the same ideals and played by the same rules. She was a farm wife from skin out and when the right man came along she’d make him happy. She had enough fire to keep him on his toes and to fight for their relationship if he ever sent flowers to a strange woman.

Anything worth having is worth the fight to keep it.
Wasn’t that essentially what she’d said to Fiona the night before? Stand up and fight for Bart. Don’t let him walk on you and if you want your marriage to work, then be the woman he married.

Holt made every fiber of her being come alive when he kissed her, but could it ever develop beyond satisfying a physical need? She didn’t know the answer to that question. There was only one way to make double sure that Dorie didn’t mess it up before she could figure it out and that was to keep Holt in Mingus away from the woman. Dorie was a brazen widow in her stomping ground but she’d never chase Holt all the way to Texas. She might make some phone calls but she would not sit in the car or truck five hours with two kids to run after him.

Sharlene stood up, straightened her back, and started back to the barn. As soon as the kids had a turn on the horse, she and Holt were going to Mingus. She’d have room and time to figure it all out there without Dorie’s smart-ass attitude and cleavage getting in the way.

One mile was exactly like the next. Miles and miles of cotton and wheat; cattle and oil wells; scrub oak and small towns. Sharlene watched familiar landmarks speed past at seventy-five miles an hour and peeked through the pickup bucket seats every few minutes to see if the children were still sleeping.

The events of the past day and a half played through her mind like a movie in full living color. She hit the imaginary replay button several times when it came to the scene with Dorie. How could her mother and grandmother encourage a relationship between her and Holt? Sure, they each had two children but that’s where the common ground ended.

Miranda Lambert was singing “Gunpowder and Lead” on the radio. The song was actually about an abused woman who was going home to load her shotgun, but Sharlene applied it to her friend.

What do I shoot her for? Pretending to be my friend all these years or blatantly trying to take Holt away from me? Damn it, Dorie, I could smack you for showing your true colors today. Now I’ve got to decide where this man fits into my life.

She shivered at the thought of really shooting anyone, even Dorie, who’d made her mad enough to chew up a full grown bull and spit out cellophane wrapped packages of hamburger meat.

Holt yawned, turned off the radio, and looked over at Sharlene. “Too much good food in the past twenty-four hours plus a very late night. You’re going to have to entertain me or I’m going to fall asleep like those two kids in the backseat.”

“What’d you have in mind?” she asked.

His grin was pure devilment and the lust in his eyes fried the sleepiness from her instantly. “I could think of some pretty interesting things.”

“Well, that’s not possible going down the highway at seventy-five miles an hour with two kids who could wake up at any minute,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow. “Got your mind in the gutter, do you? Mine spent part of the day in the same place but I was thinking that maybe you’d tell me the story of the Honky Tonk angels. Or maybe the plot of your book. Not that I’m above anything kinky while driving down the road. But not with two kids in the backseat who might wake up and embarrass the hell out of us.”

She slapped at his arm. “Honky Tonk angels?” she asked. “Why would you want to know about Dolly and those women?”

Holt shook his head. “Not the singers. The ones that owned the place before you did. Start with Daisy.”

“Why not Ruby Lee? She had it the longest.”

“Then start with her,” Holt said. Anything to get her talking and keep her going until they got home. He’d never get enough of her voice. It was smooth southern bourbon mixed with just enough honey to make it sweet and easy on the ears. She’d said repeatedly that she talked too much but Holt didn’t care. Her voice was one of the things he liked best about her.

“Okay, Ruby Lee built the Tonk back in the sixties. I’ve already told you this, haven’t I?”

“Parts of it but if you start there and build the whole thing up to when you inherited the joint, it’ll make better sense to me,” he said.

She told him what she knew about Ruby Lee again and then paused.

“Now Daisy,” he said.

“Okay, this is the way I heard it. Daisy O’Dell had a bad experience with a boyfriend and left Mena, Arkansas. She pulled into the Smokestack parking lot because her car overheated and Ruby was getting out of her Caddy about the same time. Ruby wound up buying her lunch and putting her to work at the Honky Tonk. Daisy was a vet-tech by trade so it wasn’t long until everyone with a sick rooster, dog, cat, or goat was on her doorstep wanting advice or medical attention so she was essentially working two jobs. In those days, Emmett McElroy and his wife used to come in the Tonk real often. Then his wife died and Emmett got dementia among other things and finally his nephew, Jarod, came down from Cushing, Oklahoma, to help him run his ranch.

“Daisy had been going out to the ranch to help vaccinate cows and do whatever a veterinarian does to cattle and dogs. So anyway, Jarod comes in the Tonk one night because he and Emmett don’t do anything but fight and argue and he’s thinking about going back home to Oklahoma and leaving the old fellow alone. He and Daisy clashed in the middle of the floor. I mean literally, not figuratively. They ran smack into each other and the way I got the story is that she fell right on top of him. Then he brought Emmett to the Tonk one evening and Emmett made Daisy promise she’d come to dinner the next Sunday after she worked the cattle. With his problem he forgot all about the cattle part so she arrived in the corral ready to do a job and no one had gathered up the cows. By the time she got to the house, she was sweatin’ and her temper was even hotter. She was loaded for bear and the only person in her sights was Jarod. They were already fighting a physical attraction so they locked up horns right there on the porch at the ranch.”

“And?” Holt said immediately when she paused.

She went on. “And they clashed again, only this time it was over Emmett thinking they were married. He’d gotten it into his head that they’d snuck off to Oklahoma after a fishing trip that their friends had planned the previous Sunday. To make a long story short, Jarod talked her into pretending to be his wife. Then Emmett died holding both their hands and there was the house to clean out and the place to get ready for Jarod’s nephew to take over. That would be Garrett McElroy, who fell in love with Merle’s niece, Angel, and they met in the Honky Tonk too, by the way. It was a rocky relationship between Daisy and Jarod but they finally got over all the obstacles and Daisy admitted to herself that she loved Jarod more than the Honky Tonk.”

“Angel and Garrett?”

“Relationship wasn’t rocky. They fell in love over a pool table, didn’t fight it, and are married now and living on the ranch. Angel is the head engineer for the oil company where Luther and Tessa work in the daytime.”

“And the Chigger woman you all talk about sometimes?” he asked.

“She was Daisy’s friend. She wound up married to Jim Bob Walker. He was one of the Walker triplets—Jim Bob, Joe Bob, and Billy Bob.”

Holt was getting more and more into the story. “You’ve got to be kidding me?”

Sharlene shook her head. “No, I’m not. I’ve met all three of them. They are identical and that’s really their names.”

“So she married Jim Bob. What happened to the other two?”

“Back up a little here. After Jim Bob and Chigger got married they had a wedding dinner out at Chigger and Jim Bob’s place. Chigger’s momma said she would find the other two brothers a wife before the end of the year. Be damned if she didn’t. She also told Cathy that she’d see her married too but Cathy didn’t believe her.”

“Okay, now Cathy is Daisy’s cousin? Right? Was she at the dinner?”

Sharlene nodded. “Yes, she was. She had had a row with her boyfriend up in Mena too. He’d tried to beat her up but she worked him over instead. Kind of like Miranda Lambert’s song we just heard about gunpowder and lead. She’d come to Mingus to get away from the situation and Daisy gave her a job in the Honky Tonk. By then she was trying to be Jarod’s pretend wife and run the place all by herself too. Oh, and back then Hayes Radner was trying to buy the place.”

“What in the hell would Hayes want with an old beer joint?”

Sharlene laughed. “Got to do a flashback in history here to get that straightened out. When Ruby Lee built the Honky Tonk she wanted to be close to Henry Wells. They’d met and fallen in love in Dallas. So when her aunt died and left her a wad of money, she decided to build a beer joint. Erath County is dry and Palo Pinto is wet, and Henry lived in Palo Pinto and she wanted to be close to him. So she and Merle came to Mingus. Merle was her best friend and could do her work anywhere and Ruby Lee liked bartending. Henry threw a fit and told her he wouldn’t marry a barmaid. I guess she told him he could squat and fall backwards,” Sharlene said.

“Go on,” Holt chuckled. “I’m finally beginning to understand this soap opera. You sure had plenty of material to work with for a book.”

She giggled. “The truth is stranger than fiction.”

“You got that right. So tell me more.”

She took a deep breath. “Finally Henry gave up and married another woman. They weren’t married long enough for the ink on the license to get dry but Victoria Radner had gotten pregnant during that time and Henry Hayes Radner Wells was the son they had from that misbegotten marriage. But Henry had told her about Ruby Lee and how much he’d been in love with the woman. Bless his heart, that was about a stupid ass thing to do and Victoria put all the ill feelings on Ruby Lee. She spent the thirty years trying to buy out the Honky Tonk so she could burn it down because she thought Henry was seeing Ruby after they were married and before the divorce.”

“How was that possible?”

“Victoria had a business in Dallas and thought she’d change Henry into a citified dandy. Henry had a big ranch up north of Palo Pinto and thought she’d become a ranch woman. Neither one would budge. So he lived on the ranch and she lived in the fancy house in Dallas and they saw each other on weekends until they figured out they’d both made a huge mistake.”

“What a tangled up mess,” Holt said.

“Yep, so anyway, Hayes, aka Hank, paid Daisy and Cathy a visit one night trying to buy the place and they put him packing. Then Daisy and Jarod finally admitted they were in love and she gave Cathy the joint, the cars, and the motorcycle in the garage and she and Jarod went to Cushing to live.”

Holt looked over at Sharlene. With the sunlight lighting up her hair and green eyes, she was even more enticing than she’d been in the barn. “What happened next?”

“Cathy took over and that’s when Tinker was still the bouncer. He was almost as big as Luther and twice as mean. It was New Year’s Eve and Gretchen Wilson was singing ‘Redneck Woman’ on the jukebox. The whole crowd was doing the countdown with Gretchen’s words. Like ‘ten, hell yeah; nine, hell yeah’ when Travis arrived. He wanted to kiss someone at the stroke of midnight so he just walked right across the floor and laid one on Cathy. He didn’t know she was the owner or that she’d be his neighbor.”

“You got to be shittin’ me,” Holt said.

Sharlene crossed her heart and held up two fingers like a Girl Scout. “When Cathy told me the story I said the same thing. It’s the pure gospel truth according to Larissa and Cathy both. I’m just giving you the bare bones but anyway, Amos hired her to work during the day for the oil company. The trailer was back behind the Tonk and she and Travis were constantly in each other’s company. Then her old boyfriend had her kidnapped and Travis rescued her. I guess she went up to Mena and knocked the pure old shit out of him before they came back to Texas.”

“And then they got married and as Judd says, ‘they lived happily never after’?” Holt grinned.

“Oh, no. He took a job in Alaska and she cried. But he found out somewhere along the trip that he didn’t want wings to fly as much as he wanted Cathy so he came back, fell down on one knee, and proposed right there in the Honky Tonk in the same spot where he’d kissed her on New Year’s Eve. Then they went to Shamrock, Texas, to run a company for Amos, which they’ve bought out since then.”

“Now Larissa,” he said.

“Well, she’s rich as Midas and she’d been everywhere for about six or seven years. And I mean every corner of the earth looking for happiness. So one day up in Perry, Oklahoma, she pulled down a map in her fancy house, turned around a few times, and stuck the pin in the map. It was smack dab in the middle of Mingus. So she moved to Mingus.”

“Is this part of your book or the truth?” he asked.

“Pure unadulterated, one hundred proof, guaran-damn-teed truth.” She raised her hand and even crossed herself.

“Go on then,” Holt said. They’d just gone through Wichita Falls. He hit the brake and reset the cruise control to a slower speed. He was fully awake and wanted to know the whole basic story even if it did take longer to get back to Mingus.

“So she came to Mingus and could not believe that fate had such a horrid sense of humor. She rented a hotel room down in Stephenville and was about ready to go home when she drove through town one more time and saw the house you are living in for sale. She bought it and believe me, it looked even worse in those days. Hadn’t seen paint since the original was put on in the thirties. One night she got to craving a martini and went to the Honky Tonk because it was the only joint open on weeknights. At first Cathy thought she was there trying to buy the place for Hayes but they became friends and before long Larissa was bartending for her.”

“I’m seeing a pattern here. Fate sends the women to the Tonk. They become bartenders and then fate sends them the love of their life,” Holt said.

“That’s the way it’s worked in the past.” Sharlene looked out the window. They’d all fought fate and they’d all lost. Was she next in line? She couldn’t remember asking herself so many questions. Or having fewer answers.

“Keep talking, please,” Holt begged.

“Okay. After Cathy and Travis got married, Larissa took over the place. Hank, who was also Hayes, came to the area for a month like he did every summer. When he was a little boy it was Henry’s visitation rights. When he grew up he came to get away from the city. He kind of had two lives just like Larissa. They had a hell of a lot in common but neither of them were opening up and admitting who they really were.

“So he was coming into Mingus in one of his dad’s old work trucks. I guess he was on his way to Stephenville for a tractor part. He was driving into Mingus and so was she. He was in the truck and she was in her fancy little vintage Mustang when a deer jumped out in front of him. He swerved but hit the thing anyway and it bounced back toward her. They both slid all over the road and ended up in the ditch. Her car wasn’t hurt but Henry’s truck was messed up because it came to a halt up against an old oak tree. Luther used the company tow truck and pulled them out of the ditches and took Hank home. You got to remember now that Hank slash Hayes had been trying to buy the Honky Tonk forever for his mother. By then they had investors and were going to turn Mingus into an amusement park if they could get everyone in town to sell their places. So he had been trying to figure an angle to meet Larissa and dig up some kind of weak spot to make her sell to him. And there they were crawling out of their vehicles, giving him a perfect chance to get to know her on the sly.”