Honky Tonk Christmas (4 page)

The woman fluffed back her hair and pulled a tube of bright red lipstick from her hip pocket. She used the long mirror behind the bar to apply a fresh coat and did a lip-pop to even it out. A quick smile at her reflection said she thought everything looked wonderful. “There’s got to be a happy medium. Woman with class like me don’t want a man with a foot in the grave and the other on a piece of boiled okra. But them young ones, fun as it would be to break them in, just don’t see a good thing even when it’s lookin’ them in the eye.”

Sharlene set a cold beer in front of her and made change for the bill she laid on the bar. “Guess you are right.”

She downed half the beer, made a face, and pushed it back. “Well, here goes. I’m going hunting again.”

“Good luck,” Sharlene said.

“So when is a cowboy going to claim a bar stool and the charm going to work for you?” Tessa asked.

“Never. Three times, remember. A genie only gives three wishes when he floats up out of the lamp. Larissa, Cathy, and Daisy got the wishes. I got the Honky Tonk. Wishes are over for the bartenders. Only the customers get the luck of the draw these days.”

***

The joint closed down at two o’clock just like usual. All the customers were out of the place and Luther and Tessa left by ten after the hour, just like normal. But Sharlene’s routine was all messed up. She paced the dance floor, plugged three quarters into the jukebox, and listened to three songs by Ricky Van Shelton.

Usually she had a beer while she sat in a chair with her boots propped up on a table, listened to a quarter’s worth of music, then turned out the lights. That wound her down enough to go back to her apartment and tell Waylon all the news. He would have gotten a big kick out of that night’s stories. Loralou stole the cowboy from Miss Redder-than-red lipstick. The Chigger finally went home with a middle-aged rancher with a little gray in his temples. Merle had whipped everyone who’d challenged her at the pool tables like always. Amos bought one round of beers for the pool sharks. One of his biker friends, Wayne, bought a round and Derrick, a Monday night truck driver who sometimes rented trailer space out behind the Tonk, bought another. She’d sold enough beer and pitchers of mixed drinks to keep the
Titanic
from sinking and the cash register was bulging. Tessa took home a pocket full of tips and Luther had only had to break up two fights.

Sharlene went straight into the apartment and settled down on the sofa. Waylon didn’t come out from the bedroom to snuggle up against her. She’d been interrupted at his funeral and never did really tell him good-bye. He’d been her friend for a long time. It wasn’t right not to tell him a final adieu.

“It’s the middle of the night. They’re all asleep. They’ll never know I was even there,” she said.

She picked up her purse from behind the bar and headed toward the garage out behind the Tonk. She got out into the yard and went back into the apartment. She couldn’t go to Waylon’s grave at two thirty in the morning. The guys in the white coats with straightjackets in their white vans would jump on her and carry her to the nearest mental facility.

She tossed her purse on the sofa and sat down beside it. “This is crazy. It’s my house and my garden spot and my cat’s grave. If I want to go talk to him then I can do it and to hell with anyone who doesn’t like the idea.”

She grabbed up her purse and marched out the door without stopping to lock it and went straight toward the garage. She hit the remote door opener and left it up when she pulled the VW Bug out of its slot.

The moon hung in the sky like a king with all the twinkling stars acting as subjects in the lunar kingdom. She didn’t pass another vehicle, but then normal people were in bed sound asleep. Hopefully, Holt and the children would be snoring too. If there were lights on in the house she promised she would drive back to the Honky Tonk and forget about telling Waylon good-bye.

The house was dark so she parked at the end of the driveway. Holt’s truck and trailer with Jackson’s Carpentry written on the side separated the back porch from the garden plot.

She laid a hand on the cross and whispered, “Waylon, I missed your furry old hide tonight. I never did tell you good-bye so that’s what I came to do tonight. You can’t be expecting me every night but it’s been a hell of a twenty-four hours. I could have bent your furry old ear for an hour tonight.”

“Who’s out here?” Holt whispered loudly from the back door.

“It’s me, Sharlene,” she said. “I’m here to visit Waylon one last time and you were supposed to be asleep. Besides, I wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t interrupted my funeral today. I never got to tell him good-bye so I needed closure.”

He rounded the front end of the truck and leaned against the fender. “This going to be a habit?”

He was shirtless and wore some kind of baggy pajama bottoms. His chest was broad and his dark hair stuck up every which way, testifying that he’d been asleep. Sharlene felt guilty that she’d awakened him when he had to get up early the next morning and work.

“I’m sorry I woke you up. I was trying to be quiet. And no, it won’t be a nightly thing. I usually tell Waylon everything that goes on in the Tonk every night before I go to bed and I missed him. I’m not crazy.”

“What kind of work did you do in Iraq?” He changed the subject abruptly.

“I’ll be leaving now. Good night,” she said.

“You were the one who kept talking about being there when you were drunk. I’ve never known a woman who was over there,” he said.

“I could talk all day and you still wouldn’t know how things really were in that place.”

“Kind of like raising two kids. Folks can talk about it all day but until they’ve actually done it, they can’t understand the job.”

“What happened to your sister?” Sharlene asked.

“Stupidity.”

“There might not be a cure for that disease but it’s not fatal. I see living proof every night. I
am
living proof after Saturday night. Took me all of Sunday and until Monday at noon to get rid of the headache.” Sharlene sat down in front of Waylon’s cross, pulled her knees up to her chin, and wrapped her arms around her legs.

Holt’s voice sounded weary when he started talking. “She got pregnant right out of high school and married the loser. He got drunk one too many times and tried to straighten out a curve before the kids were born. He wasn’t even old enough to buy the beer that killed him. She went from job to job until last May. She was partying with some of her friends and shouldn’t have driven home. Kind of like you were at the bar on Sunday night. She made it all the way home, got out of her car, and opened the front door to her house when her little dog ran out into the street. She ran after him. A drunk driver swerved to miss the dog and hit her. Impact killed her instantly. The dog ran off and no one ever saw it again. Her in-laws shifted the kids around among them for three weeks and then they called me and said they didn’t want to raise two kids forever so I inherited them.”

“I’m sorry. So the kids have been shoved from baby-sitter to grandma’s most of their lives?”

He nodded. “They need stability. You heard what Waylon said about drinking beer. She was too young for kids and too pretty for the men to leave alone.”

A hot summer wind picked up strands of Sharlene’s red hair and stuck them to her sweaty forehead. She brushed them back and blinked away the tears.

“Hot night, ain’t it?” he remarked.

“It’s not as bad as the Shamal wind,” she whispered.

“The what?” Holt asked.

“The Shamal winds. They’re not as strong as the Sharqi wind but they are just as wicked. We’d go hours and hours with restricted visibility. It was like a blizzard only with sand instead of snow. It gets into everything. Your hair, your ears, your boots, even between your teeth. The Shamals aren’t as strong as the Sharqi but the temperature is higher. More than a hundred degrees and thirty mile winds make you feel like you’re up against a sand blaster. I’m sorry. That’s just an information dump that wouldn’t make a bit of sense to you. The hot wind reminded me of the first time I encountered the winds of Iraq.”

“Well, thanks for the info dump. Go on and tell your cat the beer joint news. And Sharlene, it’s all right if you want to come around and talk to him in the middle of the night. Most of the time, I’ll be sound asleep.” He raised his arms over his head and stretched. His chest and abdomen were muscular and ripped like he’d been spending hours at a gym.

“Thanks, Holt. I’m sorry about your sister,” she said.

“Me too,” he said softly.

He disappeared around the front of the truck and she heard the door close softly. The yellow glow of the light coming out the kitchen window went out. She patted the cross a couple of times and went back home to the Honky Tonk.

She parked the small car in the garage and pushed the button to lower the doors. The steady hum of truckers’ engines out in the trailer spaces provided background music for the crickets and tree frogs. She opened the back door of her apartment, peeled off her clothes, and left them on the bathroom floor. A quick shower and shampoo and a favorite old nightshirt with a picture of Betty Boop on the front and she was ready for bed.

She laced her hands behind her head and stared at the dark ceiling. It became a screen for mental pictures from Iraq. The bombed out buildings. The little children in a war-torn country. The fear that was always right behind her. The joy when someone finally got to go home. The sorrow at leaving comrades behind maybe to never make it back to the States.

Everything was eerily quiet under the heavy layer of camouflage. Sharlene missed Jonah. Even when they didn’t talk he was there beside her, but now he was gone. She’d flown with him back to the hospital praying all the time that he wasn’t really dead; had stood beside his body while Joyce and Kayla tried to resuscitate him; had saluted the coffin when they loaded it on the plane; and had refused to answer questions from her four best friends about why she was so sad.

Sweat ran down the bridge of her nose and dripped off the end. It reminded her of the icicles hanging on the house in Corn, Oklahoma, in the winter. When they started melting they dripped just like the sweat dripping off her nose.

The sun came up different in Iraq. She couldn’t explain the odd way it looked as it jumped up from the end of the earth and into the sky. She’d been hunkered down on the top of the building across the street from the store for the last hour. She’d had a late supper the night before at the hospital with her friends before she got
the call
. After she finished the job, she’d go back to the hospital and do her job without nearly enough sleep. But that was Sharlene’s life. At least once a week she got a call that meant she had extra duty. If she didn’t keep up with her regular routine at the hospital, questions would be asked that had no answers because the army didn’t train women to do what Sharlene did best. Hells bells, they didn’t train her either. They came one day and talked to her, sent her to a psychiatrist who said she could do it without falling apart, and then they put her on a plane to Iraq.

Kayla always asked the most questions and teased her about having a secret boyfriend who kept her out all night. Letting her think that was easier than telling her the truth. Sharlene stopped thinking about Kayla’s teasing the minute the store opened and the target stepped out into the light. He raised his hands. He looked like dozens of harmless old fellows who sold fruit and bread. No one would have ever mistaken him for a terrorist, yet intel said that he was the center of a cell that had been killing American soldiers. She blinked twice for good luck. Then laughter rang in the streets and children ran in front of the store. She wiped her brow and waited. How could the children laugh and play?

Same way that they did in godforsaken Corn, Oklahoma. That town and its way of life put you in this army, but it’s still home. This is home to these children. They might jump at a chance to leave it but it’ll always be home.

She couldn’t shoot into them. She waited until they had run into the store next door and the man started back inside. She blinked twice and squeezed the trigger. The terrorist dropped to one knee and fell forward onto the sidewalk as if he was praying, but he was kneeling in the wrong direction.

She awoke sitting up in bed holding her pillow like a rifle. The noise of kids giggling outside her bedroom window was very real. Why on earth would Iraqi children be in the Honky Tonk yard? And that absolutely could not be sunshine peeking through the mini-blinds. She hadn’t had time to get back to the makeshift barracks she shared with the four nurses.

Reality replaced the past in a jolt. She threw the pillow on the floor and moaned. “I’ve become just like Larissa and Cathy.” Both of those women hated, no, they abhorred (that sounded so much worse than merely hated) mornings. And now that she’d owned the Tonk a few months she was growing up to be just like them.

She sat up and peeked out the mini-blinds to see Waylon and Judd playing tag. Their hair was plastered to their heads with sweat. They both wore shorts and knit shirts. Other than Judd’s dark ponytail flying in the hot Texas wind, they were two identical blurs as they sprinted in a foot race from the end of the Tonk out to the first trees beyond the trailer park.

She remembered playing like that with her brothers until they each got too old to run and romp with her. Nostalgia and homesickness hit and she was glad she’d planned to go home to Corn, Oklahoma, for a couple of days. She’d watch her nieces and nephews play in the big backyard and listen to her mother scold her about her biological clock being broken. She’d tell her mother the same thing she had ever since she’d come home from Iraq. Women didn’t marry at sixteen anymore. They waited on marriage and children. It wasn’t unusual for a woman to be forty or even more before starting a family. At which time her mother would cluck her tongue and say the whole world had gone plumb crazy.

She stretched and was about to throw back the sheets when she heard Judd screaming at Holt. “I got to go right now. Where’s the bathroom, anyway?”

Sharlene ran to the apartment door and swung it open. “In here, Judd. You can use my bathroom.”

“Sorry,” Holt said.

Sharlene ignored him. When a boy child had to go really bad and couldn’t find a bathroom, he could always find a tree or a bush to hide behind. It wasn’t so easy for the girl children.

Sharlene put a hand on her shoulder and ushered her through the living room, down the short hall, and right into the bathroom. “Right in here.”

Judd yanked at her shorts on the way and she settled her fanny on the potty. Her feet didn’t touch the floor and she swung them as she looked around at the room. It wasn’t as big as the bathroom in their new house. That one had a bathtub that Uncle Holt said was as old as God. Judd wondered how Uncle Holt knew God’s birthday and how old He was as she rolled off a fist full of toilet paper.

“I’m getting dressed. If you need anything, holler at me,” Sharlene said.

“You got a pretty bathroom. How old is God?” Judd yelled.

Sharlene smiled. “Thank you. I don’t know how old God is. Why are you asking me?”

“Because Uncle Holt says our bathtub is as old as God. I wondered how old it really is. What do you do in here all day?”

“I don’t spend my whole day in the bathroom,” Sharlene hollered back and looked up to see Judd standing in her doorway.

“I’m right here now. I got finished in there and I didn’t mean in the bathroom. I mean in this house. If you don’t have to build stuff like Uncle Holt does, then what do you do?”

“I write books.”

“Like Bambi books?” Judd asked.

“Something like that.”

“Oh. I like Bambi and Cinderella. Uncle Holt reads to us before we go to sleep at night. Waylon likes Bambi better than Cinderella. Someday I’m going to grow up and be just like her. I’m going to wear pretty dresses and the fairy godmother is going to make my hair all pretty. Hey, you want to come outside and play with me and Waylon? You can be it and chase us,” Judd said.

“I think I’d better stay inside and get some work done but thank you. You and Waylon can come in and use my bathroom anytime you want,” Sharlene said.

“How about Uncle Holt? Can he use your bathroom? I’ll tell him to put the seat down,” she whispered.

Sharlene bit her lip to keep from grinning. “If he can remember to do that, I suppose it’s all right.”

Judd took off like a jackrabbit with a coyote snapping at its fluffy tail, yelling at the top of her lungs. “Uncle Holt, Sharlene said you can use her bathroom if you put the seat down. That goes for you too, Waylon Mendoza. If you don’t put the seat down I’m going to slap a knot on your head.”

“No you won’t,” Waylon yelled. “I can outrun you.”

“But when I catch you I can whoop your ass. Whoops!” She looked at Holt.

“You better learn to watch those bad words or you’ll get in big trouble when you start school,” Holt said. “And Sharlene, Judd can use the bathroom out in Donnie’s trailer. They won’t bother you again.”

“Sorry,” Judd sing-songed and ran off to play with her brother.

Sharlene poked her head out the door. “That’s a long way to run. You might want to let them come on in here when they’ve got to go. It’s closer and could save you a lot of laundry.”

“If it becomes a bother, just tell me.” He waved.

She stepped out onto the tiny back porch and leaned on a porch post. Three men were busy hammering boards into a framework for the foundation support. She hadn’t realized the addition would take up so much space. There would be no side yard to mow anymore and she wouldn’t be able to step outside her back door and see all the way to the road. But change was good… wasn’t it?

Kayla said it had been good. Even Baghdad was better than Oklahoma according to her. She’d finished her tour and went home to get a master’s degree in nursing and nowadays she was pulling in a good salary in Savannah, Georgia. Yes, change had been good for Kayla, but Kayla had been trained as an army nurse so she had something to fall back on when she got home. Sharlene had been trained as a glorified secretary and a sniper. One she could use on the outside; the other she’d sworn not to talk about once she was discharged.

At least I got away from wheat and cows in Corn, Oklahoma. And now I own a beer joint, a house, and I’ve written a book—which is all a miracle. Not many authors can say they got an agent and a publisher for their first rattle out of the bucket. If I had to enlist again, would I? Even with the nightmares? Who knows?

She shook off the memories and looked at the men working on her addition. It was hard to think that in a few weeks there would be walls and a roof, hardwood floors. And it all started with strings and a foundation.

Holt wore bibbed overalls that were stained and faded with a gauze muscle shirt underneath. She’d never thought the day would dawn when a man in bibbed overalls was sexy, but he was. Sweat poured off his forehead and he kept wiping at it. She vaguely remembered seeing him wipe at his forehead when they got into the pickup truck at the bar where she’d gotten so drunk.

And spilled my guts. What is it about him that gets me to talking about things like Shamal winds? I never told anyone, not even Larissa, about Iraq, other than to say that I’d been there and here I am talking to Holt Jackson about it. I can always blame tequila shots for the first time and grief for Waylon for the second, but it will not happen again. Drunk is over. Grief is past.

Folks on this side of the big sand pile didn’t need to know what she did over there. If they thought owning a beer joint tainted her reputation, they’d fall off the edge of the earth if they ever found out her classified job description. She went back in the house and made a pot of coffee.

She drank two cups while she made corrections on what she’d written the week before but couldn’t keep her mind on the screen. Her editor wanted the second book done by the first of December with a publication date of November of the next year. A book a year was her goal and so far she was ahead of schedule. The first one would hit the racks in November. She started another chapter, but the hero kept looking more and more like Holt rather than the blond-haired Texan she’d described earlier.

The computer screen was blank and she couldn’t find words to fill it. For the first time in her life she had a dose of writer’s block and it scared the bejesus out of her. Writers had to make things happen on paper. If they couldn’t, they were finished.

Finally she shut her laptop and slipped her bare feet into a pair of old boots sitting beside the door. The noise had stopped and all she heard when she stepped out on the small porch was one lonesome truck engine going up the road toward Mingus and a couple of dogs barking in the distance. The kids were sitting on a blanket eating sandwiches and the men were lazing in the shade of an old pecan tree with their lunch buckets open beside them.

“Y’all need ice or anything?” she asked.

“We’re all right,” Holt said.

“Sharlene!” Judd ran to her side. “It’s hot. Can we come inside and watch cartoons?”

“Judd!” Holt scolded.

“Well, it is hot. I’m even sweating in my under-britches.”

“Then I suppose you’d better come on inside where it’s cool. A girl can’t have sweaty under-britches,” Sharlene said.

“Come on over and meet the crew.” Holt motioned her that way with a wave of his hand.

Judd hugged up to her side and kept in step with her the whole way. “Waylon still takes a nap but I don’t.”

Holt winked at Sharlene. Her heart tossed in a couple of extra beats but she told it she’d be stone cold dead if she didn’t think he was good looking. And he had seen her without her boots on—a feat not many men could lay claim to. Not to mention he’d heard her hugging the toilet the morning after she’d tied one on and listened to her ramble on about Iraq. One more drink and she would have told him classified information. Thank God and good tequila she passed out when she did.

“This is Kent and Chad Stigler. They’re brothers from up around Wichita Falls. Little community called Jolly. And this is Bennie Adams. He’s from Palo Pinto. Guys, this is our boss, Sharlene Waverly.”

“She’s the one who painted our house all the pretty colors,” Judd said proudly.

“Actually I only helped with the painting. Larissa, the lady who owned the Tonk before me, picked out the colors. I wanted to paint the Tonk just like it but she wouldn’t let me. I’m pleased to meet all of you. Y’all got set up all right in the trailer spaces? You need anything else?”

“We’re fine. We laid claim to the two at the very end of the lot,” Kent said.

“You didn’t really consider painting the beer joint those gawd awful colors, did you?” Holt asked.

“I did but Larissa convinced me it would look more like a hippy flower shop than a beer joint so I left it alone.”

Kent nodded. “Well she was a wise woman. It would sour the beer and turn the whiskey to water. Why’d you put trailer spaces behind a beer joint?”

“I didn’t. That happened when Cathy owned the place. Amos Lambert owns the land and he put in the trailer spaces to accommodate his oil well crew. When they finished up in this area he leased the land to the owner of the Tonk for ten years. I inherited the lease with the business,” she explained.

“Well, it’s an ideal situation for us. We can walk to work and we got a place to get a cold beer after we finish,” Chad said. “What nights are you open? You got a live band?”

Waylon edged his way to Sharlene’s other side but he was careful to keep space between them. She reached down and pulled him close.