Red’s Hot Honky-Tonk Bar (23 page)

T
he phone call was from Brad, who said he had news that he didn’t want to wait to share. He agreed to stop by the bar on his way home. Red spent the afternoon trying not to think about what the landlord might have offered. But every time she glanced around at the crowded interior that now functioned as her whole place, she both hoped and tried not to be too hopeful. She didn’t want to be disappointed.

But the grin on Brad’s normally stoic face was enough to dispel even the most stubborn fears.

“We certainly didn’t get everything we wanted,” he assured her quickly. “But I feel really good about what we did get.”

The pronoun “we” caught her momentarily off guard and then she realized that, of course, it had been “we.” Without Brad, she would have signed that other terrible contract. And without Cam, she wouldn’t have ever called Brad. And without the kids, she would have never gotten to know Sarah.

With that thought in mind, she got Brad seated in the back booth.

“Could you wait here a minute while I find Cam?” she said.

She hurried out the back door and up the stairs. She found him in the middle of the apartment, working on the computer, surrounded by sheets of music and instruments.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “Brad’s downstairs and I thought you’d want to hear what he has to say.”

Cam didn’t even hesitate. They hurried back down the steps. As they walked toward the back door, Cam clasped her hand. Normally she would have pulled away, but at that moment, she welcomed his touch.

Inside, they made their way to the back booth. Brad politely stood up as Red took her seat, and he and Cam greeted each other with a handshake.

Once they were all seated and with the briefest of preliminaries, Red asked the question.

“So, what’s it all say?”

She indicated the paperwork that Brad had spread across the table. A number of paragraphs within the document had little red and yellow sticky arrows pointing to them, and there were notes attached in several places.

“Well, maybe I should get the bad news out of the way first,” he said. “They are not putting any money in the building beyond routine maintenance. They will be tearing the building down eventually, so they are not going to sink money into upgrading it.”

Red sighed and nodded.

“Better news is that they will help defray the cost of what they’re calling ‘security fencing’ and they’ve offered seven hundred dollars for that, payable on receipt of the contract.”

“You can’t get much of a fence for seven hundred dollars,” Red pointed out.

“I think they came up with that figure as half the cost of a chain-link barrier,” Brad said. “But you are not limited to
using the money for that. If you want to put up a better, more attractive option, you can do so, but they’ll still only kick in seven hundred dollars.”

“Okay.”

“But the best news, and I almost wish I could have a drumroll for this,” Brad said, grinning broadly, “is that they have agreed to extend the lease for ten years at the current rate. Within that time frame you can break the lease with sixty days’ notice. They can break the lease, as well, but must give you a full year to vacate the property.”

“So I can stay here ten years?”

“Maybe,” Brad said. “You can stay here as long as this building is here. And they’ve got to give you a year’s notice before they tear it down.”

“That’s great, Brad,” Cam said.

He sounded completely pleased. Red wasn’t so sure.

“But what if they decided to tear it down fourteen months from now?” she pointed out. “If I sign this, they can come back in here after the first of the year and say I’ve got twelve months to get out.”

“Yes,” Brad agreed. “They could do that. But it’s not likely that they will. If they were planning to tear the place down that soon, they wouldn’t bother signing an agreement with you. They’d just send a notice of eviction. Even two years out, they’d probably just stall you rather than bother with a lease.”

“Okay, so it’s not one or two years from now,” she said. “But it could be three years or four years.”

“Sure,” Brad agreed. His expression had sobered considerably. “But that gives you three or four years to figure out what you’re going to do. That’s a lot of time to put together an alternative plan.”

Red sighed. “It’s too bad that I don’t
want
an alternative plan,” she said. “I just want to stay here.”

“Oh,” Brad said, looking completely deflated. “I don’t think I can get that for you. But I can…I can continue to negotiate. No lease is truly unbreakable, but I can ask for a high penalty. I might be able to get that for five years. I think it’s very unlikely that I’d get that for ten. And they would probably expect you to pay a premium for that.”

“But do you think this is a better deal?” Cam asked, tapping his finger on the paperwork.

“Yes, it is,” Brad said. “From my perspective, what they’ve offered here is not overly generous, but if they’d given much more, I would have been suspicious that there was something going on that we don’t know about. What it seems like is that the decision about the building is a done deal. Because of its age, its condition and because it doesn’t fit in with the style of the new development, it’s just gone. Allowing you to stay here until actual redevelopment starts is what I went after. I thought you understood that.”

“I did,” Red told him. “And I do. I guess I just hoped somehow that they would come back, with ‘oh, it’s too much trouble, just keep that old building.’”

“Red, this is a good deal,” Cam said.

“I know,” she agreed and forced herself to smile at Brad. “It’s a great deal, Brad, and I appreciate it. I just…well, I just wish things were different.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Where do I sign?”

Brad, in his thorough, lawyerly way, wanted to go through each specific aspect of the contract. That took another half hour, at least, and the bar was getting noisier and more crowded by the minute. Finally she put her signature on it and
Cam brought over drinks for a toast of celebration—beers for him and Brad and an iced-tea highball for Red.

She made a point of thanking and thanking and thanking. She realized that he’d thought he’d pulled a real coup, only to be met with her unrealistic disappointment. Intellectually, she knew he was right. Emotionally, however, she couldn’t quite make herself happy about it.

As Brad carefully returned the contract into the manila envelope it came in, Red was reminded of the other letter she’d gotten this week, which she’d given to Sarah to pass along to Brad. She started to mention it, but Cam spoke first.

“You’ve got to get a babysitter some night and bring Sarah down here with you,” he said.

“Absolutely,” Red agreed. “I’m a big believer in giving the good people of Alamo Heights an opportunity to knock a few back and kick up a row.”

Brad chuckled. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sarah is sort of a white-wine-and-string-quartet sort of person.”

“Really?” Red said. “I imagined her as a get-drunk-and-listen-to-honky-tonk kind of gal.”

Brad left just as the band was tuning up and Red forgot to ask about the letter.

The evening got busy and Red was glad. She didn’t want to think about the papers she’d signed. She didn’t want to think about the future. By the time the last cowboy had hit the trail and the front door was locked down for the night, her keep-the-customer-happy smile had become overwhelmed by her sense of disappointment.

As she tallied the receipts, Cam came and sat across from her at the bar.

Red spoke without looking up. “It was nice of you to stick around all night, Cam. But if you’re thinking to lure me
upstairs for a midnight quickie, I’d like to remind you that your elderly aunt is waiting up for me. She knows what time I close the bar and that you’re living upstairs. And she is not at all keen on me humping and bumping her adored nephew.”

“I agree, the less time Aunt Phyl has to speculate about the carnal nature of our relationship the better,” he said. “Though that wouldn’t stop me if I thought I could get your pants off. But I really just wanted to talk to you.”

“Speak,” she encouraged, still counting the money.

He hesitated only a half minute. “I know you were bummed about the deal Brad brought to you,” Cam said. “I wanted to talk it out with you, see if I can help you feel better about it.”

Red heaved a big sigh and glanced up to meet his gaze. “I’m feeling about as good about it as I’m going to be,” she said.

“I think it’s an excellent agreement, Red. It gives you time and flexibility and options.”

“I know that.”

“But I don’t see you smiling,” he said.

“I’ve got nothing to smile about,” Red told him. “Don’t you get it? I want this place here, where it is and like it is. And now I have this disaster sitting out there on the horizon. It doesn’t matter what I do around here now, how the business grows or doesn’t grow. Either way, this bar is headed for the wrecking ball sooner or later and there is nothing I can do to stop it.”

Red was looking straight at Cam. He stared at her for a long moment, then sort of shivered as if physically shaking off her words. She could read nothing in his expression. The very blankness of it angered her, somehow. She shook her head and waved at him, dismissive.

“Forget it,” she snarled. “There’s no way you can understand the way I feel. This place is my life. I’ve put all my hopes
and dreams into it. And then a piece of paper arrives that says ‘Too bad! We’re going to make it disappear.’ No rhyme, no reason, no justice, it’s going to be destroyed and there is not a damn thing I can do about it. There’s no way that somebody like you could get their mind around that.”

There was an instant of tension between them that almost crackled with electricity. Cam slapped his hand against the bar with such force that Red startled.

“You think not?” he asked her. “You think that I haven’t had dreams that were destroyed, hopes and plans that were ripped from me? You are so wrong, you don’t even know how wrong you are.”

There was nothing that put Red in a fighting mood faster than a man raising his voice.

“Oh, really,” Red answered sarcastically. “Tell me, then, I’m all curious. What have you ever wanted that you didn’t get? You live this free-as-a-bird life. Your parents left you a roof over your head. You don’t work any harder than you want to. You always have a sex buddy, and you’ll never have to support a family. No strings, no ties. How hard is that?”

“No ties? I’m the one who asked you to marry me. You’re the one who won’t even talk about it.”

“Yeah, you would pick an older woman, busy with her own business and not very demanding on your time or attention.”

“Right,” Cam answered, matching her sarcasm with his own. “I want to make a life with you because you’re so easy and uncomplicated.”

Red had no snappy comeback to that.

“I didn’t stay down here to have a fight with you,” Cam said, getting up from the bar stool. “I know the uncertainty of it all is scary for you. I thought I could help. Guess not.”

He walked across the room and out the back door. She
watched him go, regretting having lashed out. She wasn’t mad at him, she was mad at the whole world. He was just the closest target in that group.

Red finished counting the money and locked it in the safe. She grabbed her purse from beneath the till, checked the security bar across the front door and turned out the lights. Once out on the patio, she secured everything and set the alarm.

The lights were still on in the apartment. She gazed up at them for a long moment and then silently admonished herself.
Walk to your car. Get in. Go home.

But instead, she climbed the stairs and walked into the apartment without bothering to knock. Cam was sitting on the bed. He’d heard her on the steps and was looking in her direction.

“I love having sex after a fight,” she told him.

“We need to talk,” Cam replied.

Red pulled her shirt off over her head and threw it on the floor.

“Cam, you know me well enough by now to understand that this is the only way I can say how I feel about you.”

D
awn was not yet on the horizon, but it was a lot closer than it should have been as Red pulled into the driveway. She cut the engine in the street and coasted to a halt, hoping stealth was on her side.

There had been no call from Aunt Phyl saying
Where in the devil are you?
, so Red held out hope that the older lady was snoozing contentedly in front of old reruns of
Matlock,
unaware that she was almost four hours late.

Red tiptoed up on the porch and put her key in the lock as quietly as possible.

She needn’t have bothered. The living room was empty. Lights were on in the kitchen and the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee permeated the air.

So much for not having to explain herself.

Red walked into the kitchen, reminding herself of the working-mother’s motto—better to lose your self-respect than lose your best babysitter.

“Phyllis, I am so sorry,” were the first words out of Red’s mouth.

Aunt Phyl looked up from her reading. “The morning paper got here before you did,” she said. “Get yourself some coffee and I’ll share.” She pulled out the front section and scooted it toward the chair opposite her.

Red went over to the counter and poured herself a cup before sitting down.

“I won’t do this again,” Red said. “I never asked Kelly to stay all night, and I shouldn’t have expected you to do it. I have no excuse. I got in an argument with Cam and I stuck around until we sorted it out and then…and then I fell asleep.”

Aunt Phyl sipped her coffee.

“Please don’t quit on me,” Red pleaded. “I know I deserve it. But I really need you. And I won’t do this again. It’s only one month until my daughter is home. I really hate to make the kids take on another new person.”

“Your daughter is coming home in a month?” she asked.

“Yes, she told us that she’d be home by Christmas,” Red said. “And both the kids and I are really counting on that.”

“So the children will go home with her?”

“Yes…. Well, they’ll go somewhere with her. She doesn’t really have a home at this point. Just some household goods in a storage unit. But she’ll find a place and she and the kids will move there. And Cam will move back here and I…I’ll go back to my apartment over the bar.”

Aunt Phyl was nodding.

“Please, Phyllis,” Red said. “It’s just a few more weeks. Please forgive me and stay. The kids need you.”

Red suffered a long, anxious silence.

“I told you I would be here,” Aunt Phyl answered finally. “A late night now and again won’t kill me.”

A sigh of relief whistled though Red’s lips. “Thank you, Phyl,” she said. “I’ll…I’ll make it up to you somehow.”

Aunt Phyl raised an eyebrow at that. “When a lady receives a favor,” she said, “rather than trying to cancel it out, she should take it as an incentive. If you truly didn’t deserve it, then you should work harder to be certain that you merit it the next time.”

“Wise words,” Red said.

“They’re not mine, actually, but my mother’s,” Aunt Phyl said. “It’s strange how carelessly we listen to our mothers, yet the important things they teach us, we never seem to forget.”

“You’re very lucky,” Red said. “Not all mothers are wise. I certainly wasn’t.”

Aunt Phyl nodded as if considering her statement. “I’m not sure women are able to make that judgment about themselves,” she said. “What about your mother?”

“My mother? Good God, she was worse than me,” Red said. “Different, very different, but I think worse.”

“I’m sorry.”

Red shrugged. “No, it’s okay. I did better than she did and Bridge is doing better than me,” she said. “By the time Olivia is raising children, maybe our family will be passing down wise words just like yours.”

Aunt Phyl gave a small smile. “It’s my mother who had the wise words. Me, not so much. Maybe I might have done better if I’d had children myself. But that just didn’t happen.”

Red nodded.

“So perhaps I couldn’t be a true parent to Campbell, but I am very protective of him.”

“Of course you are,” Red said.

“Not simply because I love him, which of course I do,” Aunt Phyl continued. “But also because Campbell has needed protection.”

She raised her head, looking Red directly in the eye. There
was no overlay of polite convention or feigned friendliness. The woman was being open and honest and telling it as she saw it.

“A bright, handsome, interesting young man from a good family can capture the attention of a lot of women,” Phyllis said. “Normally such a fellow would still be shallow and selfish in his youth, and that would offer him some protection, but Campbell has never been like that. Even as a teenager, he was full of fun, like any other boy, but there was a maturity there, a need to nurture that just made him different.”

Red didn’t find anything to dispute in his aunt’s description. “I guess that’s just the kind of guy he is,” she said.

Aunt Phyl shook her head. “That is the kind of guy his life made him into,” she said. “How much has Campbell told you about his mother’s illness and her death?”

“A bit,” Red answered. “He obviously loved her very much.”

“Death is never easy on a child and he saw far too much of it,” Phyl said. “He was still coming to grips with the loss of his mother when his father died. And he was barely out of high school when he lost his grandmother. It’s been just he and I in this family for a long time now.”

“So naturally that makes the bond between the two of you stronger,” Red said.

“Yes, it does,” Phyllis agreed. “Death tears families up and also brings them together. But if it were just death, maybe I wouldn’t worry so much. His father was killed in a car crash. It was shocking and dramatic. His grandmother, old before her time, died in her sleep, peaceful at last. But it was his mother’s death from Huntington’s disease that was so hideous, insidious. It was soul killing.”

“Soul killing?”

“Maybe not for her so much,” Phyllis said. “For the last few years, she hardly knew who she was, let alone what was going on. But it was horrifying for those who loved her and had to watch.”

A heavy silence filled the room.

“My brother couldn’t do it,” Phyl told her. “Once she began to lose her faculties, he sent her home to live with her mother and he rarely saw her again.”

“That’s awful,” Red said.

Phyl nodded. “It was, but that’s the way it was. The beautiful, witty, artistic woman he married turned into a twisting, jerking creature, drifting into dementia. It was so horrible and so sad, I still get angry and weepy about it. I cannot imagine how Campbell, who was by her side every day to the very end, ever had the courage to go on with his life.”

“But he did,” Red whispered.

“Yes, he did,” Aunt Phyl agreed. “And I wished for him that someday he could find someone who would make him happy, someone he could make a family with, and that he’d be able to leave all that sadness behind him.”

Red nodded. “Of course you’d want that for him,” she said. “I even want that for him.”

“And you and I have exactly the right person in mind,” Phyl said. “Someone young and sophisticated and cultured, who can give him children and help him establish a place for himself in the community. A nice young woman like Tasha, perhaps.”

Red made no comment.

“That’s how it should be for him. We both know that. But you see, Red, the thing is, Campbell has his heart set on someone else. A woman very different from one I would have chosen for him.”

The older woman looked across the table at her meaningfully.

“I want you to know I haven’t encouraged him in that at all.”

Slowly, Aunt Phyl nodded. “Well, perhaps it is time that you should. I really think for once, Campbell deserves to get what he really wants.”