Red’s Hot Honky-Tonk Bar (17 page)

R
ed sat on the corner of the couch in the living room of the bungalow, her knees drawn up tightly to her chest. She rested her chin upon them. It was very late and the house was quiet, but her thoughts were not.

She had thought that she loved him. But more important, she believed that he’d loved her. She remembered it all so vividly. The first time she’d seen him, she’d been sitting in her lonely bedroom window seat as he pulled his Corvette into the driveway. He looked much like his photographs, square-jawed, athletic, rugged, handsome. She’d been told that he was coming. He was a junior at A & M in College Station, but he worked every summer at his father’s car dealership and this summer would be no different. Except this summer, Red was living there.

“I don’t think we can ever feel like brother and sister,” he told her that very evening. “Your mother is married to my father, but that means nothing to us.” Kenny reached over and took her hand. “What I hope is that you and I can be friends.”

Red had badly needed a friend. After her father’s death,
she’d been forced to move into town. The home of her mother and stepfather was one of the nicest in Piney Woods. Not as nice perhaps as the home that Grayson’s first wife lived in across town, but much nicer than anyplace Red had lived.

Her stepfather was a complete stranger to her and her mother was almost as distant. Patsy Grayson was busy every day with her clubs and her charities, trying to become so generous, so beloved of the community that they would forget that she used to be a receptionist at Grayson Automotive and that she’d broken up two marriages to get the old man’s ring on her finger.

She had no time or interest in comprehending Red’s grief or her loss. She offered no encouraging words. No shoulder to cry on.

Kenny had understood that completely. He’d offered both and more.

He had talked to her. Listened to her. Made her laugh. He’d treated her as if she was important. No lonely, miserable, gawky sixteen-year-old with red hair and freckles would have been able to resist him. From hand-holding to hugs to kisses, it had all proceeded so naturally. And when the kisses evolved into make-out sessions in her bedroom late at night, it was just a matter of time before it became sex.

“I’m scared,” she told him. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“You trust me, don’t you, Emmaline?” he’d asked.

“I love you,” she’d answered.

“Then you have to let me.”

She hadn’t liked it much. The first few times it hurt. And even after that, it seemed more unpleasant than pleasurable. But Kenny really liked to do it. It made him happy and that’s all that she’d wanted.

One afternoon toward the end of the summer he called her at the house.

“Is your mom gone to her club meeting?”

“Yeah, she should be there all afternoon,” Red answered.

“Good! I’m going to be there in ten minutes,” Kenny told her, laughing over the phone. “I want you naked and waiting for me on my bed.”

“Okay.”

“Do you love getting screwed by me?” It was a question he asked a lot.

“Yes, Kenny, of course.”

“Say it,” he told her. “Say it loud and like you mean it.”

“Yes, I love getting screwed by you, Kenny.”

He laughed. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

She’d done what he asked. She’d stripped down completely. She’d combed out her ponytail, letting her hair drape down her back. She put on more makeup, lots of eye shadow and lip gloss. She posed herself on the bed, like the women in the magazines he’d shown her. She loved him and that’s what girls who are in love do when guys ask.

Kenny had walked into the room ten minutes later, with five of his closest buddies.

A light tap on the bungalow’s front door startled Red into the present. Through the thin beveled glass window at the top, she could see Cam’s face.

She got up and let him in.

“What are you doing here so late?” she asked him.

“I always drive by on my way home,” he admitted. “And when I saw the light on, I thought I’d see what you’re up to.”

“Nothing,” she answered. “I just can’t sleep.”

Cam nodded. He reached out to hug her and reflexively she pulled away.

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing,” she assured him quickly. “I’m…I’m just tired, I guess.”

He reached out to smooth a hair away from her face. “When I looked through the door at you sitting there, you reminded me of Daniel, all balled up and defensive. Are you the scared armadillo?”

Red huffed. “I have plenty to be scared about,” she said. “My business, everything I’ve worked for, is about to go belly-up. And I’ve got a couple of innocent little kids that are dependent on me.”

He nodded. “It’s a tough time,” Cam agreed. “But lots of people live like that all the time. If they can do it, we can do it.”

It was on the tip of Red’s tongue to pick up on the word
we.
These weren’t his grandkids. It wasn’t his business. And certainly the other stuff, the stuff she wouldn’t talk about, none of that concerned him. He could just walk away. But she’d given him more than enough chances to do just that, and he hadn’t. She wasn’t sure she would have made it this far without him.

“Thanks for being here, Cam,” she said.

He smiled at her. “Come sit down on the couch and let me hold you for a while.”

She agreed. What she expected was to sit side by side with his arm around her. Instead, Cam sat sideways on the couch and put her in front of him, her back to his chest, so that he could wrap both his arms and his legs around her.

Red felt herself relaxing into the position. It felt very safe.

“Okay,” Cam said. “Let’s talk about stuff that doesn’t scare us.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a game I made up for myself,” he answered. “When I was a kid and got scared, I’d deliberately force myself to think about other stuff. Good stuff. Think of one of the happiest moments in your life and tell me about it.”

Red mentally ran through a montage of moments that made her smile. But to her surprise all the ones that came to mind included Cam or the kids. That was crazy. She’d been perfectly happy before Cam came on the scene. And since the kids had been dumped on her, life had been nothing but trouble.

“I can’t think of anything,” she told him.

“Oh, come on, try harder,” he said. “Tell me…tell me about the day your daughter was born.”

Red shook her head. “I don’t think you want to hear that. There was lots of sweating and screaming involved.”

Cam chuckled. “Begin after the sweating-and-screaming part.”

“Well, the nurses didn’t want me to see her,” Red said. “I was still thinking that I would give her up for adoption. And the nurses said that seeing her would make it harder, it would make it real.”

“But you wanted to see her anyway,” Cam said.

Red nodded. “We’d already been through so much together. I wanted to kiss her goodbye and tell her what a great life she was going to have with some new mommy and daddy who could really care for her.”

“So what happened?” he asked.

Red shrugged. “I was such a klutz. I didn’t even know how to hold her, the nurse had to help me. It felt so awkward and unnatural.”

His arms tightened around her.

“Holding her was a very bad idea,” Red said. “She was tiny and vulnerable and I had no business even pretending for a
moment that I could be a mother to her. I tried to hand her back. But just when I told the nurse to take her, she was needed across the hall. She said she’d be right back and she just left the room with me holding the baby.”

Red hesitated. She remembered it all so clearly, yet she hadn’t thought about that moment in years.

“I looked down into her little face and it just scared me,” Red said. “I didn’t try to say goodbye or anything at all. The experience was just pure fear. She was my responsibility until the nurse got back and I was terrified that I might drop her or hurt her. So I guess I was holding her too tight and she began squirming in my arms. That made me hold her even tighter. But she managed to get one of her little arms free from the blanket and she held it up to me. At first I ignored it. I needed both hands just to hold her. Then I shifted a bit and held out a finger to her and she grasped it, really hanging on to me. That’s when I noticed her hands.”

“Her hands?”

“They were big hands,” Red said. “I mean, of course they were tiny, baby hands, but the fingers were very long and very thin.”

Red held up her own hands, which could have been described in exactly the same words.

“They’re just like my dad’s hands. That’s when it hit me, I guess, that she wasn’t just some terrible mistake that I had made. Some gigantic lapse in judgment that had humiliated me, embarrassed my mother and got me thrown out of my stepfather’s house.”

“Oh, Red,” he whispered, pressing his cheek next to her own.

“I realized that my baby was part of me and part of my dad and that if I let her go, all of that would be gone forever.”

“You couldn’t do that,” Cam said.

“I didn’t do it,” Red agreed. “That love I’d had with my dad, I just couldn’t let it go. I decided to keep her and it was as much selfishness as anything else.”

“But you’ve never regretted it.”

Red laughed. “I regretted it a million times,” she said. “Every time I screwed up or didn’t live up or just saw the expression of unhappiness or disappointment on her face. I wished that I’d given her to some nice adoptive family, who could have probably managed her life a whole lot better.”

“I really admire you, Red. You can keep a secret longer than any human I’ve ever encountered. And you can be as honest with yourself as you are with other people.”

“Hey, when you’re Bridge’s mom, lying is not tolerated.”

“So you always told her the truth?” Cam asked.

“Most everything I’ve told her is the truth,” Red hedged. “There are just a lot of things that I’ve managed not to tell her.”

“Ah…” Cam nodded. “Same as you do with me.”

“I’ve told you plenty of stuff I’ve never shared with anyone else,” she admitted.

“And do you regret that?”

Red leaned back against him, resting her head against his shoulder she sighed heavily.

“Fact is, I can’t believe how good it feels to just say things and not have to guard every word,” she said.

“So we’re making progress,” Cam teased. “If we keep this up, in a decade or two, you might actually relinquish a real secret or two.”

Red sat up just enough to glance back at him. “Hey, you talk like you’re Mr. Transparency, but there’s plenty of stuff you’re holding back, too.”

“The difference is that I will tell you anything that you ask,” Cam said. “You just never ask.”

“All right,” Red said. “I’ve got a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“Why did you get a vasectomy when you were eighteen years old?”

“Whoa! You’ve been keeping your ear to the ground on the gossip circuit in this town,” he said. “Who told you that?”

“Tasha.”

“Ah…lesson learned. Never entrust somebody with a secret at the same time that you’re disappointing them.”

“So it’s true.”

“It is true,” he said. “I guess it’s too much to hope that you’re the first person she told rather than the one thousand and first.”

“I don’t know,” Red said. “Does it matter?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a lot like the secrets you’ve kept, not for myself but for someone else.”

Red was surprised that he’d recognized this.

“I didn’t want Aunt Phyl to find out,” Cam explained. “I knew what I was doing, it was my decision and I think I did the right thing. But she’s such a big believer in family, Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the Republic of Texas, Alamo Heights Genealogy Society. All that is so important to her. But she never married or had children of her own. And I guess I didn’t want her to find out that her family line ends with me.”

“Why wouldn’t you want to have a family?” Red asked. “Was it the music? I know a musician’s life can be tough with a wife and kids. But to give up the option completely…”

“It had nothing to do with music,” he answered.

“What, then?”

Cam’s hesitation was so slight, Red thought she might have imagined it.

“My mom died of an hereditary disease,” he said. “By the time I was in high school there was genetic testing to see if I carry the gene. So when I turned eighteen, I took the test and I do have the gene.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means there is a fifty percent chance than any children I have would have the gene,” Cam said. “And I decided there were enough children in the world with good genes, I didn’t think we’d need any with my iffy ones.”

Red turned in his arms so that she could look at him.

“And you are totally okay with that?”

“No, I wouldn’t say I’m totally okay. And a lot of other people with this gene wouldn’t have made my choice. But I still think it was the right decision for me. And I’ve learned to live my life pretty well just as it is.”

Red nodded slowly, thoughtfully.

“Is that why you were attracted to me?” she asked. “With an older woman the whole baby thing just never comes up.”

“Hey, that’s not fair,” he disagreed. “Remember, you having a daughter was a big secret. For all I knew you could have been seeking out some young stud for your desperately ticking biological clock.”

“True,” she admitted. “But it
is
a good reason to date older women.”

“I don’t date older women,” he said. “You’re actually my first, and to be totally truthful about it, it was your ass rather than your age that got my attention.”

He reached between them to grasp the attractive feature in question.

“And if I’d known that first day that it was decorated with
a gorgeous armadillo tattoo, I would have come roaring out of that booth and ripped your pants off with my teeth.”

Red laughed. “Well, that’s one way to attract more business to the bar.”

“Speaking of attraction,” Cam teased, “I’ve got some of that growing here in the front of my jeans.”

“Oh,” Red said. “I can fix that. I’ve got just the thing. Would you like to step into the next room with me for a few minutes?”