Christmas at Home, стр. 96
“Love that shirt. Is it new?” Tessa drew up the beer and made change for a fifty-dollar bill.
“Thank you. I bought it yesterday in Weatherford.” Sharlene’s shirt was white with pink rhinestone buttons and the traditional Texas longhorn symbol in pink stones across the back yoke.
“So how did the big reunion day and night go?” Tessa asked.
“Fun. Hangover. Never again,” Sharlene said.
“Girl, something happened. You told me the first time I met you your biggest failing was that you talked too much. Now you tell me in four words about the reunion you’ve talked about for a month. I figured you’d be gushing and all I get are four measly words. What happened? So you got drunk. Did you dance on the bar or take a cowboy home to the hotel with you?”
Sharlene blushed.
“That proves it. ’Fess up. What’s his name? Please don’t tell me you did a one-nighter and don’t even know his name.”
“Got customers. Nothing to ’fess up about. Didn’t do a one-nighter, and why does everyone think all roads lead to a member of the male species?” Sharlene hurried to the other end of the bar.
“Apple martini,” a middle-aged woman said. “Where’s all the good-lookin’ cowboys? I was told they were six to every woman over here.”
Her light-brown hair sported blond highlights straight from a bottle. She wore a slinky little gold-sequined top that didn’t have enough material in it to sag a clothesline and tight-fitting jeans. Her boots had sharp toes and walking heels and they didn’t come cheap. Eel seldom got put on a sales rack. The best makeup in the world couldn’t fill in the crow’s-feet or the lines around her mouth, but the dim lights in the Honky Tonk were kind. She might pass for forty after four beers. After six she could probably convince a cowboy that she was thirty-five. It would take a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label to make her twenty-nine.
“Got to give ’em time to wash the dirt from behind their ears and brush the hay off their boots. This is hay season. They work until it’s all in. They’ll be along in a little while and you can take your pick. Got bikers until they get here.” Sharlene motioned toward a table of Amos’s friends. “And those Harleys they rode in on cost more than a custom-ordered pickup truck, darlin’.”
The woman rolled her eyes dramatically. “Those old geezers couldn’t keep up with me.”
Sharlene frowned. Amos could out-two-step and outdrink any of the young cowboys. “Be careful. Those old fellows know more about how to treat a woman than the young bucks can learn in a decade.”
“Maybe I got a mind to teach the cowboy, rather than them teach me. Grab ’em young and raise them up to suit me.” The woman smiled.
Sharlene set the martini on the bar. “If you are interested in quantity rather than quality, then take a look at the door. Those three all look teachable.”
The woman wet her lips and stood up straight. “Yum, yum!”
Sharlene leaned on the bar and watched the woman paint an imaginary red laser dot on the prettiest blond cowboy’s belt buckle and head that way with an extra wiggle under her tight jeans and a smile on her face.
Toby Keith had a song on the new jukebox called “I Love This Bar,” and it described the Honky Tonk along with every other beer joint in Texas and Oklahoma. He said that it had lookers, hookers, all-nighters, preppies, and bikers among other things. Well, the lookers had just walked through the doors and the pseudo-hooker was marking her territory. Bikers would be Amos and his crew of retired businessmen who rode up from Dallas a couple of times a week to drink and dance. Preppies came from all four directions to listen to what they called vintage country music and learn to two-step in their loafers with tassels and pleated dress slacks.
Since it was Monday night the new jukebox had been turned off and the old one took center stage. Three songs for a quarter just like in Ruby’s first days had become the Tonk’s trademark. When the last bar owner, Larissa Morley, came to Mingus, she’d been instrumental in putting the news out on the internet that there was a quaint little beer joint just over the border separating Erath and Palo Pinto Counties. It didn’t take long for the word to spread and for Luther to have to count customers to make sure they stayed under the maximum quota for their space.
“Trip to Heaven” by Freddie Hart was playing when the woman stuck her fingers through the young cowboy’s belt loops and led him to the dance floor. Freddie sang about not needing wings to fly and said that he just took a trip to heaven and he didn’t even have to die. If that greenhorn got drunk enough to let her pick him up that night, he’d think he took a trip to heaven, got rejected at the door by Saint Peter, and been sent straight to hell come morning time. He’d have a hellacious hangover and a nasty taste in his mouth when he figured out the sweet young thing he’d gotten lucky with was as old as his mother.
A blushing sting crawled up Sharlene’s neck. What did Holt Jackson think when she passed out cold as a mother-in-law’s kiss in his pickup truck? And if he hadn’t been a gentleman, where would their business relationship be? Lord, what a tangled mess!
The music changed to a slow Alan Jackson song, and the middle-aged woman kept her cowboy on the dance floor for another round.
“What are you smiling about?” Tessa asked.
“Chigger,” Sharlene said.
“Yep,” Tessa agreed.
“What’s a chigger?” a blonde woman asked from a barstool right in front of