Red’s Hot Honky-Tonk Bar Read Free Page A

They’re waiting for my backup custody to pick them up. That’s you.”
    That reality hung out there in an instant of complete dumbfounded silence.
    “It can’t be me,” Red insisted. “I don’t know anything about kids.”
    “What’s to know? They practically raise themselves.”
    “No, they don’t,” Red responded with certainty. “They’re just babies. There’s no way that I can take them in.”
    “They are not babies,” Bridge argued. “Olivia is nine and Daniel is six. And you agreed.”
    “You said I wouldn’t have to do anything but agree.”
    There was a heavy sigh at the other end of the line. “Well, I’m sorry about that. There are things beyond my control.”
    Those words momentarily gave Red pause.
    “That’s a rare admission for you,” Red pointed out.
    “I suppose we all live and learn,” Bridge said. “Anyway, you have to do it.”
    “Can’t you just come home?”
    “The army doesn’t work that way.”
    “Have you tried? I’m sure if they knew that the kids are on their own, they’d want to help.”
    “Of course they’d want to help,” Bridge said. “But they can’t help. Everybody’s got problems. Before we deploy, families work out their own plan. This is our family plan.”
    Red felt a desperate, sinking sense of unpleasant inevitability.
    “I’m not any good with kids,” she pleaded. “You, of all people, should know that.”
    “I do know it, and if there was anyone else I could hand them off to, I would,” Bridge said. “There isn’t anybody else.”
    “Can’t you send them to Korea to stay with Mike?”
    “That’s possible,” she said. “But it’s not going to be easy. I’m army. Mike’s air force. That’s two different branches of the military. It’s not just that they don’t speak the same language, they each try to pretend that the other doesn’t exist.”
    “But you can get them transferred to him.”
    “Maybe, if he agrees, though I doubt he’ll be all that willing to give up his hard-won bachelor life. Even if he is, it’ll require a judge’s order to alter the custody agreement. And all the paperwork changing them from army dependents to air force dependents, that takes time,” Bridge said. “Somebody has to pick them up today. You have to pick them up. Today.”
    Red glanced around her beloved patio bar with new eyes. “This is no place to raise kids,” she insisted.
    “Mother!” Bridge said sharply. She never used the term except for the shock value of it. “I haven’t the time or inclination to argue. I’ve already been on this phone longer than I should be. These are your grandchildren. You are now responsible for them. They’re depending upon you. And you will not, under any circumstances, let any of us down. Do you understand?”

3
    I t was extremely curious that the one person in the world that Red should never have to take orders from—her daughter—was the only person who could consistently compel her to do anything.
    Bridge’s forceful admonition, undoubtedly delivered in exactly the same tone that she utilized with the men and women under her command, had so spurred Red that she’d immediately hurried to do her duty.
    Without a word to Cam, who was still in the shower, she locked up the bar and jumped into her seventeen-year-old primer-gray Honda CRX. The car made a definite whiny sound as she started it up, but the engine did turn over and within fifteen minutes she was at the guard gate of the nearby army base.
    As soon as they stopped her, Red knew she should have thought this out more thoroughly.
    “Are you aware that your inspection sticker is out of date?” a soldier, still so young he had peach fuzz on his cheeks, asked her.
    “Yeah, I…uh…well, I just hadn’t gotten around to that,” she admitted.
    He nodded gravely and made a slight sniffing sound.
    “Have you been drinking this morning, ma’am?” he asked.
    “Oh no,” Red insisted. “It’s my clothes. I work in a bar and everything