Red’s Hot Honky-Tonk Bar (19 page)

“It’s getting late,” she said. “I need to get the kids home.”

S
arah Carson called her the morning of the first cement pour. The line of cement trucks with their ever-tumbling loads were mating up with dump trucks filled with gravel. The workmen shouted above the din to hear one another. Inside Red’s Hot Honky-Tonk Bar, nobody bothered to talk. The noise easily drowned out speech. Even the jukebox couldn’t be heard.

Red did manage to pick up the phone and with a finger in the opposite ear, conduct a conversation.

“The Thanksgiving cupcakes will be a lot easier,” Sarah assured her. “We only have to serve them to the kids in our class.”

“But I guess we still have to get twenty kinds,” Red replied. “I should have kept my schematic.”

“Oh, it’s much easier with the class,” Sarah said. “We know what each child is supposed to eat and we just put the names right on the cupcakes with a toothpick flag.”

“Ah.”

“It’s a little more planning, but a lot less chance for a mis
take,” Sarah said. “Of course, it was Tasha’s idea. All the ideas that get implemented come from Tasha.”

“I guess it’s good to have someone with ideas.”

“Yes, well, maybe so,” Sarah said. “And I promise to be there with you this time.”

Red wrote down the hour and date and agreed to be there on schedule.

“And Brad has the contract ready for you to look at,” Sarah continued. “He really wants to talk to you about it, but he’s having a horrible week. Is it possible for you to get away and meet him in his office?”

“Sure, I could do that,” Red told her. “Truth is, I’d love to get away from all this construction chaos.”

She wrote down Brad’s office number and as soon as she hung up with Sarah, she called him.

She was very grateful that the receptionist found a place to squeeze her in early that afternoon. She really wanted Cam to go with her. He knew Brad and he knew about attorneys. She hesitated to ask him, though. Things between them had been not strained but touchy since Brian’s wedding and his mention of the dreaded M word. They hadn’t discussed it further, but Red suspected that he was just biding his time and she didn’t want to hand that time to him on a platter.

Still, it would be so much better to have him beside her. To have a second pair of much more educated eyes to look at the contract and ask the questions.

As she turned those thoughts over in her mind, she realized that she was scared. Going to Brad’s office was getting out of her comfort zone and she was just plain chicken.

Determined, she mentally stiffened her spine. If she could stand up to street toughs and mean drunks and barroom lotharios, she ought to feel right at home in a building full of lawyers.

She called Karl to come in early. As soon as he arrived, she donned a suit jacket to cover her assets, twisted her hair into a giant blob atop her head and stepped into the highest high heels she could find in the apartment closet. When a woman was ready to do battle, she needed to walk tall.

The law firm’s office was in a high-rise bank building near Main Plaza. Red found the place easily and went inside, head held defensively high. To her relief, she did seem to blend in without much trouble. In fact, she thought to herself, the downstairs receptionist with her short, tight skirt and revealing V-neck décolletage looked less lawyer ready than Red herself.

Brad appeared delighted to see her, though he was all business. They sat down at a table in his office and he spread the pages out before her.

“What I’ve put together,” he said, “is a counteroffer to the developers’ baseline.”

“Huh?”

“Merton, Wythe and Stone never expected you to sign that contract,” Brad said.

“They didn’t?”

“No,” he answered. “I’m sure they hoped that you would, but they would not have expected you to take this deal.”

Red swallowed, thinking how close she’d been just to signing it and getting it in the mail.

“So what I’ve done,” Brad went on, “is to ask for everything you could possibly want and then some.”

“Like what?”

Using an expensive pen as a pointer, Brad indicated and explained several clauses in the updated agreement.

“We’ve asked for a significant discount on a ten-year lease price,” he said. “And we want the developer to pay for all
repairs and upgrades your business will need to cope with the changes and inconvenience that the river construction has brought. I ballparked the wall project for the patio at ten thousand dollars. I thought, ideally, you’d want a limestone that would be similar to that used in the river project. And naturally, you can’t have a new limestone wall without veneering the old building to match. Once the business has been through all of this renovation, we’ll require a minimum two years’ notice to vacate.”

Red sat there with her mouth open.

“Don’t expect that we’ll get any or all of this,” Brad said. “Because we won’t. What I’m pushing for is another counteroffer that will get us what we absolutely need to have, and that’s a reasonable timetable to vacate.”

“Oh,” she said, trying to take it in. “So you think that no matter what, I’ll eventually have to move.”

Brad leaned back in his chair, appearing to choose his words carefully.

“It’s likely,” he said. “How much do you understand form-based zoning?”

“I’ve never even heard of it.”

He went to a cabinet across the room and retrieved a file of legal-size papers that included a photocopied map of an area north of downtown.

“River North, the area between downtown and the Pearl Brewery area, is being rezoned. The new zoning is not based on what is there now and how that area is being used, but was designed specifically to achieve a certain desired outcome.”

Brad talked at some length about what the planners had in mind. He showed Red drawings that had been done. One in particular he held up, with his fingers over the legend.

“Where do you think this is?” he asked.

She looked at the tree-lined street of two-story brownstone houses and a colorful cable car.

“New Orleans?” she suggested, it being the only city outside of Texas that she’d ever visited.

Brad shrugged. “Most people say San Francisco,” he told her. “But New Orleans is a good guess, too.”

He took his fingers away from the map’s corner. And she read the words with shock:
River North Redevelopment, Avenue B.

“That’s where my bar is!”

Brad nodded. “The city wants to take an underutilized downtown eyesore and create a walkable, mixed-use urban neighborhood.”

“Mixed use?”

“That’s retail and residential side by side.”

“Okay, so my bar could be in between these houses.”

Brad shrugged. “Businesses like yours are not usually considered appropriate for that zoning.”

“Businesses like mine?” she repeated.

He nodded. “I’m sure, from the zoning standpoint, it would be said that you’re too loud, you draw a rowdy crowd and you aren’t the right fit with family homes.”

“I’m just a neighborhood bar. Doesn’t every neighborhood need a neighborhood bar?” Red asked.

Brad let out a long, concerned sigh. “They might have a neighborhood bar,” he said. “But as your business exists right now, most people wouldn’t think of it as a neighborhood bar. It’s a honky-tonk and for all our love of Texas tradition, nobody wants to live next door to one.”

“Oh.”

“And this redevelopment is going very upscale,” Brad continued. “Staying would mean seriously rethinking your business model. The people who are going to live on that block
are going to be drinking a lot more martinis and mojitos than Shiner Bock.”

Red remembered joking about having teatime for the ladies who lunch at the Bright Shawl.

“The thing to remember is that this is still a long way off,” Brad told her. “That’s why I think the ten-year lease, while optimistic, is still within the realm of realistic. And maybe you’ll be thinking about retiring by that time anyway.”

Red had not really considered retiring at all, ever.

Brad went over every part of the paperwork they were sending to the developer. He was very careful in making sure that Red understood every word of what she was signing and what the next steps would be.

“I fully expect to have a small flurry of paperwork from every attorney they can contact,” he said. “That’s their next step, to try to intimidate us with how big they are compared to how small you are. We are not going to get distracted by that. Rezoning, redevelopment, that all takes time and in a famous-for-siestas city like San Antonio, it takes even more time than usual. They are going to want to be drawing income from you while they’re waiting. And keeping a business, any business, on that street, keeps cops patrolling and vandals and squatters out. You’re a good deal for them. And no matter what they say, you’ve got to remember that.”

Red signed all the papers and thanked Brad for his help.

“Let’s see what kind of agreement I can get you,” he said. “Then you’ll know whether you really need to thank me or not.”

She headed back to the bar, feeling better about the short-term but more worried about the long. She glanced out at tacky, run-down and unappealing Avenue B and wondered aloud, “Why do things have to change?” Her life was good.
She was happy. Everything had been going great. And now it all seemed to be going to hell in a handbasket.

She parked her car and went through the gate to the back patio. Halfway across, Cam called out to her from the stairs.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing,” she answered.

He came down the steps, shaking his head. “Something,” he said.

“What makes you think that? My amazing business jacket?”

“Your hair,” Cam answered. “We’ve been through the polygamist wives and Mrs. Olsen meets Pippy Longstocking. Today you look like the governor of Alaska.”

Red chuckled and began pulling the clips out.

“You have beautiful, long hair,” he told her. “Don’t let any of the hometown harpies scare you into hiding.”

“I just had a meeting with Brad,” she told him.

“Then I’ll bet he was disappointed not to see you looking like your gorgeous self.”

She smiled up at him and he planted a kiss on her forehead.

“So what did the man say?” he asked. “Should I start rounding up volunteers to defend this place like the Alamo?”

Red shook her head. “He thinks we’ll get to stay here a while,” she said. “He’s hoping to get me ten years.”

Cam nodded thoughtfully. “Ten years is good.”

“Brad says that maybe by then I’ll want to retire,” Red offered with a laugh. “I guess he thinks I’m even older than I am. I really almost never think about retiring. Do you?”

Red watched as the smile disappeared from Cam’s face and a puzzling, indecipherable expression took its place.

“No, I never look that far ahead.”

T
he morning was cold and overcast as Red stepped into the kitchen. Olivia and Daniel were still yawning over bowls of instant oatmeal.

“What do you think, Olivia?” Red asked. “Today is the party in Daniel’s classroom. Can I wear this? Do I look okay?”

Both children looked up.

Red was trying to follow Cam’s advice. She had on dark slacks and a casual sweater. She’d pulled her hair away from her face with a clip, but the length of it still hung down her back, past her waist.

“It’s okay,” Olivia said after a moment of assessment. “You look fine.”

“I think you look pretty,” Daniel said.

Olivia shot her brother a look of incredulity.

“It’s true!” the little boy defended. “Of all the grandmas that I’ve seen, she is way more the prettiest.”

“Why, thank you, Daniel,” Red said. “I think you’re cute, too.” She ruffled his hair and he giggled.

“Can we go down to see Abuela for Thanksgiving?” Olivia asked. “It won’t seem like a holiday without family.”

Daniel’s smile waned a bit.

“I think it’s
may
we go down to see Abuela,” Red told her, avoiding the question.

Olivia bristled. “I don’t think that somebody who didn’t even finish high school should be correcting my grammar.”

Red raised an eyebrow. “Then I won’t, unless you make a mistake. As long as you’re perfect, you won’t hear a peep from uneducated me.”

Olivia gave her a disgusted, unhappy look.

One step forward, two steps back, Red thought to herself.

Within a half hour, both children were clean-faced, appropriately dressed and donning jackets for the walk to school. Olivia’s bout of surliness had disappeared completely as she clearly and competently did a mental checklist of what she and her brother should have in their backpacks.

“All right, we’re ready,” she told Red finally.

Red put on her own jacket and they headed out into an autumn morning in Alamo Heights. With large numbers of live oak, mountain laurel and anaqua trees that never lose their leaves and the rugged mesquite, with leaves too small to make an impression, fall in San Antonio was almost a misnomer. But the November wind swept down the street, stirring up small whirls of red leaves from the elms and sweetgum and vibrant yellows from mulberry and sycamores. Red imagined herself, if only for a moment, like anyone else in the world, bundled up and moving in a purposeful direction.

Olivia hurried on ahead, eager to meet up with her friend Nayra before class. Red and Daniel set their own pace.

Daniel was too excited about the day to even notice his sur
roundings. Talking a mile a minute about the planned activities for this last school day before Thanksgiving, he bore almost no resemblance to the frightened little boy he’d been just a couple of months earlier. And his ability to speak English certainly hadn’t suffered from lack of use.

“And I have the most lines of anybody and I memorized all of them by heart,” he told Red proudly.

“Wow,” she responded, appropriately impressed.

“And I have a great costume, too,” he said. “But I can’t tell you about it because it’ll ruin the surprise.”

Red nodded soberly. “Right, you don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

“It’s really cool!” he assured her, clearly struggling not to reveal all.

Casually he reached up and grasped Red’s hand as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do.

Red was startled at the touch, then inexplicably buoyed by the feel of the small palm that clutched her own. She tried to remember if she’d ever done this. Had she walked Bridge to school? Of course. Had she listened to her daughter’s happy chatter? Surely she must have. But none of those moments came to mind, only the fears, the worry, the guilt. It was as if all the stress and struggle of those days had robbed them of any joy.

But it couldn’t be just the stress and struggle that had been her thief. She had plenty of stress now and plenty of struggle, yet somehow it was different.
She
was different.

“You know, Daniel,” she told him, “I’m really glad about how well you’re doing in school. You come home with stars on your papers nearly every day.”

“I like school,” he told her. “Livy always told me it was awesome, and now I know she’s right.”

Red nodded. “Yes, Olivia is right about a lot of things.”

“And Mrs. Reardon likes me,” he added. “She likes me a lot. And she’s really proud of how hard I work. She’s going to tell Mom that when Mom gets home. She promised.”

“And your mom is going to be really proud of you, too,” Red assured him.

Daniel’s chest pumped up immediately and he grinned ear to ear. “Thanks, Grandma,” he said.

He began to skip and because she was still holding his hand, Red began to skip, as well.

By the time they got to the sidewalk in front of the school, they were both laughing.

In Daniel’s classroom there was less hilarity and more chaos. There were more parents than kids and although the tables had been pushed to either side of the room and the chairs were lined up in neat rows, everybody was standing. Mrs. Reardon quickly got her students, including Daniel, to come behind a five-foot-high panel decorated with a forest scene. The artwork was clearly done by many little hands. There were acorns bigger than some of the trees and some sort of animal, maybe a horse or a rabbit, was hidden in the branches. But a big happy sun shone overhead and the ground was apparently covered with snow, though few of these Texas children would have ever seen it.

Sarah was suddenly beside her.

“Where’s Elliot?” Red asked.

“Mother’s Day Out,” she answered. “Are you ready to head to the cupcake corner? I’m supposed to be there, but I’ve been waiting for you.”

Red glanced around to see the spot in question, not ten feet away. Tasha was there.

Red gave Sarah a look. “You can’t let her intimidate you,” Red whispered.

“I know,” Sarah answered. “But she’s been doing it so long and so well.”

They both laughed.

“Come on.”

A few steps later, Red greeted the other member of the Cupcake Committee.

“It looks like you’ve got everything set up perfectly,” Red told her.

“Well, no, it’s not perfect,” Tasha disagreed. “I wanted each of the children to have the character they play on the top of their cupcake. But Squanto and Priscilla Alden got switched somehow.”

“I hate when that happens,” Red said.

Tasha glanced up at her sharply, but when Red didn’t even crack a smile she let it go.

“Sarah, I hope that you will at least
mention
how disappointed the children were with this mistake when you talk to the bakers.”

“I will, absolutely I will,” she assured her.

Tasha turned her attention back to Red. “So I guess this is a big day for Daniel,” she said.

Red nodded. “He told me that he has the biggest role. I’m not sure if that’s true or it’s just big to him.”

“Oh, it’s the biggest role,” Sarah assured her quickly. “The turkey is the narrator of the whole story. It takes a lot to memorize the entire story.”

“He’s a turkey?”

“Yes,” Tasha answered, pointing to the bird-topped cupcake with the little toothpick bearing Daniel’s name.

Red laughed. “Well, I guess the turkey would have the biggest role in the Thanksgiving story.”

“He didn’t tell you he was going to be the turkey?” Tasha asked. It sounded strangely like a criticism.

“He said it was a secret and he couldn’t tell,” Red explained.

“Of course, it’s always a secret,” Tasha replied. “But they always tell. Kids this age just can’t keep a secret. I know mine can’t.”

“Daniel can,” Red said proudly. “He must get that from me. I’m pretty sure that blabbing when you’re supposed to keep your mouth shut has got to be an inherited trait.”

Red was fortunate enough to see Tasha’s jaw drop before, with a smattering of applause, Mrs. Reardon came out from behind the panel to welcome the guests and commence the performance.

Daniel was the first one out. He was wonderful. His turkey costume included a lot of fat plumage as well as a beak on his head and some long red wattles. His eyes were big, but he looked straight at the crowd as he recited the story of the first Thanksgiving. The other children came out and did their lines well, though some of the pilgrims were given coaching from Mrs. Reardon from behind the panel.

In less than ten minutes it was all over. The kids were bowing and everyone was cheering.

“They did so good!” Sarah exclaimed, though Mia was one of the few who’d unfortunately messed up her part.

“They were great,” Red agreed. “It was just wonderful. I really wish my daughter had been able to see that.”

“Oh gosh, Clarissa videoed the whole thing,” Sarah pointed out. “Your daughter has e-mail, right?”

“Yeah, Olivia writes to her all the time.”

“Then I’ll get Clarissa to send it as a feed,” Sarah said.

“Do you think she’d mind? I don’t want to be a bother.”

“My God, your daughter is defending the country, the least we can do is send her son’s big moment to her.”

Clarissa didn’t mind at all. In fact, she seemed excited by the idea that her artistic production might have an international distribution. When Red didn’t know Bridge’s e-mail address, Clarissa volunteered to work out the details with Olivia.

Word quickly spread among the attendees. And as the first graders were eating their cupcakes, Mrs. Reardon made an announcement.

“I just want everyone to know that because all of my students did so well today, Tradd’s mother, Mrs. Cook, is going to send a film of our program all the way to Afghanistan so that Daniel’s mother, who couldn’t be here with us, will get to see it.”

There was a shriek of delight from the kids. Red locked eyes with Daniel. He was thrilled, too. Too thrilled. The expression of happiness that was on his face also had fear. Red knew immediately, as if she were feeling it herself, that he was scared he might cry in front of his friends.

Like a shot, Red was across the room and dragging him out the door.

“We’ve got to go tell his sister, Olivia,” she announced loudly. “And show her Daniel’s costume.”

As they made it out the door, Red heard Mrs. Reardon suggesting to the children, “Let’s see if we can find Afghanistan on our map.”

Daniel was flat against the hallway wall. He was biting down on his lip, hard. Red dropped onto her knees in front of him.

“It’s okay, punk,” she told him. “It happens to me, too. We know we’re not supposed to cry in front of people. And when we’re angry or sad, we can keep from doing it. But sometimes, when we’re really happy, it sneaks up on us.”

Tears were rolling down his cheeks now.

“I tried not to even think about it,” he said. “I didn’t even want to think about her not being here. About her not seeing me. I did real good, didn’t I?”

“You did great,” Red said. “And you are just going to make your mama’s day. I know it.”

Daniel threw his arms around Red’s neck. He was still trying to choke back his emotion. “I miss her so much,” he said.

“I miss her, too,” Red told him and she realized it was true. “Every day there are things that happen with you and Olivia, and I want to tell her about them or ask her about them or just talk about when she was a little girl.”

Daniel stepped back slightly and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I want to tell her stuff every day,” he admitted. “How many more sleeps before she’s home again?”

Red shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said truthfully. “But fewer every day. She’s supposed to be here by Christmas.”

“She’ll be like my Christmas present.”

“She sure will,” Red agreed. “Now, are you ready to go find your sister’s classroom and show her what a turkey you are?”

Daniel giggled. “Don’t call me a turkey,” he said.

“Oh, I know,” Red said. “You’re not a turkey, you just play one for Thanksgiving.”