Page 34 of The Wedding Gift
“I might bring one in the bar so you can shoot it,” she shot back at him.
Jorja did not need an intervention, he thought. That redheaded ball of fire could take care of herself in any situation, and no one, not even the devil himself, could scare her—unless he brought a snake with him, and Cameron would take care of that for her.
Chapter 6
Chigger and Frankie assured them that it would be useless to open the bar on Christmas Eve. According to Chigger, the previous owners used to come back to Mingus on that night for a little homecoming celebration, but not anymore. Managers had come and gone so fast that they had almost worn out the hinges on the doors for the past five years. That’s why Merle decided to give the bar away. According to what she’d told Chigger, she wanted to see the Honky Tonk loved and cherished, and not just from six in the evening until two in the morning by someone who got bored with it after a few months and moved on.
“That explains the office,” Jorja said over breakfast on Christmas Eve morning.
“What does?” Cameron asked.
“Chigger said that lots of managers had come and gone through here. The place didn’t belong to them, so they didn’t care if the office was taken care of or not. I’m surprised the bar itself hasn’t suffered from as much neglect.” Jorja toyed with her empty coffee cup.
“You aren’t thinking about the bar right now,” Cameron said.
“You can’t read my mind,” she told him.
“No, but I know what’s in my thoughts this morning, and I’d be willing to bet that yours aren’t too different. You’re thinking about your family and what you’d be doing if you were home, right?” he asked.
“I guess youarea mind reader.” She managed a weak smile, but it wasn’t heartfelt. If she was home, she and Abigail would be helping her mother make pecan pies for dinner the next day. Like they did every year, they would argue whether it was better to chop nuts or to leave them as halves, and they would wind up making one of each.
“Talk to me. What’s your favorite part of Christmas Eve when you can go home?” Cameron got up from the table and refilled their coffee cups.
“Cookin’ with Mama, and if we have snow, Abigail and I going to the church parking lot and building a snowman like we did when we were kids,” she said. “We makecinnamon rolls for Christmas morning and get all the pies ready for Christmas dinner. We always open our presents on Christmas Eve—three presents for each of us because baby Jesus had three gifts, and Daddy reads the story of Jesus’s birth from the Bible. Then the next morning, there will be one present under the tree for the grandkids from Santa, because he always stops at Granny and Poppa’s house on his way back to the North Pole.”
“You have nieces and nephews?” he asked.
“Just nieces. Two”—she hesitated and thought again of all the pairs or twos that kept sneaking into her life—“of them. They’re ten and twelve now, but Mama says that when they say they don’t believe in Santa, then he won’t come around anymore. They’re not stupid, so they’ll never say that they don’t believe.” She laughed. “Abigail is six years older than me, and she married right out of college.”
“So”—he chuckled—“Abigail has bossed you around forever, right?”
“You got it.” She nodded. “What about you? What would you be doing?”
His expression changed from happy to sad in a split second. “I’d start off the day by going to the cemetery to tell my cousin Merry Christmas, and maybe I’d pour a can of Coors out at his tombstone. Jesse James Walsh. We calledhim JJ and he was my best friend. We were born three days apart and grew up together. He died in a motorcycle accident on Christmas Eve when we were nineteen. That would be twelve years ago now.”
“I’m so sorry. As much as we disagree much of the time, I can’t imagine losing Abigail. We argue and bicker, but to lose her, especially at Christmas…” Jorja shivered at the thought.
“This will be the first year I haven’t gone to see him, and I miss that,” Cameron said.
“Guess we’ve both given up family for this job. So, what do we do to get through Christmas Eve without letting it get us down?” She sighed.
“We don’t have a churchyard, but we’ve got the Honky Tonk, and it has a parking lot, and about four inches of fresh snow fell last night, so we can make a snowman,” he suggested.
“There’s already one out there, and besides we need to bake something for dinner tomorrow. We should have something special to eat at least since it’s Christmas,” she told him.
“Our Honky Tonk snowman is lonely, so we should build him a girlfriend,” Cameron insisted. “When we get done with that, we’ll go to the grocery store and buy stuff to make a pie and whatever else we want. Then maybe we’ll watch a Christmas movie before we go to sleep. We can’t sit aroundand mope all day. JJ wouldn’t like that, and neither would your folks.” He finished off his coffee and put the cup in the sink.
“What kind of television reception do you think we get out here? I bet the cable has been turned off for years, and in this weather, we might not get much of anything without it.” She pushed back her chair, crossed the room, and went to the closet. “I should probably wear my snow boots.”
“Leave it to a woman to dress up to build a snowman, and, honey, it doesn’t matter about the reception. I brought a DVD player and movies with me. JJ and I always watchedNational Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. I can do that this year even if I can’t go visit him,” he said.
“My sister and her girls always watchA Smoky Mountain Christmaswith me.” Jorja sat down on the edge of her bed and pulled on a pair of hot-pink rubber boots.
“I’ve got that one too. We’re not used to getting to sleep before three in the morning, so we’ll watch both of them.” Cameron got his coat and cowboy hat from the closet.
Jorja stopped what she was doing and frowned. What in the hell would he be doing with a Dolly Parton chick flick? “You’ve gotA Smoky Mountain Christmaswith you?”
“Of course.” He buttoned his fleece-lined denim jacket. “I’ve got nieces too.”