The Wedding Gift by Carolyn Brown

Author:Carolyn Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

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 you are a 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 make cinnamon 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.

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