One Hot Cowboy Wedding

by Carolyn Brown

  But that day it was as peaceful as Austin Lanier was agitated by the inner turmoil that crept up on her unwanted and unexplained. She stood on the sandy bank and Pearlita Richland handed her the wooden box. About the size of a shoe box, only heavier, Austin held it close to her heart in a hug but it didn’t hug back and it didn’t laugh like Granny Lanier. Was this all there was to life? Joys and sorrows reduced to a box full of gray ashes.

  “Even though I don’t agree with this, it’s what she wanted so it’s the way we’ll do it. So good-bye, my dearest old friend. You hold a place for me on your park bench up there until I finish what I’m doing down here,” Pearlita said.

  She was eighty-three, the same age as Austin’s grandmother and they’d been friends from the time they started school back in the Depression years. Pearlita was a tall, lanky woman who still stood proud with her head held high and her back ramrod straight. She had gray hair cut in a no-nonsense style that required nothing more than washing and towel drying. That day she wore her one pair of black slacks and a black sweater reserved for weddings and funerals. She’d left her black shoes at home and worn her old brown cowboy boots since she was going to the river.

  Austin opened the box and was amazed at the ashes inside. That fine dust couldn’t be her grandmother. She’d been a force that never succumbed to age, even in the end.

  “She told me that old age wasn’t for wimps,” she said as she held the box out over the water and slowly poured it into the muddy waters of the Red River. Tears streamed down her face and dripped onto her favorite black power suit: tailored slacks, a fitted jacket over a black silk camisole, and black spike heels. The moment the ashes were out of the box she wanted to wade out into the muddy water and gather them all up to hug one more time. She didn’t care if she ruined a pair of expensive high heels in the sand or if the suit would have to go to the cleaners when she got back to Tulsa.

  “Living isn’t for wimps no matter what age you are,” Pearlita said. “Now we are supposed to watch the ashes disappear and then go to the Peach Orchard for lunch. When we get done you’ll need to start sorting through things at her house. Want me to help?”

  “Thanks, but I can do it. I’ll call if I need help.” Austin watched the river carry her grandmother away.

  It wasn’t right. There should have been flowers and a casket and weeping and it should have been done six months ago when she died. She deserved a twenty-one gun salute even though she wasn’t military and then they could fold up that superman cape Austin always thought she wore and Austin could frame it in a special box with the big S right on top.

  She should’ve invited Rye O’Donnell, her grandmother’s elderly neighbor, to come to the river with her and Pearlita. Even though Verline had told them exactly what she wanted, Rye should’ve been there. He loved Granny too.

  Austin had been talking to him once a week the past six months since her grandmother died. He’d been her neighbor for several years plus her best friend and he’d looked after things after Granny died. There wasn’t much to be done since Verline had taken care of everything beforehand, but Rye had kept an eye on the house until Austin could get find a couple of weeks to come to Terral to sell the watermelon farm. Maybe that was why her stomach was tied up in knots. She had to meet the elderly gentleman sometime and he’d be disappointed that he wasn’t asked to come to the river.

  “My cell phone number is on the front of her refrigerator. She could spout off my regular old phone number from the first time we got party lines, but this newfangled cell phone stuff was almost too big of a trick to teach us old dogs. You take all the time you need here, Austin. I’ll be in the truck.”

  A thousand memories flooded Austin’s mind all at once, none of them more than a brief flash. Granny Lanier in her jeans and boots making biscuits before daylight or thumping the end of a watermelon to see if it was ripe or demanding that Austin make her bed every single morning when she came to visit for two weeks in the summer. When the memories played out and there was nothing but the cooing sound of mourning doves in the distance, Austin looked out at the Red River and couldn’t see the faintest bit of ashes left. She brushed the tears from her cheeks with the sleeve of her black suit and headed toward the pickup truck where Pearlita waited.

  That sinking feeling in her gut said there was more trouble hiding nearby and in the distance she heard the engine of a truck.

  From Red’s Hot Cowboy

  The lights went out in Henrietta, Texas.

  Everything west of the bridge into town was black: no streetlights and very few humming generators. But the flashing neon sign advertising the Longhorn Inn motel still flickered on and off, showing a bowlegged old cowboy wearing six guns, a ten-gallon hat, and a big smile as he pointed toward the vacancy sign at his feet.

  Santa Claus and a cold north wind kept everyone inside that Christmas Eve night and there were no customers, which was fine with the new owner, Pearl Richland. She could cuss, stomp, and pout about operating a damn motel in north Texas rather than spending the holiday in Savannah with her southern relatives, and no one would hear a thing. Not even her mother, who had told her she was making the biggest mistake of her life when she quit her banking job in Durant, Oklahoma, and moved to Henrietta, Texas.

  “Entrepreneur! Running a fifty-year-old motel and cleaning rooms is not an entrepreneur. You are ruining your life, Katy Pearl Richland,” her mother had said.

  But Pearl had always loved the time she spent at the motel when she was a kid, and after sitting at the loan officer’s desk in a bank, she had a hankering to be on the other side. The one where she was the person with a new business and bright, fresh ideas as to how to improve it. Now she was, but it did have a price to pay. Pearl, the party girl, was now an entrepreneur and had more work than she could keep up with and hadn’t been out on a date in months. Hard work, she didn’t mind. Long hours, she didn’t mind. Online classes with research projects that took a chunk of her days, she didn’t mind. Not dating—that she minded a helluva lot.

  Pearl put the finishing touches on the assignments for the two online motel hospitality classes she was taking out of Midwestern University in Wichita Falls. One needed a few tweaks, but she’d have it done by New Year’s, and then she’d enroll in more courses, which would begin the middle of January.

  She was on her way to the kitchen to see if Santa Claus had left something wonderful like double fudge brownies in her cabinet when all hell broke loose. She thought about that guy in the poem about the night before Christmas as she ran to the window and peeked out at all the vehicles crunching gravel under their wheels—cars, vans, trucks. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see a fat feller dressed in red with tiny reindeer stopping an oversized sleigh in amongst all those vehicles.

  She hustled back to the check-in counter and put on her best smile as she looked at the crowd pushing their way toward the door. The tiny lobby of the twenty-five-unit 1950s-style motel didn’t offer breakfast, not even donuts and coffee. That was something on her list for the future, right along with a major overhaul when she decided whether she wanted to go modern or rustic. It didn’t have a crystal chandelier or a plasma television. It did have two brown leather recliners with a small table between them. In addition to the recliners, it was now packed with people all talking so loudly that it overpowered the whistling wind of the Texas blue norther that had hit an hour earlier.

  She was reminded of Toby Keith’s song “I Love This Bar.” He sang about hookers, lookers, and bikers. Well, if he’d loved her motel instead of a bar he could have added a bride and groom, a pissed-off granny who was trying to corral a bunch of bored teenage grandchildren, and sure enough there was Santa Claus over there in the corner. Pearl didn’t see anyone offering to sit on his chubby knees, but maybe that was because he’d taken off his hat and his fake beard. He was bald except for a rim of curly gray hair that ended, of all things, in a ponytail about three inches long at his neck.

  Pearl raised her voice. “Who was h
ere first?”

  The door opened and four more people crowded into the room, letting in a blast of freezing air that made everyone shiver.

  A young man in a tuxedo stepped up to the tall desk separating the lobby from the office. “That would be us.”

  “Fill out this card. Rooms are all alike. Two double beds, microfridge, and free wireless Internet,” Pearl said.

  A girl in a long white velvet dress hugged up to his side. “We sure aren’t interested in Internet or a microwave oven tonight. This is so quaint and very romantic, and it’s got all we need… a bed!”

  The man took time out from the card to kiss her.

  Quaint and romantic? Pearl thought. It’s more like the motel in that old movie Psycho. But I do like the idea of quaint and romantic. Hadn’t thought of that, but it has a nice ring for a black-and-white brochure. Visit the quaint and romantic inn… I like it.

  Built in a low spot on the east side of town more than half a century before, it had a rough, weathered wood exterior that had turned gray with wind, rain, sleet, and pure old Texas heat; wind-out windows that used to work before air conditioning had been installed (now they’d been painted shut); a covered walkway all the way around the U-shaped building; and a gravel parking lot.

  Pearl had twenty-five units and it was beginning to look like it really could be a full house. That meant she’d be cleaning a hell of a lot of rooms on Christmas Day because Rosa, the lady who’d helped her Aunt Pearlita for the past twenty years, decided to retire when Pearlita passed away in the fall.

  While Mrs. Bride whispered love words in Mr. Bridegroom’s ear, Pearl looked out over the impatient crowd. Santa good-naturedly waited his turn, but the lady behind him with six teenagers in tow looked like she could chew up railroad spikes and spit out ten penny nails.

  Maybe Pearl needed to sit on Santa’s lap and ask if he’d send his elves to help clean the rooms the next day. Cleaning hadn’t been a problem because renting five or six units a night was the norm up until that moment. The east side of the motel had ten units along with Pearl’s apartment. The bottom of the U had five units and a laundry room, and the west side had ten units. There was parking for one vehicle per room with extra parking for big trucks behind the laundry room. Part of her last online assignment was designing charts to make a few more spots in the wide middle. Even if she implemented the idea, it couldn’t happen until spring. Winter, even in Texas, wasn’t the right season to pour concrete.

  The motel area had been carved out of a stand of mesquite trees fifty-plus years before, and every few years Pearlita had ordered a couple of truckloads of new gravel for the center lot and the drive around the outside edge. She’d declared that concrete was hot and that it made the place too modern, but Pearl figured she couldn’t afford the concrete. When she saw the savings account her aunt left in her name, she changed her mind. Aunt Pearlita was just plain tight.

  The bridegroom didn’t care that the crowd behind him was getting impatient. He’d write a letter or two and then kiss his new little wife. Pearl tapped her foot and wished he’d take it on to his room and out of her lobby. After eternity plus three days, he finally finished filling out the motel card. She picked an old-fashioned key from the pegboard behind her. It was a real honest-to-god key on a chain with a big 2 engraved into the plastic fob. The back was printed with a message that read, If found please place in any mailbox and had the address for the Longhorn Inn. Pearl wondered how many times Aunt Pearlita had been called to the post office to pay for the postage on a key. What the place needed was those new modern card keys that all the motels were using.

  Pearl could almost hear her aunt getting on the soapbox: Keys have opened doors for thousands of years, so why use those newfangled idiot credit card looking keys? No telling what a locksmith would charge to come fix one of those if a kid dripped his ice cream in it. Besides, why fix something that ain’t broken? Now stop your bellyachin’ and think about how much money you’re rakin’ in tonight. Besides, a plastic credit card lookin’ key doesn’t say quaint and romantic to me.

  From Darn Good Cowboy Christmas

  It was just a white frame house at the end of a long lane.

  But it did not have wheels.

  Liz squinted against the sun sinking in the west and imagined it with multicolored Christmas lights strung all around the porch, the windows, even in the cedar tree off to the left side. In her vision, it was a Griswold house from Christmas Vacation that lit up the whole state of Texas. She hoped that when she flipped the switch she didn’t cause a major blackout because in a few weeks it was going to look like the house on that old movie that she loved.

  Now where was the cowboy to complete the package?

  Christmas lights on a house without wheels and a cowboy in tight-fittin’ jeans and in boots—that’s what she asked for every year when her mother asked for her Christmas list. She didn’t remember the place being so big when she visited her uncle those two times. Once when she was ten and then again when she was fourteen. But both of those times she’d been quite taken with the young cowboy next door and didn’t pay much attention to the house itself. The brisk Texas wind whipped around ferociously as if saying that it could send her right back to east Texas if she didn’t change her mind about the house.

  “I don’t think so,” she giggled. “I know a thing or two about Texas wind, and it’d take more than a class five tornado to get rid of me. This is what I’ve wanted all my life, and I think it’s the prettiest house in Montague County. It’s sittin’ on a foundation, and oh, my God, he’s left Hooter and Blister for me. Uncle Haskell, I could kiss you!”

  The wind pushed its way into the truck, bringing a few fall leaves with it when she opened the truck door. Aunt Tressa would say that was an omen; the place was welcoming her into its arms. Her mother would say that the wind was blowing her back to the carnival where she belonged.

  The old dog, Hooter, slowly came down off the porch, head down, wagging his tail. Blister, the black and white cat, eyed her suspiciously from the ladder-back chair on the tiny porch.

  Her high heels sunk into the soft earth, leaving holes as she rushed across the yard toward the yellow dog. She squatted down, hugged the big yellow mutt, and scratched his ears. “You beautiful old boy. You are the icing on the cake. Now I’ve got animals and a house. This is a damn fine night.”

  The key was under the chair, tucked away in a faded ceramic frog, just where her Uncle Haskell said it would be when she talked to him earlier that afternoon. But he hadn’t mentioned leaving the two animals. She’d thank him for that surprise when she called him later on.

  She opened the wooden screen door and was about to put the key in the lock when the door swung open. And there he was! Raylen O’Donnell, all grown up and even sexier than she remembered. Her heart thumped so hard she could feel it pushing against her bra. Her hands were shaky and her knees weak, but she took a deep breath, willed her hands to be still, and locked her knees in place.

  “If it’s religion you’re sellin’ or anything else, we’re not interested,” Raylen said in a deep Texas drawl. He’d been pouring a glass of tea in the kitchen when he heard a noise. Hooter hadn’t barked, so he figured it was just the wind, but when he opened the door he’d been more shocked than the woman standing there with wide eyes and a spooked expression on her face.

  She wore skintight black jeans that looked like they’d been spray painted on her slim frame. Without those spike heels she would’ve barely come to his shoulder, and Raylen was the shortest of the three O’Donnell brothers, tipping the chart at five feet ten inches. Her jet-black hair had been twisted up and clipped, but strands had escaped the shiny silver clasp and found their way to her shoulder. Her eyes were so dark brown that they looked ebony.

  “Raylen?” she said.

  Her voice was husky, with a touch of gravel, adding to her exotic looks. It made Raylen think of rye whiskey with a teaspoon of honey and a twist of lemon. He’d heard that voice before. It had bee
n branded on his brain for eleven years, but she couldn’t be Haskell’s niece. Liz wasn’t supposed to be there until the first of the week at the earliest.

  “That’s right. Who are you?” he asked cautiously.

  “I happen to own this place,” she said with a flick of her hand.

  “Liz?” Raylen started at her toes and let his gaze travel slowly all the way to her eyebrows. She’d been a pretty teenager, but now she was a stunning woman.

  “Surprise! I guess this chunk of Texas dirt now belongs to me. What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Could Raylen really be the cowboy Santa was going to leave under her Christmas tree? He’d sure enough been the one she had in mind when she asked for a cowboy. She’d visualized him in tight-fittin’ jeans and boots when she was younger. Lately, she’d changed it to nothing but a Santa hat and the boots.

  His hair was still a rich, dark brown, almost black until the sunlight lit up the deep chestnut color. His eyes were exactly as she remembered: pale, icy blue rimmed with dark brown lashes. It all added up to a heady combination, enough to make her want to tangle her hands up in all that dark hair and kiss him until she swooned like a heroine in one of those old castle romances she’d read since she was a teenager. Speaking of kissing, where in the hell was the mistletoe when a woman needed it, anyway?

  Cowboys have roots, not wings. Don’t get involved with one or you’ll smother to death in a remote backwoods farm or else die of boredom. Her mother’s voice whispered so close to her ear that she turned to make sure Marva Jo Hanson hadn’t followed her to Ringgold, Texas.

  Raylen stood to one side. “I came to feed and water Hooter and Blister. Haskell asked me to do that until you got here. We met when we were kids, remember?”

  “I do,” she said. How could she forget? She’d been in love with Raylen O’Donnell since she was fourteen years old.