Honky Tonk Christmas by Carolyn Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

hospital, questions would be asked that had no answers because the army didn’t train women to do what Sharlene did best. Hells bells, they didn’t train her either. They came one day and talked to her, sent her to a psychiatrist who said she could do it without falling apart, and then they put her on a plane to Iraq.
    Kayla always asked the most questions and teased her about having a secret boyfriend who kept her out all night. Letting her think that was easier than telling her the truth. Sharlene stopped thinking about Kayla’s teasing the minute the store opened and the target stepped out into the light. He raised his hands. He looked like dozens of harmless old fellows who sold fruit and bread. No one would have ever mistaken him for a terrorist, yet intel said that he was the center of a cell that had been killing American soldiers. She blinked twice for good luck. Then laughter rang in the streets and children ran in front of the store. She wiped her brow and waited. How could the children laugh and play?
    Same way that they did in godforsaken Corn, Oklahoma. That town and its way of life put you in this army, but it’s still home. This is home to these children. They might jump at a chance to leave it but it’ll always be home.
    She couldn’t shoot into them. She waited until they had run into the store next door and the man started back inside. She blinked twice and squeezed the trigger. The terrorist dropped to one knee and fell forward onto the sidewalk as if he was praying, but he was kneeling in the wrong direction.
    She awoke sitting up in bed holding her pillow like a rifle. The noise of kids giggling outside her bedroom window was very real. Why on earth would Iraqi children be in the Honky Tonk yard? And that absolutely could not be sunshine peeking through the mini-blinds. She hadn’t had time to get back to the makeshift barracks she shared with the four nurses.
    Reality replaced the past in a jolt. She threw the pillow on the floor and moaned. “I’ve become just like Larissa and Cathy.” Both of those women hated, no, they abhorred (that sounded so much worse than merely hated) mornings. And now that she’d owned the Tonk a few months she was growing up to be just like them.
    She sat up and peeked out the mini-blinds to see Waylon and Judd playing tag. Their hair was plastered to their heads with sweat. They both wore shorts and knit shirts. Other than Judd’s dark ponytail flying in the hot Texas wind, they were two identical blurs as they sprinted in a foot race from the end of the Tonk out to the first trees beyond the trailer park.
    She remembered playing like that with her brothers until they each got too old to run and romp with her. Nostalgia and homesickness hit and she was glad she’d planned to go home to Corn, Oklahoma, for a couple of days. She’d watch her nieces and nephews play in the big backyard and listen to her mother scold her about her biological clock being broken. She’d tell her mother the same thing she had ever since she’d come home from Iraq. Women didn’t marry at sixteen anymore. They waited on marriage and children. It wasn’t unusual for a woman to be forty or even more before starting a family. At which time her mother would cluck her tongue and say the whole world had gone plumb crazy.
    She stretched and was about to throw back the sheets when she heard Judd screaming at Holt. “I got to go right now. Where’s the bathroom, anyway?”
    Sharlene ran to the apartment door and swung it open. “In here, Judd. You can use my bathroom.”
    “Sorry,” Holt said.
    Sharlene ignored him. When a boy child had to go really bad and couldn’t find a bathroom, he could always find a tree or a bush to hide behind. It wasn’t so easy for the girl children.
    Sharlene put a hand on her shoulder and ushered her through the living room, down the short hall, and right into the bathroom. “Right in here.”
    Judd yanked at her shorts on the way and she settled her fanny