Riverbend Reunion(26)

“Not yet, but we’re working on it,” Haley answered. “I vote that we close the bar on Sunday and Monday nights. That will be our weekend and time for all of us to play catch-up with our lives.”

“That works for me.” Risa nodded.

“And we can fill in for each other if one of us needs to do something else during the week, like Risa going somewhere with the girls on a school event.” Jessica poured two mugs of coffee and handed one to Wade. “Risa might want to be at a ball game on Friday night if the girls make the cheerleader squad.”

“That can be the night we just serve burgers,” Mary Nell suggested. “I can manage that, but don’t expect me to do fancy cooking.”

“This remind you of anything?” Wade asked Jessica.

“Oh, yeah.” She took a sip of her coffee.

“What?” Mary Nell asked.

“Teamwork,” Jessica said. “I worked with a team, and I’m sure Wade did, too. We depended on each other, had each other’s backs, and after a little while, we could almost finish each other’s sentences.”

“Do we get uniforms?” Lily’s eyes twinkled.

“I hope to hell not!” Oscar came into the room and headed straight for the coffeepot. “I like working in overalls and oversized T-shirts.”

Before he reached the section of counter where the coffeepot sat, Jessica poured another mug full and asked, “Cream and sugar?”

“Black as sin and strong as Hercules. That’s the way I like my coffee,” Oscar said. “Now, what’s this about uniforms?”

Wade quickly explained what they’d been discussing. “I liked being able to depend on others, but I wouldn’t want to have to wear a uniform every day again, either.”

“Except for the boots?” Jessica asked.

“Hey, these are broken in and comfortable.” Wade held up a foot.

“Can we all have boots like that?” Daisy asked.

“If you join the military after you finish high school,” Jessica answered.

Risa whipped around and popped her hands on her hips. “I’m not so sure I want them to do that.”

Oscar shot a look over toward Mary Nell. “Sometimes we don’t get what we want.”

“Amen to that,” Jessica agreed.

“Don’t look at me.” Mary Nell threw up both her palms in a defensive gesture. “You know I didn’t get what I wanted, and neither did Risa or Haley. How about you, Jessica? Have you gotten what you wanted out of life?”

Jessica thought about the question before she answered. “Depends on what time of my life we’re talking about, but for right now, I’m very content with this team.”



“I was thinking about the business supplying T-shirts with our logo on the back with a catchy phrase for all of us to wear this fall when we are working at the bar,” Jessica said.

“I love it,” Lily said. “Daisy and I’ll put our heads together and come up with a slogan idea.”

“Remember it’s got to go on a shirt, so keep it short,” Jessica said.

“Beer, Burgers, and . . . ,” Risa started, then stopped.

“Back Home Moonshine,” Oscar finished for her.

“That sounds more like the hills of Kentucky.” Risa laughed.

“Write your ideas down, and we’ll talk about them before we have the shirts made,” Jessica suggested.

By evening, Jessica had filled two pages with quips and ideas for the bar’s name, but she was too dog-tired to even look at them as she crawled up into her loft bed. She had helped move and stack pews against the far wall of the sanctuary all day so that Wade and Oscar could measure for the bar. They had a plumber in mind who could come and do whatever was needed to bring water up through the floor and a local electrician who could wire the area for what they’d need to put in the machinery for draft beer and a small hot-water tank to run the dishwasher.

“Making the decision to turn the building into a bar was easy,” she muttered. “Making it all work—not so much.”

She closed her eyes and dozed to the humming noise of the air conditioner on top of her RV. Then suddenly everything in the RV went so quiet that her eyes popped wide open. She tried to figure out why she could hear tree frogs and crickets, then groaned when she realized that she was sweating and sticking to the sheets. The couple she’d bought the RV from had said the air conditioner had been repaired and would probably last another year or two. They had seldom used it in Maine because they almost never needed it.

“But this is Texas,” she groaned, “and this thing is just a glorified tin can.”

She sat up and bumped her head for the second time that day, cussed loud enough that all her superior officers would have been proud of her, and finally got out of the bed to open the windows. The first one she tried was stuck, which brought on another round of cussing, and then when she had it open and turned around, the damn thing fell back down. She found a wooden spoon in a drawer, propped the window up, and as luck would have it, the only breeze that flowed through it felt like it had come from an oven. That’s when she remembered the evangelist room in the church. The bed was still there. Granted, it didn’t have sheets on the mattress, but the church was cool.

“I’ve got sheets.” She opened a drawer and pulled out what she needed to remake the bed, tugged the comforter from the loft bed, slipped on her flip-flops, and headed back out across the parking lot. She was still muttering about the heat when she realized that someone was sitting at the end of the porch in the shadows. The shadow of a full-grown man startled her, but she wasn’t running away from her own building. Whoever was over there in the dark could gather himself up and get off her property.