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Mom throws her purse to the floor of the truck. It makes a thud and then we sit. Letting the weight of the past week crush us both. Can’t imagine what it was like for her. Sitting at the bar, waiting. Each minute that passed upping the odds I wasn’t coming to get her and that I wasn’t returning home.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not the Terror’s either.”
Her lack of a response expresses her disagreement. Even suggests a couple of curse words she still refuses to say in front of me, but that I’ve heard her utter to a few asshole customers.
“After all you’ve been through,” she says, “I don’t know how to make you understand how dangerous they are.”
“I’m home. I’m fine.”
She whips her head in my direction. “Fine? You’re not fine. The bruises may be fading, but when I look in your eyes, I don’t see my son. Violet may be the one who went quiet, but you’re not acting the same either. You don’t laugh. You don’t smile.”
I curl the keys into my palm and the pain from the edges is welcomed. “It’s barely been a week. Violet was just released today. What do you expect from me?”
“That you’ll wake up and see that the road you’re choosing is one that is going to shatter my heart.” Her voice breaks at the end and it’s like someone has reached into my chest and crushed my heart.
This is my mom. The woman who has raised me on her own selling drinks to men who treat her like shit. The woman who has attended every practice, peewee football game, JV and then varsity game known to man. The woman who has nursed cuts, broken bones and a broken heart.
“What do you want me to do?” I ask in such a low tone I’m not sure she heard it.
“You know what I want.”
A life away from the Terror. What had she said once? Football, a girl, a few high school parties, the son who goes away to college. Somebody else’s normal.
“Days like today I wish I could go back and slap the girl I was in high school. Tell her to take school more seriously. Tell her to take the advanced math course over the basic. Tell her that boys weren’t the answer, but really the problem. Maybe if I had taken my life more seriously, then I wouldn’t have had to rely on the Terror so much when you were younger. Then maybe you wouldn’t be as close to them as you are now. I should have done better.”
“You’ve done a great job raising me.”
“Bartending, waitressing, being away from you at night and on the weekends. Just because I wanted to be the one to take you to school in the morning. Because I wanted to be the mom who brought the cupcakes on party day and then picked you up. Because it’s the job that made me financially free from the Terror. But it wasn’t enough. I should have been home. I should have a better job. I should have found someone else to take care of you. I should have never relied on the Terror.”
I wonder if she gets tired of the same fight. “They’re my family.”
“But that doesn’t make them a good family. Even James knew that.”
Lightning strike to the chest. “What?”
Mom grabs her purse and places her hand on the door handle. “Nothing. I’m just mad.”
I’m not ready to let that go, especially with Skull’s accusation still hanging around me like a noose, but most wars are won and lost on timing. Pushing her on my father now, a subject she hates to begin with, would be the equivalent of charging a field full of defenders without a helmet.
“Bad things happen to normal people,” I say.
“They do,” she concedes. “But not like this. Never like this. Stay in the truck, Chevy. I need a few minutes by myself before I start work.”
Meaning she needs to find a way to center herself before she flirts her way into tips to pay for rent. The passenger-side door squeaks open and Mom leaves. Kills me not to walk in with her. My skin crawls with the idea I’m not eyeballing the men at the bar. Scaring the hell out of them so they’ll pass on to others not to mess with
her.
But she needs space and I need to quiet the roaring in my head. Mom doesn’t go straight in. Like a taunt she leans against the side of the building and has her head tilted up as if there’s something to see. Me? I wait.
* * *
The clubhouse is so packed full of people I have to park on the grass closer to the narrow path that leads from the main road to Cyrus’s place. The moonlight glints on row after row of motorcycles and here and there men stand in groups near them. To the right, a couple is doing the deed on a Harley Softail.
I ignore them and lift my chin to the guys who call out my name. Pigpen and Dust have already told me, multiple times, that lots of brothers are ready and willing to buy me as many beers as I can drink tonight, tomorrow night, forever. All I need to do is walk into the clubhouse and make my way to the bar, but I don’t feel like drinking.
