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Yeah, he did know why Jay was angry and hurt. He felt abandoned by Zach’s transfer, and today, during the ceremony or whatever they’d end up calling it, he’d watched Pop put his love and pride for Zach out in public in a way that, even to Zach, even in the moment, had seemed to exclude Jay.
Zach knew that their parents loved Jay as much as they loved him. Maybe it wasn’t the exact same love, but it was the exact same degree. And maybe that was the way it should be: people were individuals, everybody different, so it stood to reason that love between two people was always unique.
Today hadn’t been an exclusion of Jay. It had simply been a moment that was Zach’s.
Zach now lived in Laughlin; he was a Nevada Bull. It would be Jay who went home with their parents, Jay who’d be there every day to make of his relationships with them what he would, without the grate of Zach’s presence on every moment. It was the reason Zach had felt like he needed to go—to get some space that was only his.
Seemed like Jay needed the same thing. Maybe once they were back in Tulsa, all the decisions made and finalized, everybody settling into the new way of things, Jay would understand that he hadn’t been abandoned.
He’d been set free. Just like Zach.
Understanding that his brother wouldn’t be able to see it until he felt it happening, and knowing there was no more he could do to settle things between them until then, Zach decided he could be patient. He’d give his brother the time he needed. They’d both get on with their lives and come together again when they were ready.
“Okay, cuntface,” he said softly. “You know where to find me when you need me.” He stepped out of the room and closed the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Lyra stood in the middleof the woefully under-equipped kitchen, which was a chaotic whirlwind of women and food, and tried to get her bearings. She felt like she’d been running in circles now for days, an endless cycle of feeding people, cleaning up after them, finding them places to sit and places to sleep, directing them to things that needed to be done or people who were looking for them.
Was this what being an air traffic controller was like?
Gargoyle’s—Jason’s—funeral was over. The Laughlin Bulls—actually, they were calling themselves the Nevada Bulls now; Lyra had helped Zach, Pop, and Reed sew their patches and flashes and rockers on the night before—the Nevada Bulls had started the day with a small, private thing just among them to send their first lost brother off, then they’d invited the Oklahoma Bulls and their families to join them to say goodbye. While that was going on, a whole lot of other people had rolled onto the property just north of the Fort Mojave reservation’s Nevada border, and they’d all escorted Gargo’s casket to the crematorium. The line of motorcycles had seemed to go on for miles. Then they’d all ridden back for the wake.
She hadn’t heard an official count, but it had to be more than a hundred people, bikers and the people who loved them, plus more than a dozen people from the reservation, who’d converged on the compound in the past forty-eight hours. Every time she turned around, there were more people she’d never met, looking for the bathroom, for a beer, for a particular Bull.
All those people, and somehow she’d found herself in charge of taking care of them.
Well, that was mostly true. The full truth was she’d somehow found herself in competition with her own mother for being in charge. As overwhelmed as she was, it seriously bugged her to watch her mother flouncing around trying to run the show.
In a gentle, not-too-annoying way, Zach had been trying to persuade her to let Mom have the reins she so obviously wanted. He saw how tired and stressed Lyra was getting, how the weird tension with her mom was exacerbating that, and tried to get her to see that she could let go, simply help out rather than be responsible for the whole thing, and get a chance to rest once in a while.
It made sense, and she saw it. She just couldn’tdoit. The truth was, she was pissed at her mom, and yeah, she felt competitive with her. Not long ago, she’d thought how dumb it was for her mom to feel jealous of her, and here she was, feeling jealous right back.
Her parents were maybe getting back together. They definitely were getting frisky together on the regular, and not bothering to hide it or even acknowledge it might be surprising to their children. Reed thought it was great. Mom thought it was great. Pop clearly thought it was great.
Lyra watched her mother and wondered: was Mom just playing around with Pop because she knew she could? Would she dump him the second the next likely candidate came along?
Maybe it wasn’t fair. In all the years since the divorce, Mom hadn’t ever done anything like it, even while she tried and failed to find someone else to spend her life with. Not until this mess with Wade. Maybe she’d simply realized that she’d had it much better with Pop, a man who loved her wildly even if he didn’t show it in love-story ways, than she ever would find elsewhere.
Maybe she simply, truly, wanted to be with him again.
Lyra had asked her directly one time. Mom had laughed and said, “We’ll see what we see.”
What a bullshit answer. She hadn’t bothered to ask again. But if her father got flattened again in all this, Lyra would never speak to her mother again.
