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All Mom would ever say was that families were made up of people, and people were flawed. Sometimes the bonds between flawed people broke apart.
Sitting here now, Zach saw that maybe Jay was right. Maybe Mom was freaking out so much about the possibility of him moving away because of what happened with her family. It was different, a lot different, but maybe not in her mind.
He reached over and grabbed her hand. “I’m here, Mom. Even if I’m not actually in the same place as you, I’m still right here. I’m not going anywhere.” He hoped that made sense. His family would always be home, even if restlessness took him down the road.
She smiled and squeezed his hand.
Pop, who was conflicted about the Laughlin question, cleared his throat. “Anybody think we should toast Dex and Kelsey?”
Mom lifted her glass and brightened her smile. “Of course we should!”
––––––––
~oO~
Lying in bed that night, his TV playing an episode ofCastlevaniahe’d seen a dozen times, Zach laughed and textedI am never getting that image out of my head.
Neither am I, and I LIVED that shit.
Worst one yet. For me, at least. My dad
says he’s done plenty worse. Blech
Lyra hadn’t wanted to go into detail about the job she’d worked, but he was curious, so he’d nagged until she relented.
As a Bull, Zach had seen and done some gnarly shit. He wore the Righteous Fist flash, which was the Bulls’ way of honoring—and identifying—the men at the table who’d killed in the service of the club.
Zach’s first kills—and his only, so far—had been two sad-ass tweakers who’d rolled Jay and nearly killed him. That job had been gross and grimy, and not nearly as satisfying as he thought righteous vengeance should be.
But really, he’d done far grosser stuff as a prospect and a new patch, burying the bodies other brothers had made, or cleaning up the messes they’d left behind making them. He’d thought he had a high tolerance for viscera.
The scene Lyra and her family had spent six full hours cleaning today topped that by a mile. A five-hundred pound guy had had a heart attack and died in his living room. A friendless recluse who lived at the edge of a shabby neighborhood in a shabby house with one of those yards that accumulated decades’ worth of crap—rusting bikes, old washers, and the like. All his social interactions were online; the only contact with the actual physical world came from delivery guys, one of whom finally noticed after three weeks that the boxes piling up on the porch were new boxes.
Sometime in those three weeks, the dude’s electric had been turned off.
In August. In Nevada.
Lyra and her family had spent the day cleaning the site where a hugely fat dude living in a filthy, crowded house had died and then essentially melted.
I had a much better day than you
Birth > death for sure
––––––––
Can I ask you something?
The dots flashed fora few seconds.
... sure ...
Why do you do that work?
Hope that isn’t a shitty question
He got that it was the family business, and maybe Ben insisted. He could believe that. Ben seemed a lot like Pop in that way: stubborn and hard to refuse. But Zach was starting to get attached to this girl, and he hated thinking of her working all those nasty scenes.
The dots flashed longer this time, went away for a few seconds, came back, went away. Finally, a text appeared.
