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Zach stepped into hisfather’s workshop. Pop had his back to the door, his head down, his hands buried in the guts of a Fifties-vintage Harley he was restoring on commission. Skynyrd blared from the stereo system Zach and Jay had given him for his birthday a couple years back. Both dogs lay in their beds along the side wall. They followed Pop everywhere they could.
Pop had hung up his kutte several years back, after a third heart attack had resulted in aquintuplebypass and Mom had put her foot down. He’d flatlined four times with that third heart attack and in the days immediately after it, and he’d been in a coma for more than two weeks. They’d all thought he’d never come home again.
But he had; he’d recovered and was doing okay. Mom, however, was not having anymore life-threatening behaviors from her man. She was pretty mellow about most things, had a very high threshold for stress, but once she was scared, she was fire and fury. An irresistible force.
So Pop’s kutte spent most of its time hung in the closet, and Pop’s club ink had a dated “Retired” tag on it now. Zach didn’t think a single day went by his old man didn’t actively hate not wearing the Bull and sitting in church.
But he loved his old lady more.
Not wanting to startle his weak-hearted, lionhearted old man, Zach waited for a pause in the music to announce himself. Of course it was ‘Free Bird’ playing, so he had a wait. He stood in the open doorway, leaning against the jamb, and watched Pop work.
He couldn’t remember a time he didn’t love working on bikes with his old man. There were photos of him as a toddler, wearing only a diaper, standing barefoot and dimple-kneed on a stepstool at the workbench. Mom had framed one such photo and hung it on the wall with the other favored family pictures. It showed him, his hair almost blond and his diaper sagging, standing on that stepstool with Pop leaning over him. He held a socket wrench, and Pop had his big, sunbaked hand over Zach’s, helping him use the wrench.
He and Jay talked about it sometimes—they’d hit the jackpot in the parent lottery. Sure, there were fights and squabbles; sure, they got in trouble from time to time. There wasn’t a mellow bone in Pop’s body, so he could get pretty intense when he was mad. But he’d never laid an angry hand on them or caused hurt with a word. Mom and Pop loved their kids and never let a day pass without making sure they felt it.
For Zach, that had made it hard to act out. He felt too guilty to rebel against such great parents, and shit, what would he have done to rebel, anyway? Be a biker? Party hard? Get laid a lot? Break the law? All that was woven into the fabric of his family. Hell, he’d been allowed to cuss as long as he’d been using words. The only rule about that when they were kids was not to let loose around the normies—or, as the old farts called them, the ‘civilians.’
Mom had gotten really angry with Zach only once he could recall, when he was around ten. She’d yelled plenty of times other than that, but mostly just trying to get them to listen, or because they’d scared her doing some dumb daredevil thing, rather than a display of real anger. On that day, though, she’d beenpissed. He’d called Jay a ‘retard,’ and she’d absolutely laid into him for it.
Cussing was fine, but calling people names was out of bounds. Especially certain kinds of names. After she’d worked the yelling out, she’d come back to talk to him about it. Honestly, what she’d said then, calmly, with her arm around him, had had more impact than the anger. She’d told him she’d thought he was a better person than one who’d use a word like that.
He’d remember that feeling all the way to his deathbed.
Of course, Jay and Zach called each other filthy names all the time, but that was in fun. Between them, words like ‘cuntface’ were endearments. Those, Mom didn’t love but didn’t get heartburn over.
Jay had managed to get in a lot more trouble than Zach ever had (how to rebel: be loud about it and get the normies’ attention) but he agreed; they were lucky. Their family was good.
Today, Zach was going to break their mother’s heart.
Skynyrd finally shut the fuck up, and Zach stood straight and knocked on the jamb. “Hey, Pop.”
Pop looked over his shoulder. He took in Zach’s kutte and then nodded. “Hey, son. You headed to the clubhouse?” He muted the commercial. Pop was too cheap to pay for ad-free music streaming.
Zach came in and went to stand beside the workbench. “Yeah. Church is in about an hour. I was hoping to talk to Mom before I went. I thought she was doing paperwork from home today.”
“Hand me that 5.” Zach plucked a 5mm socket from the tray and handed it over. “Thanks. Yeah, she got called in. There’s trouble nobody can solve but her. Apparently.”
“What kind of trouble?” Mom was in charge of nursing for the whole hospital. If it was a problem only she could solve, that seemed big.
But Pop shrugged. “I don’t know. I wasn’t payin’ that much attention.”
Zach laughed. “Isn’t that your job, paying attention to your old lady?”
Pop gave him a sidelong look. “I listen when she needs to talk somethin’ out. When she needs to rant, she only needs my ears to be in the same room. This morning she needed to rant, and my ears were there.” Focused on the manifold in his hands, he smirked. “You’ll learn. Maybe with this girl in Nevada, huh?”
Zach hadn’t wanted to talk much about Lyra. He liked it being a private thing he had. But Jay had spilled the beans, so he’d had a series of long talks with Mom, and Pop, and Mom and Pop together over the new charter and his role in it. They both thought Lyra was the big draw to Laughlin. They’d apparently forgotten that Zach had wanted this assignment before he’d met her.
He was letting them think it was Lyra. The other, primary reason, that he wanted distance, would hurt them too much, and they wouldn’t understand. Zach only half understood himself, and he felt guilty as hell about it.
“I don’t know, Pop. Like I keep saying, we only had one date, and Jay and her friend were with us. Nothing happened, and I don’t know what’ll happen when I go back.” Most of that was true. Nobody needed to know what they’d been doing over FaceTime lately. That was just for them. And it was some of the hottest sex he’d ever had.
“But you want to be with her.”
“Yeah. I like her a lot.” He sighed. “It’s complicated. The last thing I want in thislifeis to hurt Mom.”
Setting his tools aside, Pop turned and leaned on the workbench. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Mom loves havin’ you and Jake still home, but she knows you’ll fly the nest. Most of what she’s feelin’ about this Laughlin thing isn’t about you, Zach.”
“It’s about the Randalls.” He’d worked that out himself.
