Bear laughed again and I smiled. “You’re funny, kid. You know that?”
“I am?” I’d been called crazy, weird, strange, talkative, but never funny. I decided that I liked being called funny.
“Yeah,” he said pushing the money closer to me. He looked up and around the counter. “No cameras in here?”
“I never seen one, but Emma is cheap, that’s what Mama says cause she used fake flowers at her wedding, so maybe she didn’t buy cameras.” I blurted, eager to say anything to elicit another smile from Bear.
“Make sure you keep this money safe. Hide it somewhere. Don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret between you and me,” he said with a wink. I tried to wink back but only managed to blink both my eyes at him like the genie on the old reruns of I Dream of Genie. Bear reached over and pushed some of my crazy stray hairs out of my face, tucking it back behind my ear. His fingers were rough but gentle, and when he withdrew his hand I wanted nothing more than for my hair to spring back out so he could do it again.
“I don’t want your money,” I blurted. I’d gone to the dollar store last week with my three-dollar allowance and couldn’t find a single thing I really wanted. Three hundred some things were way more than I could ever want.
“Well in my world when someone does a favor, we repay that favor,” Bear said, resting his chin on his hand. My eyes darted to the ring on his middle finger, a skull with a shiny stone in the center of the eye. Bear looked down, following my gaze. “You like that?” he asked, taking the ring off his finger.
“Yeah, I never seen nothing like it.”
Bear held it between two fingers and looked down at it like he was seeing it for the first time. He was quiet and his forehead scrunched like he was thinking about something the same way mine did when I did my math homework. “I have an idea,” he said, setting the ring on the counter. “This ring? It’s a promise. In my club, when we give this to someone it represents a promise.”
“A promise for what?” I asked, staring down at the ring, amazed, as if it were hovering in mid-air.
“A favor, whatever you need. It means I owe you.”
“Me?”
“Yes,” he said, tucking the bills back into his pocket. He slid the ring onto my thumb, it was so big I had to close my fingers around it to keep it in place.
“Wow. Cool!” I looked up into his eyes and smiled. “Thank you. I’ll keep it safe I promise and I won’t use it unless it’s super important.”
“I know you won’t,” Bear said. A throat cleared and we both looked toward the sound. Standing by the open door was yet another man wearing the same type of vest.
“We gotta go, man. Chop called. We gotta be back at the MC in twenty minutes.”
“Gotta go, Darlin’, You make sure you keep that safe okay?” Bear tapped his finger over my closed fist.
“I’m not gonna tell no one. I swear it,” I said, making a cross over my chest, something you only do when you are very serious about the promise you were making and I wanted Bear to know how serious I was about keeping quiet.
With a wink and a clamoring of the bell against the door, he was gone.
I watched as he slapped the back of the head of the dark-haired man who tried to rob the store. They exchanged some angry words before putting helmets on and heading back down the road. The third man following close behind.
Not thirty seconds after the last biker had left, Emma May sauntered through the door. “Anything exciting happen while I was gone?” she called out, heading for the back room.
I set the ring in the back pocket of my shorts. Then I crossed my fingers behind my back.
“No ma’am. Not a thing.”
* * *
Bear
The sunlight of midday was blinding. Skid wasn’t the only one hungover. We had partied in Coral Pines with some spring break chicks until the sun came up this morning. Skid just hadn’t yet learned the value of eye drops and strong coffee.
The fucker is lucky I didn’t lay him out right there in the parking lot of that fucking gas station.
“Are you out of your fucking mind holding up a gas station? Especially one in the same fucking county as the club. I don’t know what they told you when you patched in brother but we’re not a bunch of fucking juvenile delinquents. We don’t ride around holding up gas stations or doing anything else that runs the risk of bringing huge heat down on us. We got big shit going on right now and dumb shit like this could land us all serving real fucking time. And who the fuck holds a gun on little fucking girls? I should shoot you to teach you a lesson. Where is your brain man?” I smacked Skid upside his head and knocked his sunglasses to the ground. “Prospect,” I shouted over to Gus. “Why don’t we do stupid shit right now? Why don’t we point guns at little girls?”
“Got big shit going on. Gotta keep a low profile,” Gus answered flatly. “And cause that’s just kind of fucked up in general.”
“Dude,” Skid said, rubbing his eyes. “I’m still drunk from last night or this morning or whenever. I’m sorry, it was fucking stupid. Just don’t fucking tell Chop okay?” He bent over to pick up his shades and I seriously thought about kicking him in the head. But then I calmed down a bit when I thought about all the stupid shit I’d done when I was first patched in, shit that would have brought hell down from my old man if he ever knew. “This one time and one time only. That’s all you get. Your only pass. You pull shit like this again and you’re dealing with Chop on your fucking own and I won’t be there to come to your rescue.” I straddled my bike.
“What was all that talk about the ring?” Gus asked. “That’s the first time I heard about it. Did I miss something I’m supposed to know about? Am I supposed to give away a ring too? Cause I don’t have one as nice as the skull one you gave her.” Gus was always eager to learn and the possibility that he might have missed something made him look twitchy.
“No man, that was all fucking bullshit. A ring in exchange for her not calling the fucking law or her mommy and daddy to tell them what the big mean bikers did,” I said.
“Creative,” Gus said, pulling on his riding gloves.
“You gave the girl your skull ring? Didn’t that thing have a diamond in it?”
“It sure did, and you’ll pay me back every fucking penny.” I turned on the engine, the roar of the bike coming to life between my thighs.
I laughed all the way home at the look on Skid’s face when I said he owed me.
I never thought about that day or that girl again.
Until seven years later, when it all came back and bit me in the ass.
CHAPTER TWO
Thia
Seven years later…
Silence.
Scarier than any gun blast or cannon fire. Louder than thunder and ten times more terrifying.
Carrying one of Mrs. Kitchener’s famous apple pies with one hand and holding onto the handle of my bike with the other, I navigated the rocks and holes on the narrow dirt road that led up to the small farmhouse I lived in with my parents.
Every day when I got home from my part-time job at the Stop-N-Go I was greeted by the bickering voices of my parents. With no other houses around for miles their voices carried over the tops of the trees and I heard them well before I saw the light in the window.
Before my little brother died I’d never heard them fight at all. When Sunlandio Cooperation decided to import their oranges, canceling their long held contracts with my family’s grove, the bickering turned to full-blown hatred filled screams.
I set my bike down in the dirt, carefully shifting the pie from one hand to the other. Unable to bend down to retie my shoelace that had come undone on the ride, I shook out my foot as I walked, making sure not to trip over the hanging strings.
Chills broke out over my damp skin causing it to prickle with little bumps, making the little hairs on the back of my neck and my arms stand on end like I was moments away from being struck by lightning.
That’s when I noticed it.
The silence.
“Mom?” I called out, but there was no answer.
“Dad?” I asked as I swung open the screen door. The lamp on the side table was on, the lampshade tilted on its side like it too was questioning what the hell was going on.
I heard a scuffle from the back room. “You guys back there?” I asked, setting the pie down on the counter. I made my way down the hall, pushing open the door to my parent’s room, but it was empty. Same for the only bathroom and my room.
At the end of the hall, the door to my brother’s old room was cracked open. My mother, having kept Jesse’s room as a shrine to him since he’d passed, had always kept the door closed and whispered when she was in the hall like he was in there taking a nap and she didn’t want to wake him up.
“Mom?” I asked again, slowly pushing open the door.
“Come on in, Cindy. We’re in here,” she said cheerily. It was the first time I’d heard my mom’s voice take on a happy tone in years, although I hated that she’d called me Cindy.
It made my stomach roll.
Something was so wrong I almost didn’t want to see what was waiting for me on the other side of that door.
And I was right.
I didn’t.
Because there was my mother, sitting in the old rocking chair she used to read to Jesse in, clutching his favorite dinosaur, rocking back and forth and back and forth, clutching the stuffed animal to her chest and nuzzling up against it.
Her eyes were rimmed in red with dark circles underneath, yet she had a smile on her face. “I’m so happy you’re home Cindy-loo-hoo,” she said, using the Dr. Seuss nickname she hadn’t called me in years. “Are you ready to go?” she asked.
“Where? Go where, Mom? Where is Dad?”
“Your father didn’t want to wait so he left already, but I wanted you to come with us so I waited for you.” Her smile was big, but her eyes were glistening and were completely void of any emotion.
“But where did he go?” I asked again, stepping further into the room.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be joining him soon. I just wanted to talk to Jesse first,” she said, stroking the dinosaur.
“Mom, Jesse is dead.” I reminded her. “He died years ago.”
Mom nodded and her eyes darted to the Star Wars themed wallpaper and then to his stack of Legos in the corner. “I know that, silly.”
“Okay, because I thought for a second you were saying that…”
“I just wanted to let him know that we’d be joining him soon,” Mom said. It was then, when she shifted the stuffed animal from one arm to the other, that I noticed the gun on her lap.
“Mom?” I asked, my entire body starting to shake with awareness of what she was really saying. “Tell me where Dad is,” I whispered.
“I told you. He’s gone. He left without us because he couldn’t wait. He was always the impatient one.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “You’re a lot like him in so many ways,” she sang.
“Why do you have a gun, Mom?”
“Silly girl, how else are we going to meet up with Jesse and your father? I mean I know there are other ways but I think this is the quickest and most efficient. After all, we don’t want to keep them waiting too long,” she said, patting the dinosaur’s back like she was burping it. Back and forth she continued to rock, never breaking the slow and steady rhythm. The chair creaking with each roll over the hardwood floors.
I took another step toward her hoping to snatch the gun from her hand, but she saw where I was looking and picked up the pistol, waving it in the air. “Nah ah. Your father wanted to be the one to hold it too but I insisted. This is a job for Mommy and no one else. It’s about time I took some control and took care of this family. Having us all in the same place is the first step.”
My foot on the floorboards sounding as quiet as a beating drum. “Now, now, Cindy. You were never good at waiting your turn, but the good news is that you’ll be first.”
“Where did you send Dad to meet Jesse?” I asked, tears prickling behind my eyes but the adrenaline coursing through my veins prevented them from spilling.
“I don’t see why that matters,” Mom said, blowing off a strand of dark curls that had fallen into her eyes. “But if you must know he left in our room. It was a lot messier than I expected. When I send you I think it should be in the tub, then I’ll just climb in after you. Maybe I’ll leave some bleach for the sheriff, red stains are the worst, especially in the white grout,” she said with the same eerily cheery voice she’d greeted me with.
I took a step back and Mom continued to stare up at me, smiling a full-toothed smile from ear to ear. She didn’t follow me when I turned and opened the door to their bedroom. It was empty.
Mom’s gone crazy. That doesn’t mean Dad is dead. She could be lying. She could be making it up.
I rounded the bed.
Please be alive, please be alive.
On the floor on the side of the bed against the wall was my father’s lifeless body, his eyes and mouth both opened, frozen in surprise.
I gasped and covered my mouth. “No, no, no, no, no!” I shouted.
I backed away from my dad into the hallway and when I looked down the hall my mother was no longer in the rocking chair. I turned to run out the door but ran directly into the soft satin of my mother’s pink nightgown.
“You ready honey?” she asked, cocking her head to the side. The gun was in her hands but it wasn’t raised.
“I, I, I need to say a few things to Jesse too,” I said, scooting past her towards his room.
She smacked herself in the forehead with the barrel of the gun. “Silly me, of course you do. I’ll be waiting right here and then after we meet them we’ll have ice cream.”
“Yuh yuh yeeaaaahhh, ice cream is good, Mom,” I said, sniffling. I sidestepped her and pretended like I was turning down the hall to Jesse’s room, she shifted her shoulders to make room for me, and I took the only chance I knew I had and burst into a sprint, dodging her as I made a run in the opposite direction toward the door.
The wall beside the door exploded as a bullet tore into the hundred-year-old plaster. My mother was laughing as I leapt down the porch steps. One of the laces of my shoes caught on the railing and I sailed forward through the air, landing on my chest. The air whooshed out of my lungs and I turned on my back, desperately gasping for air.
“You talked your way out of that trip to Nana’s last year, you’re not getting out of this,” my mother said as she looked down at me from the porch. In my peripherals I spotted my father’s old rifle against the front of the house. He used it to scare the critters away from eating the oranges. I don’t think it had been used since the previous harvest. It had been out in the elements for months.
Chances were that the thing didn’t even work.
“I’m not talking my way out of it, Mom,” I said, as I could finally draw in a breath. Slowly, I crab-walked on my hands and feet, sideways toward the house.
Toward the only shot I had of surviving.
“I just thought that maybe we could do it together, you know, go at the same time,” I said, mirroring her cheery voice as best I could.
“Oh, Cindy that’s a lovely idea. You were always my sweet one, you know. Headstrong. And a holy terror at times, but you could also be very sweet. I loved the way you used to play with my necklaces and earrings when you were a baby.” Mom set the gun against her chest and sighed.
“Can you do me a favor though, Mom? Can you use Dad’s old rifle? That way I have something to talk to him about when we get there. And I can use the gun you sent him to Jesse with. It will be fun and you know it’s hard for me to find things to talk about with Dad.”
“You know,” she said, picking up the rifle off the house. I climbed to my feet and wavered, holding onto the chipped siding so I wouldn’t fall. “I wish your father would have thought of something nice like this. It would have been so much easier. You should have heard him screaming and yelling.” She let out
a quick burst of laughter. “Begging.” She inspected the gun to make sure it was loaded then tossed it to me. I caught it and made sure it was loaded just as she had. “Can you believe it? Your father…begging. It was quite ridiculous.”
Under the moonlight my mother’s ivory skin glowed. I’d always envied her long dark curls and naturally pink lips. To me she’d always looked like Snow White. I used to watch her pick oranges in the grove for her famous orange marmalade and wonder why I got stuck with pinkish hair, green eyes, and freckles, instead of her