Rock Chick Rematch (Rock Chick)

Prologue

His Father

“Don’t make me check that backpack,” I shouted to my

son.

“Mom!”

I’d had sixteen years to navigate the wide spectrum of my

son’s different varieties of Mom! and get a lock on each version.

This one said, I don’t need my mother to check my

backpack. I haven’t since I was twelve. I’m all grown up. Stop already.

And yet, the boy was always forgetting something.

I was in the kitchen, dealing with the pork in the slow

cooker.

I was doing this against my will.

Not against my will when it came to cooking. I was a damn

good cook, and I did say so myself. Also, I liked doing it.

No, it was because it was summer. Summer wasn’t about

slow-cooker meals. That was winter. Winter was stews and chili and enchiladas.

Summer was meat on the grill and some kind of salad (preferably one with

potatoes or macaroni in it, let the good Lord bless the woman—and it had to be

a woman—who deemed those “salads”).

It almost hurt to put that pork shoulder in the crockpot

that morning.

But I was a single mom. I worked. My kid was busy with

end-of-school-year stuff (though, Liam loved to cook, just right now, with

finals and friends and parties and making plans for the summer, he had less

time than me).

And, I told myself, I was making barbeque pulled pork (the

vinegary North Carolina style, and don’t give me any guff about that goodness,

I was a barbeque aficionado, and I could appreciate all the different styles,

but if you were pulling pork, you went NC).

Pulled pork sandwiches were a summer thing.

Though, I wished I had a smoker. That said summer to me.

Also winter. A smoker didn’t discriminate.

These were the thoughts on my mind so I didn’t think of

other things.

Like the weird stuff going on at work that was giving me a

very bad vibe.

Or more importantly, like the chat I’d had with Lee and

Eddie yesterday. About the decision I’d made. About the conversation I’d had

with my son that morning. About the decision he’d made.

And about how his father was going to handle it.

(My take: he wasn’t going to handle it very well.)

(My next take: my first take was an understatement.)

Liam walked into the kitchen, all tall, gangly teen.

As I watched him, I took the hit I always took once the boy

started to fade out of him and he began to look like the man he’d become.

In other words, he began to look just like his father.

“You do my head in sometimes,” he grumbled.

Liam was a master grumbler. There was some backtalk, and he

made an art of being a moody teen, but that was as far as it went. I’d never

had any real trouble with my son. Not a day of it.

Wait, no. I referred to his terrible twos as my torrential

twos. I’d never seen a more fearless, curious, intelligent child in my life. He

found ways to get into everything. It was ingenious and exhausting.

(Like his father.)

Nor had I met a sweeter, more thoughtful and compassionate

kid in my life.

(Also, like his father. Gah!)

“I don’t need a phone call at work tomorrow, asking me to

bring something into school,” I replied.

He leveled his warm, brown eyes on me. Though warm, they had

a tinge of a spark.

“When’s the last time I asked you to bring something to

school that I forgot?”

“Last week.”

Those eyes rolled.

“You did,” I asserted.

And he did. I’d learned part of the teenage hormonal growth

cycle included not only selective hearing, but significant short-term memory

issues.

“Tomorrow is the last day. I don’t have anything I need to

take to school,” he reminded me.

“How about this? Next year, you do you,” I suggested. “If

you pull this absent-minded professor stuff, once you’re in school, you deal.”

“If I had a car, I could come home myself and get it.”

Here we go.

It wasn’t like I didn’t have the money to buy my kid a car.

I made good money. And I got an envelope every month that more than made things

comfortable for us, way more.

(Again, his father, even though his father didn’t know I

knew it was from his father.)

I could buy my kid a car.

And it’d help. Liam used mine, which was inconvenient.

And if he had his own car, after school, I could send him to

Sonic to get me a diet cherry limeade so he could drop it by the office to help

get me through the afternoon and buy a bag of Sonic ice for us to use at home

because that ice was the shizzlesticks.

I just didn’t think giving a sixteen-year-old something as

huge as a car just because I could was a good idea.

If this was a different world, I could talk to his father

about it.

Since it was this world, I was going to talk to his father

about it, I just had to wait until the man got his head out of his behind

(again).

And…well, wait until we all got beyond what Liam had decided

that morning, which, considering how things had been the last few years, I

wasn’t sure his father was going to embrace.

“Let me think about it,” I mumbled, shifting my attention

back to using the forks to pull the pork apart.

“That’s what you said the last time I mentioned it,” Liam

told me. “And the time before. And the time before that. And the time—”

I looked up at him, and that up was far. He was

tall.

Like his father.

“I’m not done thinking about it.”

Another eye roll and that did it. I was making a calendar.

Countdown to the end of the teenage eye rolls.

Liam was used to my calendars. We had a countdown to the end

of his comebacks of a snappy “So?”, which was a habit he got into when

he was eleven and testing the boundaries of my authority. We had a countdown to

the end of him dribbling his damned basketball in the house when he was

thirteen. We had a countdown to the end of his annoyed “But why?” when he

wanted to update his room from Transformers to Tupac when he was fourteen (no

shade on Tupac, and I got it my kid going into high school didn’t want to have

little boy stuff around him—it was just that he had to learn, you don’t get

stuff just because you want it—though, full disclosure: his room went from

Transformers to Tupac, but even though Liam didn’t know it, that was his

father).

But I loved my boy, so he was getting a warning.

“I’m making a calendar about that eye roll,” I shared.

Another eye roll.

I nearly started laughing.

I didn’t only because he teased, “Absent-minded professor?

You’re such a goof.”

“What?” I asked. “You’re going to be a professor.”

He leaned against the island in a casual way that had one

effect on high school girls, that effect something I refused to think about,

and another effect on his mother. This effect pushing me to think about those

high school girls and how I once was one and I caught the eye of a certain

handsome, popular boy who had command of his body at a young age, a kind smile,

a great sense of humor, and an amazing streak of loyalty, which ended up with

me being Liam’s momma.

“I’m going to be a lawyer, then a senator,” Liam stated.

I tried not to quell my son’s ambitions. In fact, the

opposite.

But I was a paralegal. Before that, I was a court reporter.

I had a lot of experience with the legal system. And I didn’t keep a database

or anything, but off the cuff, I felt I could say with a good deal of authority

that five-sixths of attorneys were pure a-holes.

I didn’t want my son to become an a-hole.

I opened my mouth to share (again) he could teach

law, this being a prelude to rehashing our conversation from that morning to

make sure the decision he’d made was one he wanted to move forward on, when the

doorbell rang.

“I’ll get it,” Liam said, moving that way.

I tamped down my fear of my son opening the front door. He

was tall and athletic. He was sixteen, not six. It wasn’t like our doorbell

rang fifty times a day, but this also was far from the first time he’d answered

it. And we lived in a nice neighborhood.

Even so, he would always be a little boy to me. It was my

lot as a mother, the worry, the drive to protect, even though now, my son

thought that last part was his job.

And this was the problem. Liam was a little boy to me, but

he was something else in reality, and he needed me to trust him to find his way

with that.

Ugh.

I needed to buy him a car.

I put the forks on a spoon rest and was about to put the top

back on the slow cooker so the meat could cook in its juices and barbeque sauce

for a while when I heard Liam’s tentative, “Mom.”

I looked up.

And I saw the man standing with him. Bushy gray beard, long

gray hair pulled back in a braid, rolled bandana around his forehead, black

leather vest over a long-sleeved Harley tee and jeans.

Duke.

I hadn’t seen Duke in…

“Honey.” His gravelly voice rolled my way, that one word

making fear grab hold of the entire length of my spine. “It’s Darius.”

The tone of his voice, the look on his face, the earth fell

from under my feet.

Because Darius was my son’s father.

And he was the love of my life.

But my boy had never met him.