Chapter 2 #2
"We made a pie and I did two whole worksheets, and Grandma let me have a Coke with lunch, which she said not to tell you about." She's got flour in one braid. "But I'm tellin' you about it because keepin' secrets from your daddy is wrong."
"That's real big of you."
I set her down.
"Rat out your grandma first thing."
"Mama Lou," my mother calls from the kitchen, unbothered, sliding a pan onto the stovetop. "She gets to call me Mama Lou like everybody else and you get to hush about the Coke. Wash up, both of you. I made too much, so you're eatin' like you mean it, Thunder, you've gone thin."
I have gone thin.
Getting shot'll do that.
I don't argue with my mother about it because you don't win those either.
We eat at the kitchen table, the three of us, chicken off the grill and my mother's potato salad.
The kind of easy noise a house makes when there's a nine-year-old in it, and for a little while I let the road stay out on the road.
Raine talks enough for all three of us.
Mama Lou watches me eat with the happiness of a woman confirming her son isn't going to waste away on her watch.
My leg throbs under the table, and I ignore it, and it's the best I've felt all day.
Then Raine sets her fork down and gets a thinking look, and I know something's coming, because Raine at a dead stop is Raine loading up.
"Daddy, can Miss Presley come to dinner sometime?"
The table doesn't go quiet, because Mama Lou's too smooth for that.
She goes still over her plate and doesn't look at me, which is its own kind of loud.
"She helped me name my barn kitten," Raine goes on earnestly, building her case.
"The gray one. She said his name should be Biscuit and she was right, he looks exactly like a biscuit.
And she knows everything about horses and cows, and she said she'd show me how the cows get matched up for babies, the science part, and she never came to show me 'cause she's been busy. "
There’s a moment of silence before she starts up again.
"Can she come? I miss her."
I miss her.
Two words out of a nine-year-old and they go into me deeper than anything the road did today.
Because I miss her too, and that's what I can't say.
I miss her at this table so bad it's a physical pain worse than the hip, and my daughter just laid it out plainly the way kids do.
She said the true thing none of the grown-ups are allowed to say, and she's looking up at me waiting for me to fix it like I fix everything else.
I can't fix this one.
"She's been workin' awful hard, baby," I say, and I keep my voice easy.
"Up before the sun, out at those pens all day. Runnin' a whole cattle program by herself is a big job. I 'spect by suppertime she's wore all the way out and just wants to put her feet up."
"Oh."
Raine considers this, and I think it’s a good enough answer for her, because nine-year-olds take you at your word when you love them right.
"Okay. Maybe when she's not so tired."
"Maybe then."
"I hope she's not too tired for too long." She picks her fork back up. "I like her. She's not fake-nice like some grown-ups. She's real-nice."
"Yeah," I say. "She is."
Across the table, my mother looks at me then, one long look, the look a woman gives you when she's known you your whole life and can read something off your face you'd swear you kept blank.
She doesn't say a word.
Mama Lou never needs the words.
But that look says I see it, son, whatever it is, I see it.
I hold her eyes and I don't give her anything back, because some loads you carry alone until you can't.
* * *
Raine's asleep by dark, and my mother's gone home.
I'm out on the porch with a beer I'm not drinking and my leg propped on the rail, and I let it all come back now that there's nobody to keep my face right for.
A silver truck on an empty road, running our charter, as disciplined as a soldier.
A plate number in Spur's head that Rogue's going to run tonight, and whatever comes back off it isn't going to be good, because good things don't tail three bikers for forty miles.
My daughter across a supper table saying I miss her about a woman I can't have, in a house on a ranch where a man I can't catch is watching us from the dark.
I used to be the one they sent into that dark.
I used to be the man other men worried about coming for them, the one Phantom pointed at a problem and stopped thinking about it.
Now I'm a man who wins a fight with his own hip to walk to his own porch, sitting in the light where anybody could see me, with everything I love in the world sleeping behind me in a house I'm not sure I could defend if it came to it tonight.
The Firm's still out there.
That's what the road said today.
And me—the Sergeant at Arms, the sword of this club—I can't run anymore, I can't chase, I can barely swing my own kid up off the porch without paying for it.
But I catch myself rubbing the rattlesnake on my neck, slowly, the way you press on a bruise to remind yourself it's real, and I think about a woman two cabins over who saw it this morning and walked closer before she caught herself.
She walked closer.
Broken hip, watched house, a ghost on the road and a family I can't fully guard. I've got a stack of problems tonight tall enough to bury a lesser man.
But she walked closer.
And a man works with what he's got.