4. Chapter 4
Remember our last trip? We were supposed to go to the Dakotas.
Got as far as Audubon before I made good on my promise to turn the car around and take us home if you boys didn’t shape up.
I don’t think your mother ever forgave me for it.
She wanted you to see the dinosaur museum.
A few months later she was gone, and a few months after that I sold the Squire. I couldn’t look at it without her.
Turning around, letting my anger get the better of me all those years ago, is one of my biggest regrets. I should’ve kept driving and seen it through.
Quitting isn’t an option this time.
“I wish I could see their faces.” Aldus Whitlock had chuckled when he handed her the keys. “If I know those boys, they’ll be shitting bricks.”
Lindsey grinned, puffing hard on the short cigar Whitlock had given her.
The letter outlining Jason Young’s latest intentions rustled in the wind on the passenger seat beneath a red leather journal.
Her own dad would’ve gotten a kick out of seeing her behind the wheel of a car from his generation, and she would’ve sent him a picture if she didn’t think he’d show up with a cavalry of Marine vets to haul her back home instead of letting his baby girl take a trip with two men.
The baby girl he thought was still sixteen, not almost thirty.
With Elvis crooning on the radio, Lindsey arrived at the address Graham texted her before finishing the Davidoff.
It was the same brand of cigar she’d smoked with Jason in his study at Christmas the first night they met, after she admitted she was just a bartender, not the journalist Graham claimed.
“A bartender? So what?” Jason had said over a glass of expensive bourbon. “I met my wife when she was just a waitress.”
At the time Lindsey had smiled and fallen a little bit in love.
Knowing he wouldn’t appreciate her snuffing out the cigar prematurely today, she parked in front of the two-story brick apartment complex and leaned on the passenger door, her feet on the curb, to keep smoking.
A long puff sent tingles down her arms to her fingers. Another turned her lips numb.
Somehow, in the year she’d been with Graham, Lindsey still hadn’t met Jase.
Two ships passing in the night, she supposed.
A few weeks ago, she found a picture in Jason Sr.’s desk of a gawky teenager in braces, stubbled with acne, dark hair down to his shoulders beneath a graduation cap.
There was almost no resemblance between Graham—curly, dishwater-blond hair and beard—and his older brother, except for broad shoulders and something in the eyes that was hard to suss out in a photo.
She would finally meet Jase today.
Then they would spend an undetermined amount of time trapped in the Country Squire, a wooden wagon Jason Young Sr. chose for his boys and their travels. He had used his last breaths to ask for a favor Lindsey didn’t understand until now, facing a road trip with his sons.
“No matter how bad it gets, promise me you’ll stick it out until the end.”
Things were pretty bad already. He didn’t know how much Graham changed in the months leading up to his death.
Unless he did and that’s why he made her promise to hold on a little longer.
The sound of a motorcycle drew her attention down the street.
Lindsey watched a man with short, windblown hair, worn boots, and a T-shirt meant to show the muscles beneath it breeze into the parking lot like something out of an ’80s metal music video.
He parked the bike and casually, but not discreetly, took off his sunglasses with a wry smile and inspected her from top to bottom.
Then he tipped his head to look around her, and Lindsey wondered if it was the car she was leaning on, not her low-cut dress, that caught his attention.
“That a Squire?” he hollered.
“It is,” she said.
He hooked his sunglasses on his collar and walked over with a slightly bow-legged swagger.
“Sixty-six?” he asked.
There wasn’t a trace of awkward teen in the man who stopped in front of her. Time and mileage had chiseled definition into his cheeks, arms, and knuckles, and there was no telling what hard planes were hidden by his jeans and T-shirt.
“Sixty-seven,” Lindsey said.
“My old man used to have one just like it.”
He has absolutely no idea who I am.
She smiled sweetly. “You don’t say?”
Jase ran his palm along the wooden panel, his body angled toward hers and close enough to smell the spice in his deodorant and a hint of gasoline.
“She’s got some custom features. Check this out.” He pointed through the front passenger window and laughed. “A tape deck.”
“Is that special?” Lindsey asked.
“It’s aftermarket, is what it is. She had an eight-track player when she came off the assembly line.”
“You know a lot about cars.”
“Some. I know even more about bikes.” A corner of his mouth tipped up. “You ride?”
She’d only heard the worst things about Jase from Graham, especially his proclivity for, as Graham put it, jumping from one bed to the next. Jason Sr. was more forgiving of his oldest son, but even he admitted Jase could slow down, and he didn’t just mean on his bike.
Lindsey suppressed a smile, wondering how far she could push him before he realized his mistake.
“No, never.”
“You want to?”
It was work not to give it away. She puffed hard on the cigar and asked, “Are you hitting on me? I don’t think I’m your type.”
He rested his arm on the roof. “And what is that?”
She looked him over as if she hadn’t already, noticing the strip of darker skin on the sides of his neck where the sun baked it and rough, cracked knuckles.
“Big hair, piercings, headbangs to Whitesnake—if I had to guess.”
He leaned over, a laugh punching out of his chest, and Lindsey caught another whiff of spice and something older, rougher. Leather?
“Am I close?”
“Big hair?” He was still laughing. “There’s not enough Aqua Net in the world. Big hair doesn’t last on a bike, babe. Wild hair, though…”
It took her a moment to realize he meant hers. Unruly was the word usually used to describe her not-quite-curly waves tamable only by thick product and a hair dryer. Wild was better.
His cheeks hollowed, and the intensity of his pale green eyes zeroed in on her face almost made her forget why she was smoking one of his dad’s cigars in front of his apartment.
Almost.
Lindsey pushed off the side of the car and said, “Feeling nostalgic?”
“Why?”
She nodded to the wagon. “Keys are in the ignition if you want to go for a drive.”
“You’re serious?” he asked, crossing his arms. “You don’t know me, and you’d just give me your car?”
“I don’t know you, and you thought I’d go for a ride on your bike?”
He frowned. “Fair point.”
“And anyway, it’s not my car. It’s yours.”