Chapter Two #2
The man should be ugly. He should have one eye and a limp and maybe a personality built entirely out of old tobacco spit.
Instead, he is tall and broad with tattoos disappearing under his sleeves, a swanky beard, and a mouth that looks cruel until it almost smiles.
There’s not one hair on his shaved head, but he has the kind of body a woman notices even when she has more important things to worry about, which only makes me resent him more.
He opens my door wider before I can push it closed again.
I glare at him because it’s easier than saying thank you. “I can open a door.”
“I can see that.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“Because you looked like you were fixing to sit in there until sunrise.”
“I was thinking.”
“Looked painful.”
My mouth opens.
Nothing polite comes out in my head, so I keep it shut.
He glances past me at August. Something shifts in his face, so quick I almost miss it. Not softness. More like discomfort wearing a mask.
“What’s the kid’s name, again?”
“August.”
“August,” he repeats, like he is testing the weight of it. “That a family name?”
“No.”
“Month he was born?”
“No.”
Derby waits.
I sigh because I’m tired and because his silence is somehow more irritating than questions. “I liked the name.”
“That allowed?”
“It was when I filled out the birth certificate.”
One corner of his mouth moves.
Not quite a smile.
It shouldn’t feel like winning.
August wakes then with a small, broken sound, blinking at the lights and the men and the strange place surrounding us. His face crumples before he even knows why.
“Mama?”
“I’m here.” I unbuckle fast and turn, reaching for him. “I’m right here, baby.”
“August Vale,” he answers Derby’s question, like he heard it in his sleep. Regrettably, giving too much away.
He wraps both arms around my neck when I lift him out of the tow rig. He is getting too big to carry for long, all knees and elbows and warm sleep-heavy weight, but I hold him anyway. His dinosaur presses between us. His breath smells like crackers and fear.
“Where are we?” he whispers.
I look over his head at the old jail. At the bikers. At Derby watching us like he would rather be punched than asked to help.
“We’re somewhere safe for tonight,” I say.
The lie tastes hopeful.
Derby hears it. I know he does because his gaze flicks to mine.
He doesn’t correct me.
That is the first kind thing he does.
The second is when he turns toward the men staring too hard and snaps, “Y’all ain’t seen a woman and kid before? Find something useful to do before I assign chores.”
He doesn’t touch me.
He doesn’t put an arm around me or pretend I belong to him so the men will look away.
He just makes the yard behave.
I don’t know why that matters.
It does.
A few men snicker. A few look away. One mutters something about Derby getting domesticated and earns himself a look so lethal he suddenly remembers business on the other side of the yard.
August lifts his head off my shoulder and stares at Derby.
“You’re loud,” he says.
My soul leaves my body.
Derby looks at my son.
My son looks at Derby.
Then Derby says, “So are motorcycles.”
August considers that with grave suspicion. “Mama says loud things give her a headache.”
Derby’s eyes come to me. “Does she?”
“She says a lot of things when she thinks little ears aren’t listening,” I mutter.
August pats my cheek. “I listen.”
“I know you do.”
That is part of the problem.
Derby reaches into the tow rig and grabs the first box before I can protest.
“Wait,” I say. “You don’t have to carry those.”
“Good, because I wasn’t planning on carrying all of them. Just enough so nobody steals your busted lamp and whatever else nearly killed me in the road.”
“I’m not staying.”
He looks back at me. “Tonight you are.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“No. The flat tire, sleeping kid, empty gas tank, and the fact that you came looking for a dead man do.”
The words hit harder here than they did on Hell Road.
Derby already said it once.
Mike’s dead.
But hearing it under the floodlights, with the old jail in front of me and men in leather watching from the shadows, makes it real in a way the road did not.
A dead man.
My arms tighten around August.
Derby’s face changes.
Just a little.
Enough.
The noise of the yard seems to thin out. Laughter still rolls from the porch. Music thumps low somewhere inside the building. Men talk. Glass clinks. A bike engine pops in the distance. But all of it moves far away, like I’m underwater and Derby has just cut the rope holding me to the surface.
“You already said that,” I whisper.
His jaw works once. “Yeah.”
“On the road.”
“I know.”
“And somehow I still thought…” I stop because the rest is too pitiful to say out loud.
Somehow I still thought maybe he was wrong. For some reason, I still thought the night had taken its fill and would relinquish one thing. I still imagined, bizarrely, that a girl could be late and the dad-shaped ghost would still be there.
Derby says nothing.
That silence is kinder than most words would be.
I shift August higher on my hip, but my hand slips against his pajama shirt. I have to grip him tighter. He makes a confused sound and pats my neck.
“Mama?”
“I’m okay,” I say.
I’m not.
It’s ridiculous because I don’t know the man I came here to find.
That should make this easier.
Legendary Mike Welles isn’t bedtime stories and school pictures.
He isn’t scraped knees and birthday candles and a hand on my shoulder at graduation.
He’s a name my mother said differently depending on how much she’d been drinking and how lonely the night was.
Sometimes she said it with anger. With longing, at times.
Sometimes with a laugh that made me think she had once been a girl who believed in dangerous men because she had not yet learned how danger stays after the charm leaves.
Your daddy was something, she used to say.
Not good.
Not bad.
Something.
As a child, I imagined him ten different ways.
A hero. A villain. A famous wrestler throwing men across a ring while the crowd screamed his name. A biker in leather with women hanging off him. A man who did not know about me. A man who knew and did not care. A man who might open a door one day, see my face, and realize he had missed me.
That last version was the stupidest.
It was also the one I carried longest.
I don’t realize I’m crying until Derby steps closer and August wipes my cheek with his little hand.
“Don’t cry,” August says, and that breaks something worse than Derby’s words did.
Because my son shouldn’t have to comfort me.
I turn away from Derby, from the men, from the whole outlaw kingdom watching me come apart under their floodlights. I press my face into August’s hair and breathe in sweat, crackers, and little-boy shampoo from yesterday’s bath. I try to swallow the sob before it gets out.
It gets out anyway.
Just one.
But one is enough.
A door opens on the porch.
The noise shifts.
Not quiet exactly, but aware. Like everyone feels the air change before the storm hits.
I lift my head because I feel him before I know who he is.
A man steps out of the old jail.
Tall. Broad. Dark-haired. Wearing his cut like it isn’t clothing but authority stitched into leather. He doesn’t have to raise his voice. He doesn’t have to move fast. The yard makes room for him by instinct.
“Legend,” someone says behind me.
I know before anyone says he is related to Mike.
Because I’ve seen pictures. Not clear ones.
Not recent ones. My mother had one photograph of Legendary Mike tucked in a shoebox, and in it he was young, grinning, arm around a woman who wasn’t her.
Later, when I got old enough to search online, I found grainy wrestling clips, and a few articles that sounded like warnings disguised as local news.
I saw a man with my eyes and told myself I was imagining it because a girl can make a father out of anything when she wants one badly enough.
But this man walking toward me has the same presence as that ghost.
The same jaw.
The same storm around him.
Only younger. Meaner. Alive.
Derby sets the box down.
“Prez,” he says.
The word lands heavy.
President.
Of course.
The man’s gaze moves over me, over August, over my truck, my boxes, my shame scattered in plain view. He doesn’t leer. He doesn’t soften. His face gives away nothing.
That scares me more than a sneer would.
“Derby,” he says, “why is there a woman crying in my yard?”
His voice is low. Rough. Accent thick. Kentucky wrapped around steel.
Derby glances at me, then back at him. “Found her on Hell Road. Flat tire. Kid in the tow rig. Says she’s looking for Mike.”
The president’s face doesn’t change. But the yard does. People go still in little increments. A cigarette pauses halfway to someone’s mouth. A laugh dies near the porch. The woman with the shotgun lowers it an inch.
Legend’s eyes sharpen. “Why?”
My mouth is dry.
I should answer.
I came all this way. I ran from my husband. I dragged my child through the dark. I let a stranger lead me through iron gates into Hell itself because I needed to say the words out loud to someone who might know if they’re true.
But now that the moment is here, I want to hide.
What if they laugh?
What if they call me a liar?
What if Legendary Mike did know about me and told everyone I was nothing?
What if this man looks at me and sees only trouble?
August shifts in my arms. “Mama, I’m tired.”
That gives me something to hold on to.
I kiss his forehead. “I know.”
Legend looks at him.
For the first time, something moves across his face.
Not softness. Not yet.
Recognition maybe. Not of August himself, but of a child caught in adult wreckage.
A woman comes out behind him, and the whole scene changes again.