Chapter Eighteen #2
Kentucky rolls past in blue-gray shadows. Fences. Fields. Wet blacktop. Farm signs. Old barns. Horses with their heads down against the morning chill. I watch the mirror until my eyes ache, expecting the roar of Widowmaker to rise behind us.
It doesn’t.
Of course it doesn’t.
Derby is sleeping.
The thought hurts worse than if he chased us immediately.
The first hour passes in road noise and guilt.
Lottie drives like she learned from a moonshiner being chased by demons.
Fast but smooth, one hand on the wheel, the other wrapped around a travel mug of coffee so strong I can smell it over the old leather seats.
She avoids the main routes at first, taking county roads and state highways, cutting around places I would not have thought to avoid because I still think like a woman who believes roads are public.
Lottie thinks like a woman who knows roads can be watched.
At a gas station near the state line, she pays cash.
She makes me and August stay in the car until she checks the bathrooms, then escorts us like we are in a bad spy movie wearing muddy boots.
August picks a granola bar, a chocolate milk, and a small bag of chips shaped like dinosaurs because apparently every store in America is conspiring to make me cry today.
“Can we call Derby?” he asks when we get back in the SUV.
My hand tightens around the burner phone.
“No, baby.”
“Why?”
“Because we need to get farther first.”
“Is Jeremy following?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is Derby?”
My throat closes. “Not yet.”
He frowns. “You keep saying that.”
“I know.”
“Doesn’t yet mean maybe?”
“Yes.”
He leans back and looks out the window. “Grown-ups make words slippery.”
Lottie sips her coffee. “Ain’t that the damn truth.”
“Language,” I whisper.
“Half-hearted correction. Doesn’t count.”
We drive.
And drive.
Kentucky gives way to Missouri in a blur of rain, truck stops, and Lottie’s muttered commentary about every driver who offends her.
August sleeps with his head tipped against the window and Blue Rex tucked under his chin.
I watch his reflection and wonder what memories he will keep from this.
The fear? The road? Derby’s house? The dinosaur courthouse?
Me crying behind sunglasses while Lottie curses at a semi for drifting lanes?
I hope he remembers Derby saying the part about liking him wasn’t fake.
Then I hope he forgets everything else.
Lottie breaks the silence somewhere west of St. Louis. “You gonna stare holes in that mirror the whole trip?”
“I keep thinking he’ll appear.”
“Derby?”
“Widowmaker.”
She snorts. “You named the man by the bike now?”
“The bike might behave better.”
“Not from what I hear.”
I turn my head toward her. “Will he come?”
“Eventually.”
“You sound sure.”
“Men like Derby don’t sit home while their heart gets dragged across state lines.”
The words hit so hard I look away.
“His heart?”
“Don’t start playing dumb. It don’t suit you.”
I swallow. “He’ll hate me.”
“No, he’ll be mad enough to chew nails and spit horseshoes. Different thing.”
“He trusted me.”
“He gave you a choice.”
“And I used it to leave.”
Lottie glances at me. “You used it.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all and everything.”
I press my forehead against the cool window. “I slept with him.”
“I assumed.”
My head jerks toward her. “What?”
“Oh, please. You walked out looking like guilt had bite marks.”
Heat rushes up my neck. “Lottie.”
“I’m not blind.”
I cover my face with one hand.
She laughs, not unkindly. “Honey, women have been having goodbye sex since Eve packed fig leaves and thought about leaving Adam to deal with his own damn apple issues.”
“It wasn’t goodbye sex.”
The lie is automatic.
Bad.
Thin.
Lottie’s silence says she knows it.
I lower my hand. “It wasn’t only goodbye.”
“That I believe.”
I blink hard.
The road stretches ahead, long and flat for a while, nothing like the hills of Kentucky.
The farther we get, the more unreal everything feels.
Derby’s house becomes a memory with warm sheets and a cracked door.
Jeremy becomes a shadow that might still be stretching after us.
Hot Mama becomes a voice on the phone, rough and certain, calling me Caroline’s girl.
“Tell me about her,” I say.
Lottie knows who I mean.
“Hot Mama?”
“My mother.”
Lottie’s hands tighten slightly on the wheel. “I didn’t know Caroline. My ol’ man Holler say he met her once when he was out west years back. Before I got my crown. Before I knew what crowns were good for.”
“And where’s Holler?”
“On a run. Club business.”
I look at her. “She had a crown?”
“Caroline?”
“Yes.”
Lottie is quiet for several miles.
That is answer enough to make my pulse pick up.
“Depends who’s telling it,” she says finally.
I turn fully toward her. “What does that mean?”
“It means some women patch in. Some women just leave blood on the floor and get remembered anyway.”
The words slide under my skin.
“My mother was a Queen?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say she wasn’t.”
Lottie smiles faintly. “Look at you learning outlaw language.”
“Lottie.”
She sighs. “Caroline ran with them for a while. That’s what I heard.
Lonerock had a King chapter back then, before Hot Mama took the reins and men started clutching their pearls through their leather.
Caroline was young. Wild. Tangled up with Mike Welles when he was out there playing Romeo in every state that would let him.
She wasn’t the kind of woman men forgot. ”
“She never told me.”
“Women don’t always tell their daughters who they were before fear got to them.”
That lands hard.
I think of my mother at our little kitchen table in Paducah, hair messy, cigarette burning down between her fingers, saying Mike Welles was trouble with a smile and a knife.
I think of her snapping at me for asking too many questions.
I think of her crying when she thought I was asleep.
I think of the stories she almost told and swallowed instead.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Hot Mama’s story to tell.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s got knives in it, and I ain’t cutting my fingers on somebody else’s blade.”
I hate that answer.
I respect it too.
August wakes somewhere in Kansas and announces he is hungry enough to eat a criminal.
Lottie says that is concerning but resourceful.
We stop at a roadside diner where the waitress calls everyone sweetheart and looks at the bruise-shadow under my collar with eyes that know too much. Lottie sits facing the door. I sit beside August. He eats pancakes shaped like bears and tells Lottie that Derby’s pancakes were black.
“Derby isn’t a pancake man,” Lottie says.
“He tries,” August says.
My heart squeezes.
Lottie’s eyes flick to mine.
I look down at my coffee.
August keeps talking. “He fixes forts good. And he said he doesn’t fake like me.”
The waitress refills my cup at exactly the wrong moment, hears that, and looks like she might cry into the pot.
I want to climb under the table.
Lottie, thankfully, handles it. “Derby don’t fake much except knowing how to behave in public.”
August nods. “He says bad words.”
“He says true words with seasoning.”
I laugh before I can stop myself.
It hurts.
After the diner, the road gets longer.
The country opens wider than I’m used to.
Fields flatten. Sky grows bigger. Lottie plays old country, then Southern rock, then something with a woman singing like she has smoked every cigarette and regretted every man.
August colors in the back seat. I text no one.
Call no one. My old phone is still sitting on Derby’s counter, maybe already found, maybe not.
At some point, guilt stops being sharp and becomes weather.
It surrounds everything.
Sleep comes in broken pieces. I doze against the window and wake thinking I hear Widowmaker.
I dream Derby is standing at the side of the road holding the little dinosaur keychain, asking why I took the road if I meant to come back.
I wake with tears on my face and August’s small hand on my shoulder from the back seat.
“It’s okay, Mama,” he says.
Those words from my child undo me more than crying ever could.
I reach back and squeeze his hand. “It will be.”
Lottie says nothing.
The next day blurs into gas stations, cheap motels, bad coffee, and Lottie checking under the SUV every time we stop.
She makes calls I’m not allowed to hear, using names that sound like jokes until she says them.
Harlot. Shortie. Sagebrush. Baby Doll. Once, she says Wild Thing and then catches me listening and smiles like a cat with a stolen bird.
“Names get worse before they get better,” she says.
“Is Hot Mama the better?”
“No, that one is the warning label.”
By the time we cross into Oregon, August is restless, I’m exhausted, and Lottie looks like she could keep driving until the ocean gives up and moves.
The landscape changes around us, dry and rugged, pine and rock, wide spaces that feel both empty and watched.
The sky sits huge overhead. The road narrows in places, bending through country that doesn’t care how far I ran.
Oregon smells different.
Dust. Pine. Cold earth. Something old.
My chest tightens as signs begin naming places I remember only in pieces.
Lonerock.
The word appears on a green road sign near sunset.
I sit up straighter.
August leans forward against his seat belt. “Is that it?”
“Almost,” Lottie says.
My hands go cold.
Home.
Not home.
A place before Kentucky. Before Paducah. Before Jeremy. Before Derby. Before I knew men could turn houses into cages and bikers could hand you keys.
The road into Lonerock curves past scrub, rock outcroppings, scattered pines, and land that looks too stubborn to be pretty for people who need obvious beauty.
There are old trailers, a gas station with faded pumps, a tiny market, a bar with motorcycles out front, and then a road branching toward darker trees.
Lottie turns there.
A wooden sign rises ahead between two posts made from stripped logs.
The letters are carved deep and painted black.
QUEENS OF ANARCHY MC
Under it, smaller words:
Straighten Your Crown Before You Start A War
My mouth goes dry.
Lottie slows but doesn’t stop.
Beyond the sign, the road opens into a campground spread through the trees.
Cabins. Bunkhouses. A communal building with warm light in the windows.
A garage with bikes lined in front. Laundry strung between posts.
Kids running near a fire circle under the watch of women in leather cuts.
A dog barks once, then stops like someone told it not to waste energy.
It looks like summer camp.
If summer camp kept shotguns by the kitchen door and patched women on every porch.
August presses his face to the window. “There are kids.”
Relief hits me so hard I almost sob.
There are kids.
A little girl with braids chases a boy with a foam sword. Two toddlers sit in a dirt patch with toy trucks. An older child helps a younger one carry a plate toward the main building. They are laughing. Dirty. Loud. Alive.
August’s whole body leans toward them.
For the first time since Derby’s porch, something in me unclenches.
Only a little.
Enough to hurt.
Women turn as the SUV rolls in. They watch us without pretending not to.
Some wear Queens cuts. Some don’t. Some have tattoos.
Some have scars. One has a baby on her hip and a pistol at her thigh.
Another is barefoot in the dirt, smoking a cigarette beside a motorcycle while a small boy climbs on her back like she is playground equipment.
Lottie parks near the main building.
She turns off the engine.
For a second, none of us moves.
Then she looks at me.
“Well,” she says. “You didn’t run into safety, honey.”
I stare at the women, the bikes, the kids, the sign, the crown carved into wood above the code nailed beside the office door.
My heart is still breaking in Kentucky.
My body is here.
My son is staring at other children like he has found oxygen.
“What did I run into?” I ask.
Lottie smiles, but it isn’t gentle.
“A different kind of outlaw world.”
The driver’s side door opens before I can answer.
A woman’s voice rolls through the dusk, rough and warm and dangerous as a match struck in a church.
“About damn time.”
I turn.
An older woman stands on the porch of the main building in a Queens of Anarchy cut, silver-streaked hair piled high, red lipstick sharp, curves wrapped in black denim and attitude, boots planted like the ground owes her rent.
Hot Mama.
I know it before Lottie says a word.
Her eyes land on me.
Then August.
Then back to me.
“Caroline’s girl,” she says.
My throat closes.
Hot Mama smiles.
Not sweet.
Never sweet.
“Come on, baby. Let’s see if we can find where your mama left your crown.”