CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Alex
Then
Summer break was close. I was eager to be done with school and equally certain I had no idea what came after.
I knew I wasn’t going back to California.
If it were up to me alone, I’d stay in Arizona with Riley for the rest of my life.
California was a beautiful locked door. I did not want the key back.
I wondered, sometimes, how long we’d go without my parents ever meeting him.
The thought used to sting. Three years in, it barely registered anymore.
My new family’s total acceptance of me had quietly replaced whatever I used to need from the old one.
A person can only wait on a driveway so many times before she faces the other way.
It was a Saturday morning. Price and Riley had gone to look at a motorcycle. Brisco and I were killing time at the clubhouse, waiting for them to get back. I liked these stretches with the guys. The ones where nobody needed anything from me except conversation.
Brisco raised a fist the size of a ham to his mouth and yawned. “Shoulda got more sleep last night. I’m worn the fuck out.”
“What were you doing?”
He stretched his arms out wide, like a soaring eagle. “Playing with my cat.”
I’d have believed almost anything else. Sharpening knives, hitting a heavy bag until his knuckles bled, staying up half the night cleaning a gun. A cat had not occurred to me, and it took a second for my face to catch up with the thought.
“You have a cat?”
He gave me a look. “Something funny about that?”
“A little.”
“What’s funny about having a cat?”
“You look like a dog person,” I said, still fighting a smile. “Rottweiler. Pit bull.”
“Dogs need too much attention,” he said. “Cats take care of themselves.”
“If he takes care of himself, why were you up all night playing with him?”
“I was entertaining myself. He could care less if I lived or died.” He said it like a point of pride. “Long as the little fucker’s fed and has clean ice water, he doesn’t need a thing from me.”
“Ice water. For a cat.”
“If it hits room temperature, the little prick just looks at his dish, then looks at me like I’m an idiot. Ice fixes it. Goes through four, five dishes a day. Drinks more than I do.”
It sounded less like a cat and more like a very specific kind of houseguest. “What breed?”
“Bengal.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Domesticized version of the Asian leopard cat.” He said it the way other men talked about their trucks. “Looks like a baby leopard.”
I could picture that, on him, more easily than I could picture a Siamese curled in his lap. “I bet he’s beautiful.”
He dug his phone out of his pocket, flipped it open, and squinted at the screen like it owed him money, before he found what he wanted and handed it over.
The cat was, in fact, beautiful. Rosetted like something out of a nature documentary, mid-leap after a napkin someone had left on the kitchen island.
“He looks three feet long.”
“They’re not usually that big. He’s been putting on about a pound a month.”
“You weigh him?”
“Every Friday.”
“Every single Friday?”
“Look, Squirt.” He put his hands on his hips like he was about to explain something important.
“You and Panzer are gonna have kids one day. You’ll toss ‘em on the scale every week and call everyone you know to tell them how big they are—bigger than any kid you’ve ever seen.
Then you’ll prop ‘em against the wall every month after that and call everyone again. I don’t have kids.
Don’t plan on having any. This is my kid.
He gets weighed on Fridays, and he’s smarter and bigger than any other cat on the planet. ”
It was, in its way, kind of sweet. It also wasn’t the conversation I wanted.
“How many kids are Panzer and I going to have?” I asked.
“According to him? Two.”
I hadn’t known Riley had put a number on it, let alone said so out loud to someone else. We’d talked about kids before, but never like it was settled.
“A boy and a girl?”
He looked at the floor, then back up. “Son of a bitch.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t supposed to say that.” He shook his head at himself. “Forgot it was a secret. Don’t tell him I told you.”
“I won’t. But since it’s already out, you might as well finish.”
He thought it over. “Not a word?”
“Not one.”
“Fine.” He looked almost embarrassed on Riley’s behalf. “He wants a boy and a girl. Said he’d have a few more if that’s what it took to land the boy.”
“As many girls as it takes to get one boy?”
“Pretty much.” He went back to picking at his fingernails. “Boy’s the priority. Guy thing, probably.”
I already knew Riley wanted a son. Fishing trips, go-carts, motorcycles built together in the garage, the whole inheritance of things his own father had given him. Hearing that he’d said it to the club, and not just to me in bed at midnight, made it feel more like a plan than a daydream.
“I think I’d want a girl, honestly. One of each would be perfect.”
He laughed. “Anybody fucks with that little girl, this whole club comes down on him like the wrath of God.” He glanced up. “That’s the upside of a daughter. Built-in protection.”
I pictured two dozen motorcycles idling outside some seventeen-year-old’s house on prom night and felt, in roughly equal measure, terrified and comforted.
“What about the boy? No protection for him?”
“Boys learn to protect themselves. Then they protect their sisters. We’ll teach him.”
“I don’t want a mean little boy.”
“Who does?”
“You said you’d teach him to—”
“There’s a difference between teaching a kid to defend himself and teaching him to be a bully. No room in my world for a bully. Your boy starts bullying kids, and I’ll bite off his ear and spit it in his lap.”
“That’s a little extreme.”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Because getting made fun of on a playground does something to a kid that doesn’t go away.” He said it flatly, like a fact he’d checked twice. “I know. I got bullied.”
I couldn’t picture it. “Who would bully you?”
“Sixth grade, I was built like a stick. Sixty-five pounds, arms like pencils. Every other kid in my class had thirty pounds on me, easy. After a couple years of getting the hell kicked out of me, I started lifting the summer before high school. By junior year I was the biggest kid in the building.”
He was the biggest man I’d ever stood next to, in person or otherwise. It was hard to reconcile with a sixty-five-pound sixth grader.
“That’s awful. I hate thinking about kids getting bullied.”
He flexed, more out of habit than anything. “Nobody bullies me now.”
The rattle of Riley’s exhaust manifold gave him away before the truck came into view. “Sounds like they’re back.”
“Cheap bastard will never pay to fix that.” He looked at me. “Not a word. Remember?”
I zipped my fingers across my lips.
The truck squealed into the lot and stopped a few feet away. Price kicked the passenger door twice before it gave, muttering about having to ride in a cage.
“Bust?” I asked.
“No,” Price said. “We got it.”
“Where is it?”
He jerked his thumb at the truck bed. “Back there. In boxes.”
I pictured Riley’s next year of weekends disappearing into the garage, one rusted piece at a time. “In boxes. That’s rough.”
Riley grinned like he’d won something. “Not really. We got it for nothing.”
I looked in the bed. Crumpled boxes, rust-colored parts stacked on top of each other with no apparent order. It looked less like a motorcycle and more like a car accident.
“Sounds expensive,” I said. “Inventorying it. Figuring out what’s missing.”
“That’s the good part,” Riley said. “It’s all there. All it costs is time.”
“What’d you end up paying?”
“Guy wanted four grand,” Price said, laughing.
“I told him it’d run six to have someone assemble it and it wasn’t worth more than seven put together.
He looks at me like I insulted his mother.
Says, ‘You telling me you don’t know how to assemble an Evo?
’ I said, ‘What do I look like, a fucking motorcycle mechanic? I’m a short-order cook working minimum wage.
Take a grand for it?’ He said, ‘Make it fifteen hundred.’”
I hoped, quietly, that it was going to end up in Price’s garage instead of ours. “So who bought it?”
“I did,” Riley said. “He talked the guy down. I wrote the check.”
My stomach dropped a little at the thought of a year of evenings lost to a garage floor.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Put it away.”
“In boxes?”
“For now.”
Relief, unearned and immediate. “You’re not building it?”
“I’ll build it one day,” he said. “Not now.”
I hoped one day was a long way off. I told him otherwise. “I can’t wait until you start. Can I help?”
“Not really a girl project. Sorry.”
“You’re doing it alone?”
He looked at the pile of boxed rusty junk in the truck bed. “Hope not.”
“Who’s helping?”
“When the time comes, I’ll find somebody. It’s years off, don’t worry about it.”
“I’ll make sandwiches for the crew,” I said, mostly relieved I wouldn’t have to make good on it anytime soon.
He grinned. “I’ll hold you to it.”
My phone rang on the drive home.
I didn’t recognize the number. I recognized the rhythm of it, though.
Three rings and then a hang-up if I didn’t answer fast enough, the impatience of a man who considered other people’s slowness a personal inconvenience.
I let it go to voicemail. I didn’t listen until I was back in my apartment, boots off, textbook waiting on the counter where I’d left it that morning.
“Alex.” No greeting, no preamble, just my name delivered like the first line of a memo.
“Give me a call when you get a moment. Your mother and I have been discussing your situation out there, and we have some thoughts about your future.” A pause, the kind he used to make a decision sound like a suggestion. “Nothing urgent. Call me back.”
I didn’t call him back that night.
I told myself it was nothing. A phase, same as always. A comment about my grades, a complaint about the distance, something I’d field on his terms in a week or two and forget by the following month.
I deleted the voicemail, poured a glass of water, and went to sleep thinking a summer filled with no college and much Riley.