Chapter Twenty-One
Cox stood at his kitchen sink and stared out the window. A normal summer weekday was happening out there—Johnny Davis, Jarod Allieri, and Brandon Pak on their bikes doing wheelies in the street, the Felton twins drawing hopscotch squares in pink chalk on their front walk, Mr. McRae trimming his hedges while his son, Toby, washed his beater Corolla on the driveway.
All those people out there having a regular day. It pissed him off.
From somewhere in his house behind him, Autumn was on the phone, speaking with clarity and purpose, all business. He didn’t bother to listen hard enough to determine whether this call was her business or his.
Seemed like she’d been on the phone most of every day since Tally had called him to his mom’s house. He was paying enough attention, barely, to understand that she was making the arrangements he should have been making. She came to him to make decisions, and he thought he made most of them. When he couldn’t, for whatever reason, she made them herself, and it was fine. None of it mattered, anyway. His mother was dead; she wouldn’t care one way or another how she was buried, and he didn’t care one way or another about any fucking thing at all.
His mother was dead. She’d done it herself, choked down all the pills she had in the house, from Tylenol to Xanax to Vicodin, a trove of empty pill bottles like she’d been hoarding the fuckers, and about half a bottle of gin, and somehow kept it all down. Probably she’d done it slowly, methodically, to make sure she got it done right.
She’d been leaving him for thirty years. Three days ago, she finally got it done.
So now he had nothing.
Autumn’s voice grew louder as she approached and then entered the kitchen. “... Okay, yeah, that should work. Do we need to go into a bigger town to get that done?”
He felt her hand on his back. She leaned around him, and he blinked away from the window to see her turning off the tap. How long had he left that running? Why was he standing here? She took the empty coffee cup from his hand and set it in the sink. Right; he’d meant to rinse out his cup.
Standing beside him, gently rubbing his back, she told the person on the other end of her call, “Well, I need to get a black dress anyway, so I can—” She listened for a moment. “That would be great. Let me talk to Cox and make sure, but tomorrow afternoon? ... Okay, excellent. Thanks, Ade. Talk to you soon.”
Ade. Adrienne, Badger’s old lady. More funeral planning, and at some point, Autumn had become friendly enough with the Horde queen to call her Ade.
“How d’you feel about getting an update?” she asked as she set her phone on the counter.
Cox turned and stared at her. Charlize, one of his rats, was perched on her shoulder. She made the grabby-hands gesture she made when she wanted him to pick her up, but he barely noticed and didn’t drag up the energy to give the rat his hand.
Autumn was watching him, waiting for an answer. He dug around in his head and found the question. Did he want an update?
He didn’t care about anything, so he had no opinion about getting an update on anything. None of the words he had seemed worth the effort of speaking them, so he didn’t bother.
If his silence bothered her, worried her, whatever, she didn’t show it. She proceeded as if he was part of the conversation. “There are a couple errands I need to run out of Signal Bend. I’m going to have the programs professionally printed, and I need to do a little shopping. Adrienne will drive me. Will you be okay if I’m away for a few hours tomorrow?”
He was a grown man, pushing forty. He’d lived alone for close to two decades. What did she think he would do if he was alone for an afternoon?
Yeah, he knew the answer, and yeah, his heart could shut down anytime and that would be just dandy with him, but no, he was not going to do that bullshit his mother had done.
Fuck that coward.
He’d been here. All this time, all these years, he’d fucking been here. His mother had lost her man and been halved, and then she’d lost her firstborn son and quit right there and then. She’d stopped living twenty years ago, when she decided she’d lost everything.
But she had two sons. Why hadn’t he been enough? Why hadn’t she cared enough to give him even half of herself?
He was her son, too, and he had been here. He’d been only eighteen years old when Billy came home in a flag-draped box. Barely grown and fully lost. He’d been drowning in his own grief, his own hopeless fury at what the world had stolen from him, and he’d had nowhere to turn for comfort. He’d needed his mother, but he’d left her in that cemetery, beside Billy’s grave. All he’d brought home was a phantom, a fading shadow where his mother belonged.
For twenty years, he’d tried to keep that wispy form bound to the earth, to his life, but really he’d buried his mother with Billy.
So it didn’t fucking matter how she got buried for the second time.
A white-hot burst of rage exploded through him, and he kicked out, sending his boot into the door of the under-sink cabinet and cracking the fucker in half.
Autumn reacted calmly to his outburst; it wasn’t her first rodeo around here. For the most part, Cox felt indolent, too lost in his thoughts and too beset by his stormy emotions to react to or engage with anything going on outside his head, but occasionally, rage would explode like lava from a volcano. He wasn’t counting, but he’d thrown a few glasses and mugs to shatter against walls, he’d punched the mirror over his bathroom sink and needed fresh first-aid on his knuckles, and now he’d broken a cabinet door.
She seemed concerned by those outbursts but not afraid. He could snap her in half, but even in the face of his unpredictable violence, she trusted him not to hurt her.
Where the fuck had she gotten the idea she could trust him?
Dropping to a crouch, she put Charlize in a bright green exercise ball and set her rolling across the floor. When she stood again, she found Cox’s gaze and smiled softly.
Her hand came up to cup his cheek. “I’ll ask Adrienne to run the errands without me,” she said. “I’ll stay close.”
He wanted to tell her she didn’t need to watch him like a toddler. He wasn’t going to off himself, and none of the many things he was furious about had a form he could fight.
He wanted to tell her to go and do whatever she needed or wanted to do.
He wanted to tell her to go back to Indianapolis and live her life, to free herself from him while he was already so buried in rage and loss he couldn’t feel anything else.
But the thought of her being away from him, leaving him alone with this spider’s nest of fury and hurt, carved out a crater in his belly.
So instead of telling her he didn’t need her, he bent over and set his head on her slim shoulder.
Her hands came up, slipped through his hair, and held him to her, and Cox found a full breath.
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~oOo~
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Cox woke up well before dawn and knew at once sleep was gone for the night. Autumn lay beside him, on her side facing him, her small, pretty hand with its pearl-pink nails resting on his chest. If he was in reach of her these days, she was touching him—rubbing his back, stroking his hair, holding his hand, resting on him as they slept. He wasn’t sure if she was comforting him or herself. Or maybe she was afraid he’d shrivel up and disappear if she wasn’t holding on.
That last one felt closest to true.
Lying on his back, looking up at the grey-dark ceiling where moonlight made monsters of the trees outside his window, Cox felt the rage in his belly roar to fullness. It sent flames licking through his veins, turned his stomach to poison, made his heart a fist. He’d lived most of his life with anger throbbing a bassline beneath the score of his days, but this rage was different. This wasn’t a throbbing ache, it was a screaming agony. It was being burned from the inside out, and it was steadily growing, devouring more of him each day. Soon there would be nothing left.
He could not deal with this. He had to get away from it.
Moving carefully, Cox slipped from the bed, lifting Autumn’s hand and setting it gently on the mattress. She sighed deeply but didn’t wake. Continuing with the same watchful quiet, he pulled his jeans and boots on, found a t-shirt in the basket of clothes Autumn had washed the day before, and left the room. He grabbed his keys from the wooden box on the kitchen counter where he kept his pocket shit.
Both his phones sat in that box as well. Cox considered them for a moment but left them where they were. He left the house.
At the garage, he rolled his Breakout to the street and mounted and fired it up there. It was still loud, but it wasn’t ten feet from his bedroom window, and with the AC on, maybe she’d sleep through it.
In the hours before sunrise on the day of his mother’s funeral, Cox rode out of Signal Bend. He had no idea where he was going and no interest in considering the question. Away. He was going away from everything—a family he’d lost, a past that tormented him, a life he hated, and a future he couldn’t imagine.
He was going away, and right now that was all he cared to know.
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~oOo~
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He rode for hours, over every twisty road he knew and a few he discovered along the way. He rode in the dark, in the grey light of dawn, and into a bright, cloudless summer day. He ran low on gas and stopped to fill the Breakout’s tank and drain his own, and after a cup of watery, burnt gas-station coffee, he got back on the road.
He still had no destination in mind, and he was vaguely aware that if his journey were plotted on a map it would look like a skein of yarn after a litter of kittens had been at it. His progress on the road was no more a straight line than the progress of any thought in his head for the past week or more. But he didn’t feel better, so he kept riding. The sun traveled through the sky on its daily commute, and Cox rode on.
He found himself back in Signal Bend without aiming for it; the snarl of yarn had simply led him home eventually. When he registered where he was, the first switch of reality flipped on and he got his bearings. Up ahead was Marie’s, and nearby the church; he could see the full parking lot, and he knew what that meant.
Cox checked his watch: it was almost four in the afternoon. He’d been riding for half a day. Autumn had scheduled his mother’s funeral for three o’clock.
He’d missed his mother’s funeral.
Her second one, anyway.
Yet the lot was still full of familiar vehicles, including a long line of Harleys. His people. Were they doing the wake thing at the church? No, he thought he remembered Autumn talking about that, saying one of the women had told her Horde wakes happen at the clubhouse.
Turning toward the cemetery, Cox understood: he’d missed the funeral, but hadn’t quite missed the burial.
He wanted to keep riding, but somehow the bike turned into the parking lot. He pulled it to a stop along the edge and sat there, watching a cluster of men in black leather and women in funeral black while a minister in religious black spoke over a white box hovering above a hole in the earth.
For a long time, Cox sat on his bike and watched what was going on over there. Fully aware that he should be where they were—he was the guest of honor, wasn’t he?—that idea, that sense of obligation and propriety, would not land.
He should stand beside that big hole so everybody could watch him be sad. That was part of the ritual, right? Performative sorrow. But he wasn’t sad, he was furious. If he got too close to that damn white box—who’d picked it out, anyway?—he’d kick it, spit on it, try to heave it into the sky.
What kind of asshole got so goddamn angry at his own mother for dying?
No, not for dying, for killing herself. For abandoning him decades ago and then leaving him forever. Leaving him alone in this shitty, fucked-up, pestilent ass of a world.
While he stewed in his overheated head, the people circling his mother’s eternal hole in the earth began to break up and head his direction, toward the parking lot. He watched them come, watched them see him. They shifted their direction, began to aim for him, and Cox’s first, nearly overwhelming impulse was to fire up his bike and beat hell away again.
But then he saw Autumn, still at the gravesite, talking with the minister. Handling his shit as she had all week. A woman he barely knew, who’d known his mother not at all, had planned her funeral.
It was probably Autumn who’d selected the white casket. She’d probably asked him, and maybe he’d even answered, but he had no memory of that exchange at all.
He’d checked out and let a virtual stranger take over his life.
He wasn’t interested in checking back in, but he wasn’t interested in anybody else running the show, either.
Badger and Adrienne came to him first. Cox watched them come but didn’t bother to cue up any words or shape his face in any particular way. He stared at them through his sunglasses as they reached his bike.
Adrienne got one good look at him and stopped before she got close enough to try to hug him. Badger came right up to him and set his hand on his shoulder. “It was real nice, brother. She did your mom proud.”
Cox shifted his attention back to Autumn, now walking with the minister toward the lot. He didn’t acknowledge Badger. Finally, the president and his queen walked on.
All the other Horde came by and set a hand on his shoulder. Most made some kind of meant-to-be-comforting bullshit statement and moved on. Most of the women said something sweet, but they didn’t try to touch him.
Cox sat and let it happen. But his eyes were fixed on Autumn. A decision was forming in his mind, something with the heft and shape of truth. It hurt, the hurt cut deeply through his fury and scared him, but that was why it was true. The rage in him would destroy everything around him. Like the sorrow in his mother had destroyed everything around her.
Autumn was on the parking lot now, twenty feet away. Close enough that Cox could see the pallor of her complexion, the way her eyes were outlined in red.
“I tried to wait,” she said when she was close enough to speak to him without raising her voice. “I didn’t know what to do, but everybody was there, and I couldn’t reach you. I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t blame her for not waiting. In fact, it was a relief. The thing was over, and he hadn’t had to sit in a pew and feel a whole town’s eyes on him, every one of them knowing that he hadn’t been enough for his own mother.
Of course, they’d known already. They’d had twenty years to understand that truth.
Autumn reached for his hand. Cox pulled it away.
“You need to go back where you came from.” The words were out of his mouth without his realizing he’d chosen them.
And they hurt. They burned into his chest like a brand. The only full breaths he’d taken in days had come while she held him; if she went away, where would air come from?
He didn’t want—no. Didn’t fucking matter what he wanted. Never had.
Autumn snatched her reaching hand back as if she’d touched live fire. “What?”
The words he’d said hurt, hurt them both, but they were the only ones he knew anymore that felt true.
So he clung to them. “I don’t need you running my life. Go back to your own.”
He fired up his bike.
“COX!” she cried, skittering back from his roaring engine. Through that curtain of noise, he heard the pain in her voice. Through the shade of his lenses and his rage, he saw the same pain on her face. The fiery brand of need for her in his chest sank deeper.
But he rode away from her anyway.
Maybe he’d go back to his house when he was sure she was out of it.
Or maybe he wouldn’t come back at all.