Chapter Twenty-Three
Cox sat at his place at the Horde table and watched his brothers file into the Keep. Most looked his way as they entered the room, but the only greeting any gave him was a terse nod, for which he, to the extent he was capable of feeling anything, felt relieved.
Nobody much talked to him at all these days, except to convey necessary information, and he was relieved about that as well. He avoided any kind of conversation where a nod or grunt wouldn’t do.
Badger was the last in, which wasn’t unusual for a regularly scheduled meeting like this. However, the table was unusually quiet while they waited, and Cox knew that was him, bringing down the morale of the whole damn MC. To care about that, however, would require more fucks than the few malformed relics he had left rattling around at the bottom of his soul.
A few minutes after Thumper, the last of the patches, plopped into his chair, Badger came in and shut the doors. He grabbed the gavel and knocked the meeting open as he took his seat.
“I got updates on a bunch of outstanding shit, and we need to talk about it all. Definitely shit to talk about, maybe shit to vote on, I don’t know. First, though, the good news: Tommy’s getting sprung from rehab Friday.”
All around the room, patches cheered, drummed their hands on the table, whistled, and otherwise celebrated that good news. Everyone but Cox. He was glad for Tommy, but he felt virtually nothing enough to react.
“That’s fast, isn’t it?” Mel asked.
Cox had not been paying much attention at the time, but as he understood it, Tommy had been in a coma for about four days after his stroke, then in the ICU for a week, as they worked out how much damage he’d suffered. Then he’d gone to the rehab floor ... a couple weeks ago? Something like that. Cox wasn’t sure he’d ever heard what kind of damage the stroke might have done.
Dom answered. “Yeah, once he got to do some real moving, he started making gains right away. Docs say they’re impressed, and he might get all the way back.”
“Speech, too?” Saxon asked.
Dom, who was pretty close with Tommy, answered again. “He’s working on that, too. He’s supposed to keep up with outpatient shit for a while.”
“Will he be able to ride again?” Isaac asked.
“Docs say yeah,” Dom said, “once he’s steady again, he can try. Might need to go to a trike.”
Mel laughed. “Ah man, poor Tom.”
“Nothing wrong with riding a trike,” said Showdown, who was pushing into his golden years and rode on three wheels most of the time.
“Didn’t say there was,” Mel replied. “But Tommy says it all the time.”
“Let’s get back to business,” Badger said as the room settled again. “I got more decent news on the quarry situation.”
The ‘quarry situation’ was the bodies of two sadistic ex-cops they’d sunk to the bottom of a quarry lake last year.
“Decent news?” Isaac asked, sitting forward. His daughter, Gia, had killed those cops. “They backin’ off again?”
Badger nodded. “They iced the case. Officially it’s budget cuts, but sounds like they’re dropping it because Donahue’s aunt is a pain in their ass. Zaxx was right that the chick cop at that station was a pressure point. Dom pushed there a little, and she’s got all the intel, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder with the department. She was on track for sergeant stripes until she complained about another cop getting grabby with her. Right after that, she started failing tests and interviews she’d been passing with flying colors before. Department says that’s a coincidence, and the cop didn’t mean anything by his ‘jokes.’ So she’s happy to keep us apprised and doesn’t even ask why.”
“Bet she’s got a little crush on the Domster, too,” Mel teased with a smirk. He affected a high-pitched voice. “He’s so dreamy, with that flowing hair, and those sky-blue eyes. Like the Beast!”
Dom flipped him off, but he was grinning.
“You got a little crush yourself, Mel?” Saxon asked. Mel, always going for the joke, flipped imaginary hair and batted his eyes.
Showdown clapped a hand on Isaac’s shoulder and got them back on track. “I’m glad we can relax a little about the quarry. That is great news.”
Badger nodded. “Yeah, it is. But we all know better than to rest too easy. Let’s move along. Kel, do the financials, get that out of the way.”
Kellen pulled a sheet of lined paper from his kutte and pressed it flat on the table. As he did his spiel about money the club had, money it needed to pay out, upcoming costs, and dues paid or owed, Cox let his head fill with white noise. He did not give a quarter of a fuck about any of it. The only reason he was still at this table, still wearing this leather, was a dogged refusal to take the coward’s way out like his mother had. There wasn’t anybody left to care if he did, but it wasn’t about that. He was no fucking coward. End of story.
As Kellen wrapped up, Zaxx sat forward and asked, “What was the number that’s in the bank?”
Kellen sighed, unfolded the paper again, and read him the number, down to the cents.
“Is that lighter than it should be?” Zaxx asked, turning his attention to the head of the table.
“You accusing me of something?” Kellen asked, already angry, before Badger could respond.
Zaxx shook his head slowly. Something about the way he executed that gesture suggested that he was ready to accuse Kellen of something but holding it back. Cox found some interest in the meeting.
“Not accusing anybody of anything,” Zaxx said, his voice calm and flat. “I’m asking a question.”
“Why are you asking?” Badger asked.
Cox aimed his attention at Kellen, the most interesting part of this sudden tension. His eyes were too wide, his posture too square, like the outrage was a cover for something else.
Zaxx told the president, “I’ve been paying closer attention lately, and the financials have been pretty steady for a while. Last few months, at least. What Kel just said is in the bank is a good twenty grand less than last month.”
“We’re paying Leigh Prentiss now,” Kellen said, self-defense warping his tone.
“Not twenty grand a month, we’re not,” Zaxx shot back. “Only other thing different is the Pavilion job, but that should be a plus, not a minus—unless MWGP is kicking our invoices down the road.”
When Zaxx pinned the possible source of the problem on MWGP, Kellen relaxed at once. But Cox tensed like he’d been tased. He reacted forcefully enough to move his chair; the arm hit the table sharply, making it shake, and everyone turned and stared at him.
Cox stared back.
There was one thing left he gave a fuck about, and that was the deep pool of bitter poison that filled his chest at each and every thought of Autumn—and those thoughts rolled through him day and night.
He was furious and disgusted, mostly with himself, but also with her. For a sliver of a second, he’d let himself consider the possibility that he might be able to—might want to—share his life with someone. But, of course, the universe had snatched that away from him before the notion had fully settled in, swept it out on the same current that carried his mother away.
Then he’d spent a week or however long like a zombie, giving up all control of everything in his life to Autumn, letting her handle his business, his schedule, letting her even fucking bathe and dress him, letting her run his mother’s funeral, all of it.
What a piece of runny shit he was. Incapacitated by a death he’d known for the past twenty years could come at any time.
But she’d done it! She’d grabbed the reins of his life like it was hers to drive. He couldn’t remember her even asking if it was okay with him. That whole week or however long was a blur in his memory not merely because he’d been flattened by what his mom had done, but because Autumn had stepped in instantly. While he was still sitting beside his mother’s body, Autumn was already making decisions about his life.
He hadn’t given up control, she’d taken it.
Or maybe he had dropped the reins, but she’d grabbed them before they hit the ground.
Fuck that shit straight to hell. Nobody ran his life but him.
But in that sliver of a moment, that night and first light of day before Tally called and the illusion shattered, Cox had felt an ache in his chest so deep and hot he’d thought he’d burn. When Autumn had told him she was more afraid of missed chances than of disappointments, he’d thought, yes. Yes, me too. I don’t want to miss this with you.
It haunted him, the memory of her lying beneath him, her long ginger hair tossed all about the pillow, her copper eyes sparkling in the early morning light, telling him that he was significant to her. That he meant something. Especially at night, it haunted him.
“Y’okay, brother?” Showdown asked, yanking Cox back to this moment, this place.
He didn’t answer. Showdown gave him a few seconds, then turned back to Badger.
“MWGP is paying us in the thirty-day window,” Badger said. “So if we’re light, it’s not that. Kel, look into that, see if there’s something not squaring up. I want to know by Friday.”
“I’ll help,” Zaxx said.
“I don’t need anybody’s help to do my own fuckin’ job,” Kellen groused.
“It’s a good idea, though,” Badger said. “Get an extra pair of eyes on it. Yeah, Zaxx, help Kel.”
“On it,” Zaxx agreed.
Kellen made a clearly irritated shrug and hunched back in his chair.
There was something going on there, something slightly interesting, but before Cox could start sorting the pieces in his head, Badger derailed him again.
“As long as MWGP’s on the table, I’ll update there. The Pavilion project is on schedule and everything looks good so far, but there’s a new wrinkle.” Badger’s focus sharpened so obviously on Cox, even Cox noticed—and so did everyone else. Again, they all turned his way.
Badger cleared his throat. “I talked to Autumn this morning. MWGP is doing some reorganizing—they’re opening a satellite office in St. Louis. She’s gonna run it. For now, she’s the only staff and we’re the only contractors out of that office. It’ll grow from there, but Autumn wasn’t interested in telling me the rest of her plans.” He paused, focused even more obviously on Cox, and said, “You gonna be okay with that, brother?”
“She’ll be around more, I guess?” Darwin asked, his eyes on Cox.
Badger shrugged. “I don’t know. She didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. Do we care if she is?”
Cox had the strong impression that Badger was specifically asking him.
He didn’t answer because he didn’t have an answer. He might have lost the capacity for speech.
The news that Autumn was coming toward Signal Bend, relocating closer, began to tear Cox apart at once. All the pain and anger and loss and disappointment he could still feel was attached to her name and every one of the few memories he had of her. Emotions that could not touch him at any other moment of his life filled him with fire at the mention of her. He wanted none of that, thus he wanted none of her.
But the want filled him, too. Want like he’d never known at any other time in his life. The loss of her was an infected wound.
One fucking weekend of his nearly forty years. That was all the time they’d been together. One fucking weekend, right before the last corner of his life’s foundation fell to dust. Almost like Autumn had brought his mother’s suicide to town with her.
He was all but dead inside, yet the sound of her name enlivened every pain he’d ever felt. She was a parasite, burrowing into him deeper than he could reach.
“Cox,” Badger prompted. “Will it be a problem?”
Yeah. Yes, it would. But he shook his head.
In the end, nothing fucking mattered.
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~oOo~
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“Do what you want with it. I don’t give a shit.”
Tally gaped at him. “Danny—”
That name was a spear shoved into his brain stem. There was nobody left in the world he wanted calling him that name. “Cox.”
“Okay, enough.” With a great heave of a longsuffering sigh, Tally set the small jewelry case on the kitchen table. The bits of gold stitching in the faded embroidery across the top blinked in a strip of afternoon sunlight. She set her hands on her hips and gave Cox a hard look. “I’ve called you Danny since we were kids sitting on the street in the summer playing tar pits driving our Hot Wheels though the melting strips of tar. It’s your name.”
He didn’t give a shit. “Call me Cox or don’t call me anything.”
“Fine,” she conceded. “Cox. You have to make some decisions. The estate-sale guy is coming in the morning, and anything you don’t take or make a note that you want to keep, it’ll all go into the sale.”
Cox knew that. He deeply regretted taking Tally up on her offer to help figure out the house. He should have just doused the whole thing in gasoline and struck a match. He glared at her and said nothing.
Tally set her hand on the tattered box. “This is your mother’s special jewelry. Things she loved. Her engagement ring is in here. The promise ring your dad gave her in high school. That red stone pendant that was her mother’s. The locket with Billy’s and your baby hairs in it. These are her special treasures. When I was a kid, she used to bring this out when I was here and show me each piece, telling me its story.”
A banked fire had smoldered in his chest for weeks, throwing out occasional tongues of flaming pain to knock his breath away. One hit him now, and he closed his eyes while his insides bubbled.
He felt Tally’s hand on his arm and yanked it away. Opening his eyes, he glared at her. She gazed back, her eyes lively with pity and frustration.
“Then you take the box,” he told her. “I don’t give a shit.”
With another infuriating sigh, she collected the box and took it to her growing stack of shit she was taking from the house.
And that was fine with him. She could have whatever she wanted. He just wanted this finished.
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~oOo~
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The day of the ‘estate sale’ (like his mother had ever owned a damn thing grand enough for her leavings to be called an estate), Cox felt especially foul. His presence was required; something to do with the estate sale people’s insurance or bonding or both (another point in the should-have-burned-the-fucker-down column), so he had to stand there and watch strangers and acquaintances alike rifling through his mother’s shit, his father’s shit, his brother’s shit, even his own shit from when he was a kid. Fucking strangers wandering in and out of every damn room, talking over the merits of his mother’s furniture, the glasses and dishes that had filled her cupboards, the clothes and coats and bedding and towels in her closets, the ancient, ignored tools and crap in the garage. Even his rusty fucking Huffy ten-speed, handed down from Billy.
None of it was worth shit, but it pissed him off nonetheless to have strangers pawing at it all. Fucking maggots, digesting the rotting leavings of the dead.
“Cox?” A sweet, feminine voice spoke his name softly, like a question.
Cox turned from the living room window, where he’d stood for he didn’t know how long, watching the maggots digging through the tables on his mother’s front lawn.
Abigail Freeman stood there. She held an empty glass bottle in her arms, so big she had to hug it to her body, her fingers linked. That old thing, about two feet tall and two feet around, with a narrow neck and a mouth as small as one on a gallon of milk, had stood in the corner of the garage as long as he could remember. It had been full of spider webs and old spider sacs, but the estate-sale people must have cleaned it out.
He looked at Abigail and waited for her to say what she’d come in to say.
They still had no idea who’d ransacked her property early in the summer. No further trouble had happened since, so it was probably nothing more than shitty teenagers getting a jump on being worthless adults. The club wasn’t even talking about figuring it out anymore.
Tommy had been badly hurt for it, Cox had killed a man for it, and all for naught.
She waited to see if he’d speak. When he didn’t, she set the big bottle on the floor and came straight to him.
“Well,” she said, her Ozark drawl adding a syllable to the word. “I came in to tell you that that bottle there? It’s more’n two hundred years old. It’s hand-blown and got a stamp from France. Your estate folks missed it—they had it in the ten-dollar area, and Cox, hon, this thing’s worth at least twenty times that. Maybe more like fifty times. Or more. It’s almost a museum kinda find.”
A flutter of interest almost caught in Cox’s mind. Not about the worth of the bottle, he could not have cared less, but about Abigail’s apparently deep knowledge of obscure, inconveniently sized glassware. He almost asked, but the thought of stringing so many words together and actually starting a conversation exhausted and repelled him.
Instead, he said, “If you want it, just take it.”
Abigail stared at him with an expression like he’d offered to let her chop his hand off. Then she sucked in a big breath and shoved her hands on her hips. “Okay, mister. I know we ain’t close, and I know you don’t like meddlers. Or conversations. Or people. But I know you, ‘cuz I know people. I’d tell you what I see in your aura, but I know you don’t care about such things. Even so, I got somethin’ to say. I’m gonna say it, and you’re gonna listen. Because somebody’s gotta say it, and I guess nobody else is gonna.”
That might well have been the most words anyone had spoken to him since his mother’s funeral. It damn sure was a lot more words than he’d spoken at any time since. Cox stood there, watching her, waiting to see what was so fucking important for him to hear.
She stood there akimbo, looking at him like she was a teacher and he’d just given her a lame excuse about missing homework. “Where’s Autumn, Cox?”
Nowhere in his mind had he imagined Abigail Freeman asking him a question like that. He flinched as if she’d slapped him, and her expression softened.
“Why isn’t she here?” she asked when he said nothing.
No. Absolutely not. He started to turn, intended to get away from Abigail and things that were none of her fucking business.
She grabbed his arm. “Cox, stop.”
He stopped but didn’t turn back to her. He stared at the front door, standing open so strangers could feed on his mother’s things.
“Do you remember everything she did for you?”
Autumn, she meant. Not his mother. He remembered that she’d taken over his life, like she’d been waiting for the chance to turn him into a pet or something. Like one of his rats—which she’d also taken over.
He also remembered the howling emptiness when she’d left, when he’d sent her away.
He couldn’t remember which of those was really true, or if they were somehow both true, but it didn’t matter either way. She was gone, back where she belonged.
Except she was moving closer. He couldn’t get his head around how to deal with that, so he’d decided not to think about it.
When he continued not speaking, Abigail came around to face him again. “I’m telling you this because I know you’ve felt alone most of your life. I know right now, you feel more alone than ever.”
How the fuck did Abigail Freeman know shit about him?
Because they lived in a small town and everybody knew everybody’s shit.
She was still holding his arm; he twisted it free. When he tried to sidestep her, she moved back into his path. “I told you, you gotta hear this, and nobody else is sayin’ it, so I’m gonna. You are not alone, Daniel Cox. I don’t think you ever have been, but maybe it’s a certain kind of love you’re missing, and feeling that lack so hard it seems like it’s everything. That’s what I think, anyway. I’m only outside lookin’ in, but sometimes that’s the best place to be to see the real truth. So I want you to hear this: you ain’t never been alone, hon. You got people who love you all over the place.”
With that, she took his arm again and drew him onto his mother’s front porch. She gestured at the people on the lawn. The maggots feeding on his mother’s leavings.
Throwing an arm out toward the scene, Abigail Freeman said, “Look, Cox. Look.”
As if the words were an incantation, Cox found that he couldn’t not look. At first, all he saw was the same crowd of maggots that had been there since the sale opened.
Then he saw Zaxx and Darwin carrying the armoire that had held ancient board games and baskets of Hot Wheels and LEGOs to a truck on the street. Ian and Deck Elstad were carrying other large purchases to people’s cars. Megan and Caroline Ness, two of Badger and Adrienne’s kids, worked a snack stand at the sidewalk. Henry Ness and Loki Mariano were directing traffic. Lilli and Gia Lunden and Candy Kohl stood behind a banquet table, dealing with the transactions.
They weren’t feeding. They were helping. They’d stepped in where he hadn’t.
“Autumn did that, too.” Abigail said in an almost-whisper at his side. “I wasn’t part of any of it, ‘course, but I heard a little about it around town, and I could see with my own eyes, too. The day of the funeral, she ran ragged making it all happen, and looking for you, worrying about you. It was a beautiful service, Cox. Maybe you don’t care about that, but I think deep down you do. What’s more, I think I understand why you couldn’t do it, couldn’t be there. Anger is part of sorrow, and hopelessness is part of loss. But pain is fleetin’, just like joy. If you try to hold joy too long and too hard, you’ll crush it in your hand. If you try to hold pain too long and too hard, it’ll crush you.”
She let go of his arm and rubbed his back, much as Autumn had rubbed it habitually, knowing he could only breathe when he could feel her. “It crushed your momma, hon. Don’t let it take you down, too. Do you really want to follow her road? Do you think she’d want you to? Or could you maybe see instead that your momma released you the same time she released herself?”
That colossal blow had been delivered gently, while Abigail rubbed his back, but still it rocked him back a step.
Though she wasn’t much older than him, her smile was maternal. “There’s joy to be had. You just gotta open your hand and let go of the pain so joy can come to you.”
Had his mother killed herself to free him? Could he live better with that than with the idea that he hadn’t been important enough to live for?
Abigail’s words were among the first he’d really heard in weeks, but it was her touch that finally reached him. That touch so like Autumn’s.
For that endless, unclockable time between getting Tally’s call and standing outside the cemetery telling Autumn to get out of his life, she had been there for him, been exactly what he’d needed, the only thing that gave him any kind of ease.
He’d been so fucking angry at ... her, for taking control of his life, at himself, for being weak enough to let her, at his mom, for being too weak to live, at the world, for being an unmitigated chunk of shit. He was still so fucking angry. But as Cox stood on his porch and watched the people before him through Abigail Freeman’s light, he saw.
The people here today weren’t maggots, they were his friends and neighbors. They weren’t looting, they’d attended a sale he was putting on. Buying things he was selling. He had made the deal with the estate sale folks. Tally had leaned on him, but he’d made the call. The only thing weak about that was blaming someone else for a choice he’d made.
The Horde were out there helping, doing tasks that needed to be done, tasks he’d known would need to be done when he selected the ‘package’ in the estate agent’s list that did not include a whole staff of strangers marching through the house, loading, selling, directing traffic. He’d left a hole there, and the Horde had filled it.
And Autumn? Same thing. She hadn’t taken control of his life. She’d stepped in where he couldn’t. His mother had left a hole in his life, and Autumn had made sure he didn’t fall into it. She’d taken care, not control.
Then Abigail said the thing that shook him to his soles and filled him with the first vivid emotion he’d felt in weeks that wasn’t anger: regret.
“This is love, what they’re doing out there, what Autumn did,” Abigail said. “It’s even a love language. Acts of service, it’s called. People do for the ones they love. When it’s deep, true love, they do the hard things for the ones they love. And Autumn? Comin’ from away, just ‘bout gettin’ tarred and feathered for months around here? Nobody’d have a better reason to bolt at the first sniff of trouble like yours. But she stayed.” Abigail gave him a wry little smile. “Wonder why that might be.”
Cox barely heard her last few sentences. His head had filled with thunder and his chest was caving in. He staggered backward a couple steps; Abigail helped him into a chair.
Words, thoughts, ideas clamored through his mind, they fought to get free, but there were too many. He didn’t know what he could or should say. All he could think was how badly, how completely, he’d fucked up.
He’d been so goddamn angry, so lost. He still was so goddamn angry, so lost. The black caul of his rage had turned everything he saw dark. Seeing his friends as maggots? Because he was having an estate sale and they’d come to buy things? To put money in his pocket? They weren’t just buying, they were helping. What kind of rot was in his soul that he saw that as a burden?
And Autumn. Fuck. She’d been a lifeline, and he’d cut her loose.
She’d loved him, and he’d thrown it in her face.
He loved her, and he’d crushed that fragile, infant joy in his clenched fist.
“It’s too late,” he said aloud, the words barely wisps slipping through his lips.
Abigail Freeman leaned down before him. For the first time, he noticed her voluminous sundress, dark blue with big red poppies scattered over it. Her bare shoulders were freckled and pink. Her dark curls were pinned messily at the top of her head, as always. A round, silver pendant, like a coin, dangled under her chin. What appeared to be a woman with too many arms was embossed into its face. Or maybe too many heads? Both? He couldn’t make sense of it, but focusing on that mundane question brought the world back into clarity.
She put a blunt-nailed finger under his chin and lifted his head. Her eyes were soft and her smile affectionate as she said, “S’long as you’re both still alive on this plane, ain’t no such thing as too late. There’s only what you decide to do, and what you decide to don’t.”