Chapter Ten
Rachel hated paperwork so I fell into the chore of sorting through the bar’s receipts. It was nice, though. I was glad to have something to keep my mind off Orion. In the odd, empty moments my mind would inevitably wander to places that made me blush. The way he felt inside of me. The way we moved together. The way he dominated me but wouldn’t indulge himself until he’d made me scream my pleasure. Then I wondered what he was doing at that moment, what sort of danger might have found him, and the thrill was gone.
The small office was in the back so I could stay out of sight, which had the effect of pre-empting any questions from the locals who frequently ducked in. Rachel wandered back there frequently to chat and even though I knew she did it as a kindness I was glad for the company.
On the second day I was growing weary of squinting at an Excel spreadsheet full of numbers. It was late in the afternoon and as I listened carefully I didn’t hear any voices other than Talia’s complaint about the state of her manicured nails so I exited the office.
Talia looked up from moodily regarding her hands to smile at me sweetly. “You missing your man yet?”
I warily walked right by. I remembered what Rachel had said about her and besides I had ears enough to hear the hiss of a snake myself. “I guess,” I grumbled.
She widened her eyes. “Well I would think so. Orion Jackson’s got the biggest cock in La Paz County.”
Adele spoke up from a dark corner. “Cut the shit, Tal.”
Talia swiveled. “What? We’ve all had a taste of that beef, isn’t that right, big sister? Rachel?” Adele shook her head in disgust while Rachel stared with silent ice. Talia squeezed her skinny arm through mine. “Girls can talk. So tell me, did he put it to you over his bike yet?”
I felt my jaw drop and Talia grinned in quiet triumph.
Rachel threw down her towel and stood toe to toe with Talia. “He ever move you into his f*cking house? No. Nor will he. Let it lie, dammit.”
Adele adopted a bored look. “You forget I’m Grayson’s now?”
“Like hell you are. I’d bet a year of tips he’ll tire of your tricks soon enough.”
I heard Adele chuckle in the background. Talia’s eyes had none of her sister’s warmth. The look she gave Rachel was ferocious. “Rachel, how about you tell us whose bastard bled out of your hole about a year and a half ago?”
Rachel reared back and slapped Talia full on the face. Adele gasped and jumped out of her chair. Talia righted her head and glared at Rachel. Blood trickled out of her nose.
“Crazy bitch,” she muttered, sniffing and searching for a napkin.
But Rachel didn’t seem to hear. She ran out the door of Riverbottom, slamming it behind her.
Adele looked at her sister with loathing. “For f*ck’s sake, Talia.”
I had winced over Rachel’s look of agony. She was nowhere in sight as I scanned the sandy parking lot in front of the bar. I headed around the building toward the trailer she called home. I could well imagine what Talia was getting at with her cruel dig and tried not to let it get to me. It wasn’t any of my business.
The door was unlocked so I walked in without knocking. A beaded curtain separated the bedroom from the rest of the place and Rachel was curled up on the bed behind it. As I sat on the edge she gave no sign that she realized I was there.
I bit a nail, wondering what the hell I should say. Sometimes it was just best to state the obvious.
“God,” I said loudly. “What a cunt.”
Rachel sat up. She wiped the tears from her beautiful face and smiled at me slowly.
“Yeah,” she said. “I told you she was a cunt.”
“You okay?”
She nodded, then sprang out of the bed, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and leading me toward the door. “Come on, Miss Kasey Kira or whatever the f*ck we’re calling you today. You’re having a drink with me.”
***
Brandon and Teague didn’t talk to me much but they were forever lurking about. Once I happened to walk in the living room as Teague stood in a corner with a phone pressed to his ear. He scowled at me and stalked outside. I wondered if Orion was on the other end.
Several times I had taken the basic cell phone he had given me and stared at it, touching the keypad lightly. It was the only link I had to him but he had warned me that calling just to say hello wasn’t an option. So I just held it like a talisman and did nothing.
By the time the third day rolled around with no word my mounting tension had reached a nearly unbearable point.
Rachel was showing me the washer and dryer in a small closet-like room behind the bar when I asked her the thing which had been weighing on my mind.
“How do you stand it?”
She cleaned out the lint tray, frowning at me absently. “What?”
I folded my arms. A chill had risen on my skin even though the day was warm already. “Waiting. Just hanging out and hoping to god that there will be some hint. That he’ll even come back in one piece.”
She thought the question was silly. “How do you stand it? You want to be with a man, and you just manage.”
I shook my head miserably. When I was a kid Crest had left me often enough. For a while we lived in a basement apartment beneath a large Vietnamese family who would look in on me in his absence. It was after my mother took off.
As I loaded the washer I thought about Anne Marie Carter. I’d long made a conscious effort to avoid doing just that. My most lucid memory of her is of the day she cupped my face in her soft hands and gazed at me with watery blue eyes.
“You’re your daddy’s daughter,” she’d said sadly and kissed me lightly on both cheeks before she left, instructing me to sit at the kitchen table and not to answer the phone until Crest returned.
The last time among the rare occasions I’d seen her since that day was when I graduated from high school. She’d grown heavy and had never had any children with the stern man who became the stepfather I didn’t know. But her face was alight with a serenity I didn’t remember from childhood. Back then she would wear out the threadbare floor anxiously twisting her hands as she waited for my father to roll through the door. Then they would scream terrible things at one another until they both tired of it.
I leaned against the washing machine and pulled my hair back. Anne Marie took a long time to reach her tired point. I was tired already. It wasn’t Orion’s fault. The violence I’d witnessed had torn through something inside me. And Orion? I couldn’t expect that he would change who he was. But for the first time I dimly understood the weariness of my mother’s life. How it might have driven her to the unthinkable; abandoning her child.
No, I wouldn’t forgive her. There was no excuse. But a tendril of sympathy rose in my gut for the years she’d put in with Crest before giving up. It wasn’t an easy lot and it took a tough soul to rise to it. I wasn’t sure I’d have in me if it came to that.
Perhaps, I grimly reflected, I was more like my mother than I’d suspected. And that thought scared the living shit out of me.
When I brought in the laundry Teague and Brandon were sitting in the living room. Evidently I’d interrupted a tense conversation. Teague ignored me but Brandon tried to catch my eye in a friendly way. I dropped the freshly folded clothes on the bed and returned to the living room. I didn’t expect that they would divulge whatever they knew but I was sick of tiptoeing around the place.
“Hey,” I snapped my fingers and both men glanced at me. “It’s getting toward evening. I saw a box of spaghetti and a jar of sauce in the pantry. Give me twenty minutes and I’ll have a meal on the table.”
Teague stared at me blankly but Brandon looked thoughtful.
“I’ll take that offer,” he said. “Let me run down the road and I’ll get a loaf of bread of some wine.”
“Wine?” Teague sneered incredulously. “What the f*ck?”
I laughed and returned to the kitchen, sorting through the mismatched collection of pots. I found some garlic powder and seasoned salt in the cabinet above the sink. Both looked as if they had been there since the last presidential administration but I figured it wouldn’t harm anything to add a bit to the sauce.
Teague came in and stood next to the fridge. “I met your daddy a few times.”
I stopped and leaned against the table, closing my eyes. “Yeah?”
He pulled at his beard, his eyes forlorn. “Yeah, years ago. He was less of an a*shole than most.” Teague sighed. I guess that was as close to a compliment as he parted with. “Look, this is all a shit show, that’s for sure.” He coughed. “I’m sorry.”
In that moment when Teague seemed human and reachable I wanted to ask him where Orion and the others had gone. But I knew how it would go. His eyes would darken and he would smirk and then ultimately he would say nothing. They were his brothers. I was just some girl taking up space in the kitchen.
“I think beer would be just as good as wine,” I finally said.
Teague laughed coarsely. “Let’s just f*cking humor him,” he winked, talking about Brandon.
It turned out Brandon’s idea of wine came in a box. Or else that’s all there was to be had in Quartzsite. But I thanked him for the addition and he seemed pleased. Teague cut the bread into thin slices and Brandon pulled Rachel in from the bar to join us. Adele had gone home to check on her mother and Talia was still pouting so she stayed in the bar to serve.
I had a smile on my face as I brought the steaming bowl of spaghetti to the table. It brought back happy memories of my girlhood among the Warlocks and I was glad. I didn’t want there to be only pain when I thought of them, when I thought of my father.
Brandon belched and drank a large mug of box wine like it was water. “You throw it at the wall?” he asked, eyeing the spaghetti.
Rachel laughed. “Holy shit, my mother used to do that. I don’t think she ever really got it though. She would just kind of stand there and watch as the noodles bounced off the wall and then she would shrug and serve it to us crunchy.”
I mixed it all together one final time in the bowl. “Perfect pasta is about the only thing I know how to cook.”
It was a pleasant hour and I found myself feeling content. The only moments I’d felt really at ease since arriving here were in Orion’s arms and even that was bound up in lust and emotion. Brandon regaled us with disjointed stories about being a Marine. Apparently it involved a lot of running and not much sleeping. The day he got out he vowed not to cut his hair until the turn of another decade.
“You’ll want to rethink that,” Teague joked with his mouth full of pasta. “I just saw some shit crawling around in your beard.”
Brandon filled his mug with wine again. “You’re a f*cking liar. There’s no shit crawling around in my face.” Although before he finished speaking he’d already begun stroking the mottled hair on his chin and after a minute he exited abruptly and ran into the bathroom. Teague cracked up.
“Man,” he laughed. “It’s so f*cking easy.”
A telephone ring pierced the air and I jumped. For a second I thought it was the phone Orion had given me, which I’d left on the kitchen counter.
But no, it was Teague’s phone. He glanced at the face of it and his face darkened. Rachel and I exchanged glances when he pushed back from the table and ran outside.
Brandon returned with a big patch of hair gone from his face. He looked at me in drunken confusion. “I think I used your razor.”
“That’s okay,” I muttered, staring at the door Teague had exited from.
“Kira,” Rachel warned when I rose and followed him outside. I didn’t listen.
Night was approaching and the wind was whipping up. Teague was standing behind Riverbottom smoking a cigarette. Whatever business that call had been about was over.
“Rain will be here soon,” he said.
I inhaled. An oddly sweet fragrance hung thick in the air. “How can you tell?”
“That smell. It’s desert greasewood. Gives off this perfumy crap when it gets wet.”
“Oh,” I said, shifting. Teague stared at me as the wind lifted my hair. “Are they coming back soon?” I asked quietly.
“Yeah.” He tossed the cigarette on the ground and stepped on it. It was a message. That was the only information he was going to offer. He started to walk towards the trailers. “Hey, thanks for the meal. Get the kid to wash the f*cking dishes.”
I assumed he was talking about Brandon. “I’ll see you, Teague.”
He nodded, continuing to walk away.
Rachel was already cleaning up. She kept removing dishes from Brandon’s drunken clutches and he kept grabbing more and dropping them. She wagged a finger at him. “You better not be thinking about riding around town tonight. You know Orion doesn’t have much of a sense of humor about you winding up in the drunk tank.”
“F*ck, that wasn’t me,” Brandon yawned. “That was Maddox.”
She slapped at him with a wet dishtowel. “Head on over to the bar and work it off or else really get going and pass out.”
He thought about that. “Anyone interesting over there?”
“Talia.”
Brandon grimaced underneath half a beard. “That bitch. Yeah, Grayson’s got to figure that out sooner or later.”
Rachel smiled sweetly. “Stay out of it. Gray was on lockdown for six years, right?”
Brandon nodded. “Something like that. F*cks with a man’s sense of what’s good and what’s not, you know?”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
I joined Rachel at the sink and quietly began drying the motley collection of clean dishes she set on the counter. After a few minutes Brandon grew bored and headed over to Riverbottom, taking his box of wine with him.
I stacked the dishes in the cabinet as Rachel finished washing and grabbed a towel.
“It’s going to rain,” I said helpfully.
She gave me an odd look. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I know.”