“No. My living with and caring for your disrespectful, sullen, foul-mouthed son for the past year qualifies me. And my knowing you and watching you fail for twenty-nine years. That qualifies me.” With a huff, Lindsay tossed her dark hair, perfectly styled even at this hour, over her shoulder. Not much longer than her shoulder, it slid forward again, and she left it.
Righteous anger, hurt, and fear whirlpooling together in her stomach, Cory tried to keep her voice calm and quiet. She didn’t want to end the night with her and Nolan sleeping in the car. They’d avoided that so far, but it was the next step down. A doozie. “What happened?”
“I had to pick him up from school—again. He’s got in-school suspension for three days for calling his English teacher a”—she stopped and blushed—“C-word.”
“Cunt?” Cory couldn’t control a little smile; even now, her sister’s perfect primness was amusing.
“Corinne! That’s an awful word. You do things like that just to upset people. It’s terrible. And Nolan is just like you. Six days left in the school year, and he’s suspended for three of them. My God!” She cleared her throat and composed herself. “Anyway, when Alex got home, he tried to talk to him, and that ended up in shouting and slammed doors. Just like it always does. He uses awful language when he’s angry, and he’s always angry. The only reason we’ve let you continue to stay with us is that he doesn’t do it where Vienna and Verona could hear.”
Her son did not have anger management issues. He was a fifteen-year-old boy whose emotional well-being had taken a lot of body blows over the past five years, and he was having very appropriate angry feelings about it. He didn’t hit or break things. He yelled and he swore. Sometimes he went out walking in the middle of the night, but he always came home, and he always went to school, as much as he hated it. Cory thought he was playing an awful hand well.
But she didn’t bother arguing the point with her sister. There was never any purpose in arguing a point with Lindsay Lessing-Moore—which was not a hyphenate name Cory would have chosen to be known by, personally. She was perfectly confident in her correctness, and she was perfectly rigid. Perfect in every way, she was.
“Is there more you need to say?”
Clearly, Lindsay had prepared for more of a fight than that, because she faltered, as if she needed a moment to rifle through her index cards and find the right point in her prepared remarks. “You need help, too, Cory. It’s not normal to go through jobs like you do. It’s not a normal response to a good, solid job to get so depressed after two months that you can’t get out of bed. You are so smart and talented, but you’re afraid of making anything work. You find ways to ruin every job. Just like you found ways to ruin your grades in high school. And the way you glommed onto that loser like he was God’s gift. It’s not healthy. You’re thirty-four years old. You should be able to support yourself and your son on your own.”
“Matt’s not a loser.”
“Oh, please, Cory. A thirty-five-year-old man who plays baseball in a crappy league, making a grand a month? Who sleeps with every little barely-legal hoochie mama groupie in the Midwest? Who gave you chlamydia because of it? And who hasn’t seen his son in four years or paid a dime of child support in three? I’d say that Matt is the featured performer on the loser stage.”
All of that was true. All of it hurt. Cory was so constantly furious at her ex-husband the force of it baffled her sometimes. And yet she didn’t feel vengeful toward him. She knew Matt—better than anyone, probably to this day. He was a dreamer, like her. Reality got hard for people like them, the not-Lindsays and the not-Alexes.
They’d been sweethearts since eighth grade. In high school, Matt had been a baseball star, and he’d gotten a scholarship to a little Christian college in mid-Missouri. Cory hadn’t wanted college. She wanted to be a musician. A singer-songwriter. So she’d stayed home in their little town and worked, looking for gigs, and she’d taken a couple of classes at the county junior college, so she could get some studio time. They chased their dreams, and they stayed together. She went to see him as often as she could, driving the Beast.
Then he’d gotten expelled on a morals violation—he’d been caught banging a townie on the bus while the team was on a road trip. He’d come home and apologized profusely, weeping in her lap. She’d forgiven him. And they’d gotten married not long after. He was nineteen; she was not quite yet. She was pregnant within months.
Baseball was Matt’s life—more than Cory, more even than Nolan, when he showed up. Baseball. His dream since he’d first swung at a ball on a tee. He’d tried out in a farm league, but he didn’t make it. So he went to the independent leagues. He got his spot, and for ten years they’d lived a raggedy, hand-to-mouth existence, Matt playing ball, traveling heavily eight months a year, working the kind of jobs that let a guy disappear for long stretches during the season. Not the kind of jobs that paid well.
Cory had held things together at home. She worked a lot of different day jobs and gigged as much as she could, with a little boy at home and no money for sitters. Their mom had died when Cory was a senior in high school, and their dad was not the kind of guy you trusted to keep an eye on an active little boy. Cory got help from neighbors as she could.
But she had trouble keeping jobs because she refused to be treated shabbily. When she was expected to work off the clock, or to do something shady, or when she was berated beyond a civil critique—or when, as happened often in certain kinds of jobs, the boss came onto her or worse—she spoke out, and not always civilly. When she spoke out, she was either fired on the spot, or the situation elevated, and she walked. Customer service jobs. Retail, restaurant, bar—it didn’t matter. In her experience, workers in that industry were treated like subhumans.
In the other kind of job, the boring office jobs she could get, she’d hold on for awhile until the sameness nearly literally killed her and she’d sink into blackness and not be able to get out of bed. Those jobs usually paid better, but Cory was just simply not wired to work a desk job. She could not do the same thing over and over every day. She wasn’t a naturally depressed person, but that was a guaranteed descent into misery.
So she job-hopped. And she tried to make something work with her music. She had steady gigs, and she had a little channel online that got enough hits to generate a little bit of money.
That had all been working okay—until the day jobs had dried up. She hadn’t punched a time card in over a year. She was afraid that her, um, extensive resume, and her increasing age, was in her way.
But she wasn’t afraid of success. She simply defined it much, much differently from the way Lindsay did. She didn’t need a terrifying crystal chandelier in a fwah-YAY. She needed to be able to earn a living—just a living, food and shelter—doing something she enjoyed with people who weren’t assholes.
“When do we have to be out?”
~oOo~
Before she went to her sleeper sofa, she checked in on Nolan, quietly pushing open the guest room door. The hallway light cast a soft beam over the bed. He was lying with his back to the door, the sheet pushed down around his waist. His sketchpad was open at the foot of the bed. She was curious to see what he’d been sketching tonight, but she never pried. He’d show her on his own, anyway. Stepping back, she started to pull the door quietly to.
“I’m awake, Mom.” He rolled over, his dark curls drooping over his eyes. Even in his ratty Ninja Turtles t-shirt, he was a beautiful kid.
“Hey, kiddo. Rough night?” When he sat up and turned on the lamp on the nightstand, Cory stepped in and closed the door. “Wanna talk?”
He shrugged. He looked sad, not angry. “I just—I know I’m not supposed to say this, because he’s, like, family or whatever. But I hate Uncle Alex. He’s such a dick. Don’t get mad that I said that, okay?”
She moved his pad without looking at it and sat down at the foot of the bed. “I’m not mad, Nolan. I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to make things better. But Aunt Lindsay and Uncle Al
ex are helping us out—a lot—and we have to remember that we’re guests in their home.”
“How could we forget it? They remind us all the time! You should hear the things they say about you, Mom. Especially him. It pisses me off so much. He calls you flaky and irresponsible. Tonight he called you a worthless leech.”
Trying to keep herself neutral, she asked, “He said that to you?”
“No. They go into his office for their talks. But his office is right next door. I hear pretty much all of it.”
“Did you hear all of it tonight?”
“Yeah.” He looked at her through his messy curls, his blue eyes bleak. “Do I have to see a shrink?”
She put her hand on his knee and gave it a squeeze. “No, kiddo. No. Not unless you want to. Do you?”
After a sharp, emphatic shake of his head, he looked down at his own hands, the nails bitten past the quick and the cuticles frayed. “Do we have to go, then?”
“Yeah. End of the month.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. Really sorry.”
“Nolan, it’s okay. I’m the one who’s sorry.” Holding his knee wasn’t enough, so Cory moved up closer and pulled her son into her arms. He came willingly and wrapped his arms around her right away, holding tight. Neither of them cried. They were past tears for this shit. “I’ll figure it out, okay? We always make it to the next day, and we’ll keep doing that. Okay?” He nodded, his face tucked against her neck.
Running her fingers through his mop of hair, she whispered, “You want to tell me about your day? I’ve got two ears and two shoulders, and they’re all yours.”
Nolan nodded and then pushed back to lean against the headboard. Cory repositioned herself to sit next to him.
“Got a D+ on my English paper. When I asked Ms. Geralds why, she said I didn’t read the poem right. I told her I didn’t read it like she did, but I thought I proved my point, and I asked her where I didn’t. She said I was arrogant because I thought I knew so much I could make up anything I wanted. I was so mad, but I was really trying to be cool, Mom, really I was. But then she told me to sit down before she changed my grade to an F. That’s when I called her a stupid cunt. I kinda yelled it.”
“Well, I’m not gonna tell you that you shouldn’t have called her a name, because you know that. I’m glad you stuck up for yourself, though. Just do your ISS, because that’s an appropriate consequence for what you said. And then the school year will be over, and we’ll figure out the next thing. What happened with Uncle Alex?”
Now Nolan started to get agitated. “God, Mom! He’s just such a dick. He tries to come off all fatherly or whatever—and that sucks anyway, because I have a father and I don’t need Mr. Suit Guy trying to step in. I know he doesn’t like me and it’s all just an act, like it’s getting him points on some kind of scorecard to lecture me about respect and responsibility. And then he goes back into his office with Aunt Linz and they talk about how I’m already a loser just like Dad, and how it’s all he can do not to smack me, and then he goes at Aunt Linz because we’re her family and she should get us under control.”
His voice broke then, and he stopped. After a pause, he sniffed and carried on. “I just hate it here so much. I’d like living in the Beast better. That’s the next thing, isn’t it?”
It chilled Cory’s heart to contemplate it, but she didn’t know how she’d get the money for a place in the next three weeks. “I don’t know, kiddo. Maybe. For now, let’s just get to the next day and see what we see, okay?”
“Yeah. I love you, Mom. I’m sorry I fucked this up.”
“You didn’t, Nolan. Don’t pummel yourself over it. We stick together, we’ll be okay.” Sweeping his hair back, she kissed his forehead. “We’ll be okay. You have your first exciting day of in-school suspension tomorrow. So you’d better use these last couple of hours to rest up.”
When she stood, he scooted back down to lay his head on the pillows. With a kiss to his cheek, Cory whispered, “I love you, little cub.”
He smiled at the name she’d had for him when he was small, and then he closed his eyes.
When Cory was settled on the sleeper in the scrapbooking room, she sat staring into the dark. She didn’t cry. She rarely cried anymore. But she worried.
CHAPTER THREE
When Havoc roared down the drive to his family home, his father was riding the massive mower out of the equipment barn. He cut the engine as Havoc dismounted the Softail and set his helmet on the seat.
Don Mariano was dark, burly, and hairy, robust and fearsome even now in his sixties. He wasn’t born a farm boy, had instead been raised on The Hill in St. Louis, but he’d married a woman with no brothers, and he’d taken over the Anker family farm when Havoc’s maternal grandfather fell ill. He’d taken to the country life immediately and now bore almost no lingering trace of city breeding. The A/M Farm was one of the strongest independent farms left anywhere near Signal Bend. They’d weathered the bleak times because he’d put everything into the farm, leaving only enough for essentials for his wife or children, or himself.
Havoc and his baby sister had grown up in a subsistence life surrounded by lush green success. Working heavy labor in the fields from the age of ten, so that his father could cut back on hired hands, Havoc had grown broadly muscular early. He’d wanted to play football, but his old man couldn’t spare him from the fields. Don hadn’t had much patience at all for school, where Havoc was concerned—it took a strong hand from real work, he said—but Havoc’s mother, June, had insisted her children graduate high school.
And he had graduated, barely. But he’d have been fine with dropping out. School bored him thoroughly, and when he got bored, he stirred up shit. He’d spent a lot of time in detention, or suspension, or just in the principal’s office, waiting for his old man—it was always his old man—to pick him up.
And then, at home, in the barn, Havoc would get what was coming to him. He never thought to resent his old man for the beatings, even the ones that left scars he still had to this day. It was just the way of things. Don never laid a hand on the women. He wasn’t a drunk, abusive bastard like Isaac’s old man. He just had set ideas about a father’s responsibility. Sophie got grounded, and Havoc—Joe, back then, and still, at home—got bruised, sometimes bloodied. Never in anger, though, never without control. He’d never seen his old man actually enraged and out of control.
Havoc didn’t think he’d do the same if he ever had kids—as if that would ever happen—but he thought of those beatings as his old man’s way. No more, no less.
It never really stopped him acting out, though. It was like he didn’t have a choice. It was still like he didn’t have a choice. He just had never been able to find a way to mesh his gears with everybody else’s—until he’d started hanging around the Horde clubhouse. That’s when he’d found where he belonged.
Don sat back in the mower seat and readjusted his Deere cap. He got a new one to commemorate the beginning of every sowing season; by the end of June it was always, like this one, already crumpled and grimy.
By way of greeting, around a thick plug of Skoal, the old man gritted, “You here to work, boy?”
“Came to talk to Ma, but if you need me, yes, sir.”
Don turned his head to the opposite side of the mower and spit a viscous brown stream into the grey gravel. “Naw. Light day. Mabel is set to foal, though. Soph’s back with her. She might use the help.”
Havoc nodded. He and his old man had as much relationship as either wanted from the other. They were not men who talked deep. Strong and not afraid of hard work, Havoc thought he had earned the old man’s respect. And Don had not lost his son’s, being the kind of father he’d been.
“Anybody call Delia?” Delia Borden was the most local veterinarian, specializing, as vets did in the country, in large animals.
Don’s mouth wrinkled in disgust. “Soph’s got it. Not her first rodeo. Nor Mabel’s.” Without another word, he kicked the engine on the mower back up and rode to the fa
rthest reach of the green space that served as the yard. Havoc headed for the animal barn.
The barn was cool and dim, a welcome break from the late-June heat, though the air was no less thick with damp inside than outside. Missouri summer air had weight to it; it lay on the skin like a film.
His baby sister, Sophie, was leaning over the front wall of the largest stall in the barn. She turned and smiled at him. “Hey, Joe.”
Sophia Mariano was a pretty young woman, ten years younger than her brother. Where Havoc was big and dark, like their old man, Sophie took after their mother—blonde, with hazel eyes, a build somewhere between petite and average. At twenty-eight, she still lived at home. Or, better said, she lived at home again. She’d gone to college and gotten a degree to teach grade school. She hadn’t been able to find a placement, though, so she was back at home, working at Fosse’s Finds on Main Street.
“Hey, Shorts. Pop says there’s doin’s in here.” He walked up to her side and looked into the stall. Mabel, a beautiful, white leopard Appaloosa mare with black spots, was lying on her side in the clean shavings. Soph had wrapped her white tail in bright pink flexible tape, and Havoc saw two little black hooves already out. Mabel lifted her head and looked back. She started to roll, as if she wanted to stand, then fell back, her body clenching. With an irritated huff, she laid her head back down, and a little nose peeked out the other end.
Having been raised on this farm, this wasn’t Havoc’s first birth, but it never ceased to amaze him. Watching a totally new, separate life moving out of its mother’s body, enclosed in a pearly, semi-transparent sac, unmoving at first, but soon to take its first steps on its own out in the world—it gave him a feeling of warmth and power that he didn’t entirely understand. Always had. He’d always been fascinated by animals and the simplicity with which they lived their lives. All instinct. Pure. And yet he’d seen animals exhibit what he could only think of as devotion.
Mabel contracted again, and the head was out—mostly black, with large patches of white.
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