Bones by the Wood (22 page)

“Wassup, li’l bro?”  It felt wrong to call him ‘bud’, that was Thea’s name for her boy, but he found himself using the moniker that Scooby and Shaggy had adopted for the boy.

“You and my mama, you’re, like...together now... or, whatever?”

Dizzy sat forward.  “Yeah.  But I don’t want that to cause a problem for you.  If you’re not happy ‘bout that, I’d like for you to tell me.”

“No.  It’s okay.  I guess.  Well, it’s kinda gross and weird that she’s got a boyfriend.  She’s never had one before.  But that’s not it.”

Dizzy wondered about that fact, but didn’t ask for more details, because Josh wasn’t done yet.  He was relieved, though, very relieved, that Josh was okay with him being around Thea.

“It’s just, I need, like, help with somethin’.  And I guess if you’re my mama’s boyfriend, that you’re the right person to help me.”

Dizzy felt a cold knot in his throat.  He’d known that getting involved with someone with a child would bring some particular complications, but he hadn’t intended on trying to parent Josh, certainly not without Thea’s permission.  He was more than a little concerned about how serious something might be that Josh would come and speak to him about it, especially since his relationship with the boy’s mother was still effectively only hours old.  But he swallowed all his misgivings as best he could.  Thea and Josh were a package deal; he had to deal with that or face the consequences.

“I’ll try.  What do you need help with?”

“It’s her birthday next weekend.  We never do much for it.  But, if you’re, like, her boyfriend, then you should know about it, right?  And I kinda feel like, with this weekend being...I don’t know.  Like maybe I, we, should do somethin’ for it, but I don’t know what.”

Oh, well that wasn’t the trauma he’d been expecting.  He had no idea how he was going to help Josh, but he was touched that the boy had asked for his involvement, and encouraged that it was a positive sign that whatever it was they were starting could work.

“Okay, I’ll help you with that.  I’m not sure what’d be good, but I’ll think about it.”

“Good.  Thanks.  She’s thirty.  That’s, like, a big thing, isn’t it?”

Dizzy was rendered momentarily speechless.  He knew how old Thea was, but having her ten-year-old son, who wasn’t even as old as the age difference between the two of them, spell it out to him, that threw him for a loop for a moment.

“Yeah, but don’t worry, li’l bro.  We’ll come up with somethin’ good.”

“Good.  That’s great.  Thank you.”

Josh’s attention was diverted when Thea reappeared.  She spotted him and Josh.  He saw surprise cross her face, before it relaxed almost immediately into a pleased smile.

He followed them back to their apartment.  Mostly to check that her car made it, and partly out of a reluctance to let them go, rather than out of any real fear for their safety.  He would have suggested that she bring the rattling shell into the garage, but he feared that it was beyond the point of saving.  Another project was added to his mental ‘To Do’ list.

When Dizzy got back to the clubhouse, his brothers were waiting.  None of the women were in sight, and Dizzy supposed that they’d either all left or made themselves scarce.  Even with the men dotted around the room, chatting quietly, it felt empty and silent.  Dizzy went to the bar and asked Nut for a shot of Jack.  He needed something to take the maudlin edge off his thoughts.  He downed the shot, relishing the quick burn in his throat, and then asked for a coffee.  Once Nut had poured it, he signaled to the others that it was time to meet.  They’d discuss business, then he’d go and take his frustrations and disquiet out on the projects in the garage that had mostly been ignored all weekend.  At least the broken vehicles would keep him occupied for a while.

Was it really only Monday?  Was it really only seven days since she’d watched Dizzy beat the addict that had tried to rob the store?  So much had happened since then that Thea felt physically jarred.  Her world had been turned upside down and righted again, but she thought maybe she was still on the other side of the looking glass, staring at the shadows of the life she’d been living before.  Things were different now.

Dizzy had followed them back to their apartment building, made sure they got inside okay, left her with a kiss and ridden off. Thea wasn’t sure what that meant, if she should be scared still.  But he’d said they would be safe and she believed him, and besides, she wasn’t quite ready to let him go yet.  Seeing him ride off had added to the feeling of ending, of the return to normality.  Their apartment had seemed small and cramped and very, very quiet.  It was a little musty, so Thea had opened the windows and stripped the beds down.  There were some funky things living in the refrigerator that had once been edible, but that were now about ready to walk out on their own legs.  She’d thrown those into the trash with a grimace.

She’d taken Josh to the laundromat, and then taken him to the store to restock.  Val had been on shift, which was odd. She didn’t usually work the earliest one, but she’d explained that Thea bailing over the weekend had meant some shuffling around.  Val had hinted that the manager wasn’t too pleased, which Thea was expecting since he’d been downright snippy with her on the phone that morning.  Thea didn’t mention the developments with Dizzy to Val. She wasn’t sure what to introduce him as; boyfriend seemed like the wrong term for a grown man, and it had only been a couple of days really, and how in the hell was she going to explain how all that had come about.  She had no idea, so she kept quiet on the subject. 

She gave Val the same story that she’d given the school about the stomach bug to explain why Josh was with her and not in class.  She had to give Josh a lot of credit, she hadn’t thought to warn him, but he’d rolled with it.  After a quick glance that seemed to be asking what in the hell she was lying for, he got it, and started spinning impressively gross tales of projectile vomit that soon had Val crying for mercy.

Thea got it in her head to blitz the apartment after lunch and enlisted Josh to help her clean.  The fuzzy stuff in the fridge had made her skin creep, and she knew she wouldn’t settle until all the surfaces had been wiped over with disinfectant.  Josh was quiet and not all that chatty while they worked.  Thea figured he was feeling the loss of his new friends and all that activity as much as she was.  He’d been about joined to the hip to Shaggy and Scooby, and now he was back on his own again.

Thea hated asking her boy to lie, since she’d invested a lot of effort in to trying to make sure that he didn’t feel the need to keep things from her, but she knew she had to have a difficult conversation with him before he went back to school.  She decided to broach it while they were washing out the cupboards in the kitchen. 

“Bud, I hate sayin’ this, but you know you can’t mention at school where you were this weekend, right?”  They’d piled the contents of all the cupboards into the living room space so that Josh could clean the under-counter cupboards while Thea stood on a chair to clean the wall units.

“Yeah, I kinda figured that, Mama.  I’m s’posed to have been sick.”

Thea paused in re-soaking her cloth in the bucket of soapy water.  “Yeah, I’m sorry I dropped that on you.  I didn’t think.”

“It’s okay.  It was kinda fun makin’ Val’s face go all funny like that.  If any of my teachers ask, I’ll just tell ‘em the same thing.”

“That’d be good.  And, bud, you should probably hold off mentionin’ about Scooby and Shaggy and the rest as well.”  She made herself look at him while she spoke.

“Well, yeah.  If I’ve been pukin’ all weekend I shouldn’t have been playin’ computer games, right?”

“True, but it’s not just that.  Your teachers don’t know them.”  Thea sighed.  It was going to be hard to explain this to her boy.  Prejudice was something she wished he didn’t have to know about.  “They don’t know that they’re good people.  They hear the loud bikes and they see that they’re big and they see the tattoos and they automatically think they’re bad people.”

“But they’re not.”  Josh seemed completely perplexed.

“No, they’re not.  But your teachers will think that they are, and they’ll think it’s not safe for you to hang out with them.”

“But you have tattoos.”  He wasn’t any less confused.

“Yeah, and some people think that makes me a bad mama.  The same people who will think I’m a bad mama for takin’ you to the clubhouse and lettin’ you hang out with the guys.”

“What?!  But those people don’t know nothin’ about you, or me, or them!  His confusion had given way to outrage now.

“No, but they’ll judge me anyway. Just like they’ll judge Shaggy and Scooby and Dizzy and the rest.  So we need just to not speak about it.  You don’t need to lie, well, apart from the thing about bein’ sick, just don’t talk about it.  If you don’t tell ‘em, they won’t know.”

“What about Billy?  Can I tell him?  I wanna tell him about Shaggy takin’ me on his bike and stuff, and the garage was way cool.”

“It’d be best not to, bud.  Billy will probably think it’s way cool, too.  But I’m not sure his mama will.”  Billy’s mother had always been friendly to Thea, but she was a Soccer Mom, as much as someone could be in Ravensbridge.  She wore the Mom Jeans and everything.  Thea thought even six degrees of separation from an MC might be more than she could bear.  And yeah, that was her judging, too, but she was basing her assumption on experience.  Ravensbridge was a small town, and there had been an MC calling it home for years.  Thea knew what people said about the bikers that inhabited this town, and not much of it was good, not much at all.

Josh was silent for a long while.  He just kept mopping out the cabinet he was working on, one of the corner units.  Eventually, Thea heard from deep inside it, “That sucks.”

“Yeah, bud.  It does.  But that’s the way it goes sometimes.  When you’re older, you’ll be big enough to do what you like and not care what anyone thinks, but for now, we have to pay them some heed.”

Josh emerged from the cupboard to look at her.  “Because they might put me in a home?  Kenny Wilkes, in my class, they put him in a home ‘cause they said his mama didn’t look after him right.”

Thea had been aware of that case, it had been the subject of a lot of gossip in the community, so she’d overheard much of it in the laundromat and as people chatted as they shopped in the store.  “Yeah, well that’s ‘cause Kenny’s mama was drunk when she wasn’t cranked outta her mind and she didn’t look after him at all.”

“But you don’t do drugs.  And Dizzy and Shaggy and the others don’t.”

Thea decide not to split hairs about pot; she was pretty certain Dizzy wouldn’t stand for the others doing anything else, anything harder. She would be out of there in a cloud of dust if they did, but she had seen zero evidence of that.  “Some people think stickin’ a needle in your arm and hangin’ out with bikers is the same thing, as bad as each other.  So we’ll just keep quiet, yeah?”

“Yeah.”  Josh was sullen.  “Still sucks though.” 

“Yes.  Yes it does.”

She’d cooked them a quick supper and then left Josh under the watchful eye of Clarice, who was obviously dying to ask some questions about their disappearance, but politely kept them to herself when Thea didn’t offer any information.  Her hunk of junk car seemed even more recalcitrant than usual and only made it to the store on a wing and a prayer.  Thea thought about asking Dizzy to take a look at it, but she felt weirdly awkward about that for no discernible reason, so she shelved the thought for the time being.

Dwight, the store manager, was coming off the shift before her. If he’d been snippy on the phone that morning he was outright hostile now.  He was rail thin and no taller than 5’ 5”, and more than a couple of inches of that height were courtesy of the heels of his boots.  What he lacked in stature, he made up for in attitude.  Puffed full of his own importance, he reminded her more than once that she needed the job more than he needed a flake employee.  That was fucking rich.  It was the first time that she’d called in sick in years. And now he was holding it over her.  That was just great.

She had her high school diploma, but it was over a decade old.  Now all she had was plenty of experience working in the store.  There was a chance she could get a job waiting tables in town if she lost this job, but she’d bet her last paycheck that Dwight would badmouth her if he sacked her.  She was sure she’d struggle to get work if she lost this job.  Fuck.  She hated that he was right.  She was going to have to be a model employee for the foreseeable future.  She hoped that would be enough.

Apart from the drama with Dwight, it was as tedious as Monday shifts usually were.  Since it was quiet, and she was bored, she decided to earn some space in Dwight’s good books by cleaning the store.  She mopped the floors and wiped the shelves down and didn’t see one customer the entire time.  By the time she was done she didn’t think she’d ever be able to get the smell of fake pine trees out of her nose.

Unfortunately, all that time with nothing much to keep her occupied gave her way too much opportunity to overthink things, specifically things concerning her and Dizzy.  There was a real attraction there, the man was sex on a stick for a start, considerate and kind, and he paid attention to Josh.  Thea could see from the respect and affinity that the other patches had for their President that he was a good man.  Not once during the entire weekend, even though one of their number had died doing whatever it was they’d done, had she heard anyone say a bad word about Dizzy.  She’d kept her ears open and all she’d heard was friendship, and that his presence was missed in Louisiana, and pride at the progress he was making here in Texas.

But she started worrying that she’d just been caught up in the frenzy of the lockdown.  Now that she was a couple of steps back from the situation, she wondered if she’d let things move too fast.  Maybe she should have thought things through more, taken more care.  She should have held back, considered Josh more through all of it.  It was too late now, though.  Dizzy was not the kind of man who was just going to hand the reins over to her.  The sense of authority that surrounded him, his power, his command, it was all as alluring as it was terrifying.  Not only did she have someone else in her life to consider when she made decisions now, but she knew she would not be calling all the shots.

She was disturbed from her anxious train of thoughts when she heard the rumble of a bike approaching, and then silence, but no one came into the store.  It wasn’t unusual to hear the roar of the engines about town, so she just got on with closing up for the night.  She double checked everything.  She didn’t want to give Dwight an inch.

She was a little late when she started her way across the lot to her car, and she was fumbling in her bag for her keys.  The day was catching up with her, she was beginning to feel bone tired, so she didn’t see the bike parked next to her car at first.

“Heya, sweetheart.”

Thea let out a little squeaky shriek and dropped her keys.  Dizzy threw his head back and laughed at her shocked reaction.

“What the fuck?!  I nearly had a heart attack!”  She dropped to the tarmac and scrabbled for her keys, trying to breathe her heart back down her throat and into her chest.

“No drama, sweetheart.  Just wanted to make sure you made it home okay.”

“I don’t call sufferin’ a coronary event okay.  Anyway, I thought we were okay, that we didn’t need to worry too much?”  She caught her errant keys and straightened, but made no further move towards her car.

“You don’t.  Just tryin’ to be nice over here.  If anythin’, I’m more concerned the engine is gonna drop out of that death trap, or the brakes are gonna fail.”

“Yeah, well, it’s done okay so far.”  Thea wasn’t sure why she was offended on her car’s behalf. It sure didn’t deserve her defending it.

Dizzy cast a skeptical eye at the dented hunk of metal.  “It was doin’ okay ten years ago.  It’s on its last wheels now.”

“So you’re sittin’ here at this time to scare me half to death and insult my ride?”

Dizzy shrugged.  “Guess so.”

It was late, or early, whichever way you wanted to look at it, Thea did not want to spend hours standing in a parking lot.  She stalked to her car door, but as she aimed the key in the lock, Dizzy caught her arm.  “I’m sorry I scared you.  I don’t warrant a kiss ‘hello’, though?”