Chapter 29: Ethan

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Ethan

M y brother, the head of the Rebel Barbarians Motorcycle Club, sent us out on a mission to eliminate the rest of the living members of the Midnight S.S. Once they’re gone, we have no more enemies out West, no more enemies chasing after Oske’s land that partly belongs to us. Shaw land. I don’t care too much about the land situation, but I hate having to step out of my routine.

I report the good news to Wyatt and stay at mom’s house nearby instead of getting a head start on Boston. I do not want to catch Ruger Blackwood in my apartment. I warned him not to fuck in my bed, but I know Ruger. It would have been just as good if I issued him a decree mandating he fuck in my bed. I’ll have to throw it out.

Mom loves having me over at her second home in Springfield. It’s her “party house” – lots of wine and lots of Real Housewives on the television. She makes me feel like a kid again, the rare times I visit. It’s hard seeing her without dad. It’s like she’s missing a piece of her. I don’t think a woman will ever love me the way mom loved dad. Her kitchen is stuck in 2006 – Tuscan themed. There are formica brown quartz countertops, a kitchen island, and grapes painted on the walls. A little wooden sign that says “it’s wine o’clock”. The smell of mom’s kitchen reminds me of high school.

The half-finished bottle of wine on the kitchen island reminds me of high school even more. I’m glad Tylee isn’t sitting at the dining room table bitching over basic fucking algebra. I don’t miss her whining. Mom cooks steak whenever I visit. Tonight, the steak and wine combination smells incredible.

I place a few bets on my phone and shove it into my pocket as the little burst of relief floods my brain. Won my bet on the German pretzel cutting competition, but lost the Canadian College Curling finals. Fuck. At least I have enough in the account to bet some more.

“Ethan. When are you going to get married?”

“Can you at least wait until we finish the first bottle of wine?”

“Wyatt got married. Owen got married. What’s wrong with you? Your dad always said you were the most handsome.”

“Mom…”

I take my flask out of my cut. If I’m going to hear another lecture about my relationship status, I’ll need something stronger than my mom’s fancy ass Finger Lakes wine from that weekend trip I sent her on last month. Whiskey burns down my throat, but unfortunately, I’m just face to face with mom once I put the flask down.

“I’m serious,” she says, raising her plucked eyebrows and giving me her most serious sea-green stare. Mom… She was a born and raised biker chick. Dad kept his old lady by his side with a pistol in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Mom always wanted him – even when he was married to someone else. She never hid that from us, which made dad clear his throat disapprovingly in her direction a few times. Mom wasn’t ever afraid of him.

She was too much of a badass. She quit smoking when we were kids, but once in a while, she misses them and has one out on the porch.

“Any woman who wants to be a part of this life is crazy. Unlike dad, Wyatt, or Owen, I have no desire for a crazy woman.”

“Then find a boring woman. Lots of women hang around the club house. Find a nice Oklahoma girl and settle down.”

I bristle. Sleeping in a cold bed every night might be hard, but putting up with the personality of an unbuttered slice of bread would be worse. Wyatt and Owen might have tied themselves to women with a screw loose, but at least they won’t be bored.

“I don’t need a woman. I have gambling and… you know.”

“I don’t,” my mother says sternly. I dry swallow. It’s not like I don’t talk to my mom about my problems but… the older I get, the less I want to spill my guts.

“Situationships.”

“What the fuck is that, Ethan?” she says, taking a swig right out of the bottle. Okay, she’s tipsy. Mom always switches from the glass to the bottle when she’s appropriately tipsy.

“Sleeping around.”

She wrinkles her nose in disgust. “That’s a good way to end up like Ruger. Or Owen.”

Ruger was married to Darlene. Owen and Kaylee-Marie had known each other for almost a decade. Sleeping around didn’t cause those babies out of wedlock. Loving the wrong person did.

“I can’t force a woman to be with me.”

“Why not?” she says. “Force her by proving to her you’re a good person.”

“Mom.”

She looks at me. Right at me. In only the way a mother can.

“I’m not a good person,” I tell her once I have her attention. My mom shakes her head.

“You just want to be difficult.”

“Yes.”

“I’m serious, Ethan. You need a wife.”

“I’ve made it this far.”

“I could set you up with someone.”

“No.”

“Have you considered that you care too much about gambling?”

My mother is out of her fucking mind. Gambling takes the edge off. It makes it easy to keep track of the other shit I have to do. Playing motivates me. Mom wouldn’t understand. She blames video poker for some big fucked up thing dad did in the 90’s that she mentions without mentioning. She doesn’t have a problem with card games or dice games that happen in person, but she doesn’t trust the machines.

I’m the opposite. I only trust machines. People are unpredictable.

“Mom. Can we just drink and have a nice time?”

Her body tenses. I sense that she’s holding something back from me, but if she doesn’t want to tell me what it is, I can't drag it out of her. But my mother sighs and then she touches her neck, which she always did when she was explaining a big credit card purchase to our father. I stare at her, with eyes that remind us both of the man we lost.

“Fine,” she says. “I want to go back to Boston.”

Her eyes are glassy. If this were Tylee, I would be suspicious that she stepped out on her husband and got pregnant or something. But it’s my mother – the most perfect woman on planet Earth.

“What? Why?”

Mom isn’t the type to leave the comforts of her Midwestern home. She finds people on the East Coast unfriendly, and she isn’t afraid to tell them that she thinks so. Despite her origins – on her mother’s side – mom has never had much of an affinity for Boston. She likes being close to Wyatt and Anna. She has precious grandchildren – and without all the drama that came with Kaylee-Marie, Owen’s first baby mama.

“I need to,” she says, the tears vanishing and her voice returning to that stoic, if not stern tone that I recognize from my childhood. There is something wrong.

She’s drinking with her eldest son and pressuring me about marriage. This woman has never wanted to share my affections with anyone. She threw red wine on my prom date’s dress. I had to let it go eventually, but I didn’t talk to her for a month after that stunt.

I’m worried.

And it takes a lot to worry me. I’m nothing like Wyatt, who worries about whether the sky will be blue today, as if that has ever been up for change.

“Mom?” I ask her, using a voice that I hope will coax the truth out of her. I want to act like I can handle anything, even if I’m not sure I can.

My mother has made it a long practice of hiding her pain from her sons. That’s the part of her East Coast upbringing that she kept up all those years. She finally meets my gaze – after another hearty swig of wine.

“I can’t,” she says. The bottle clinks against the counter. I need to know.

“Mom. I can handle it. Just tell me what’s wrong.”

She sighs and those tears appear again just in the corners of her eyes. Fuck. This is serious.

Her voice warbles, “There’s a lump in my right breast, Ethan. And I don’t trust these hillbilly doctors. I was raised in Boston. That’s where I want to go.”

A lump.

“It’s probably nothing,” I tell her. But I know it isn’t nothing. Our grandmother in Boston was a Murray before she was a Hollingsworth – first cousin to the leader of an old Irish mob family. And she died. Of breast cancer.

“I know,” she says, returning to flip the steak.

The seasoning on the steak suddenly smells heavy. I feel like I drank the entire bottle of wine on my own, even if I’ve had far more whiskey. Internally, there’s nothing but pure panic. Outwardly, I know I have to keep my cool. Be the eldest brother. The one who takes care of mom.

“I’ll take you out there,” I tell her. “You can stay in the condo. I’ll get a place nearby.”

She looks up at me, her eyes still wide with concern.

“What about the club?”

“What about the fucking club? Mom… It could be–”

“I know,” she says. “I know what it could be.”

She finishes the rest of the wine. I’m too stunned to tell her to stop. I don’t even want to poke the bear and ask if she’s sure that drinking all this wine will be a good idea when she might have…

“I’ll tie up my loose ends out here and get Deacon on the phone.”

“I don’t want people to know,” she says quickly, as if that should be her primary concern. I fight the tension building into something more volatile. I don’t care if people know. The only thing I care about is getting this woman into a PET scan machine to make sure she doesn’t have…

“He can be discreet,” I tell her. “You’re gonna be fine. Just fine.”

But the truth is, I don’t know if she will be. We all have to go at some point. Dad probably had it the worst – blown to smithereens on American soil by the same people he fought to protect after surviving IEDs in Afghanistan. And mom.

Is this how I’m going to lose her? Cancer?

She must be crazy to even think I could want to find a woman right now. She needs me.