7. Death Comes Knocking

CHAPTER 7

DEATH COMES KNOCKING

TRINITY

The house was too quiet when I woke up. I knew in my heart that she would be gone when I went to check on her, but I still managed to pull myself out of bed and shuffle down the hall until I got to Momma’s room. I peeked in and, at first sight, she appeared to be sleeping peacefully. That was something she hadn’t done for the entire time I’d been back home, so I doubted she was still simply sleeping. My body pushed forward somehow. I shuffled one foot in front of the other to the side of her bed and eventually glanced down. Her skin held a grayish tone that wasn’t terribly surprising. Usually, in the morning there was a bit of a flush to the skin on her cheeks though. I looked a little harder as if it would appear at will. Her chest never rose. Never fell. It stayed still, like everything else in the house. It felt as though the entire place held its breath while I decided how to handle the fact that my mother was no longer there with us. Her body was left behind but the magic that made her a person no longer existed.

“Sleep well, Momma,” I whispered to the room. “Say hi to Trent for me.” A tear ran down my cheek as I leaned forward to tuck the covers a little tighter around Momma’s body. I didn’t want her to get cold while I went to grab my phone. Stupid thought. She couldn’t get cold anymore. Still, it was a compulsion from all the times I’d come home from work late at night or super early in the morning and I did the same thing as I leaned in, gave her head a little kiss, and told her to sleep well. It was something I’d done when I’d come in the night before. She had been breathing then. I thought I saw a smile on her cracked lips too. Maybe I’d just imagined the whole thing.

I reached my room and pulled my cell phone off the side table. There was a number Dr. Vaughn had given me to call in case this happened. They would come and take Momma to the funeral home to get her ready for her final goodbye. I would have cremated her and been done with it, but she refused. Momma wanted to be buried in a coffin beside her son in Lakeview Cemetery where they could look out at the ducks swimming on the water together. It was a lovely, if misguided thought on her part, but I’d agreed to her last request two weeks ago. It would tap out every bit of my savings, but I’d keep my promise for her to be with Trent.

Maybe, if I was lucky, there wouldn’t be any outstanding bills to leverage against the house and I could sell it. Then again, I had no idea where any of her important papers were. Every time I’d asked, she always told me there was time for that later. The knot in my stomach was proof enough that I thought she was hiding something from me, and that told me everything I needed to know about getting some of that money back. I wouldn’t even have enough cash to get me back to my life in South Dakota, let alone keep a roof over my head in Georgia.

I made the phone call to have someone come pick my mom up and then sat on the couch to wait for them to show. It took a few minutes for me to wrap my head around everything. When it finally happened, I reached for my phone again and called Uncle Bishop. He never answered, so I called the only person who was close by to come sit with me. Luckily, he picked up on the second ring.

“It’s early as fuck, Trin.” Hollywood groaned into the phone. I could hear rustling that meant he probably hadn’t spent the night alone.

“Who in the hell is Trin?” A woman’s sharp screech cracked down the line.

“Girl, we are not a couple for you to be asking me that. You only slept here because I was too fucking tired to deal with the drama over kicking you out. Get gone.”

“Some way you have with the ladies, cuz.” I said and my friend finally realized he was still on the phone.

“Shit, sorry. What’s up that you’re calling at the ass crack of dawn?”

“It’s after nine, not the ass crack of dawn,” I argued because saying it out loud was going to suck. I should have just sent a text.

“Okay…” He drew the word out as if that would pull the words from me. I breathed one heavy breath into the phone and then my voice began to tremble as everything crashed down on me. “Shit,” he huffed into the phone. “I’ll be right there!” The line went dead and I leaned back into the couch to wait for my friend and the strangers who would come collect my mother. I thought about calling Reesa again, but from what I understood, she was having enough trouble with her marriage and the pregnancy. Shaina was out of the question. We had only reconnected recently, when I came back to town, and she was more concerned about getting close to one of the men at the clubhouse these days than she was about anything else. She would be here, in a heartbeat. I knew that. She wasn’t a completely shitty friend, but her priorities were to find a man and settle down first and everything else second. I didn’t blame her. That was her ultimate goal and always had been. She wanted to live wild while she was young and then settle down and have a big family with someone she thought she could count on.

There was a time when I wanted a big family too. I loved my brother and wanted to make sure my kids had all the sibling love they could stand. Granted, I also wanted to be there for them as a mom, unlike how mine had been with me. She hadn’t been the same way with Trent. It was like she resented me for being born, and that only started when my dad took off. I guess she blamed me for him leaving. There was no way of knowing now. She was gone and before she took her last breath, she refused to talk to me about anything important. As always, my mother had been selfish rather than giving me any useful information to make life easier.

Stop the bitter thoughts.

Telling myself to let it all go didn’t work, no matter how much I wished it would. I was sad she was gone but I was angry too. A knock startled me out of my thoughts and I got up to go answer the door. The men from the funeral home got there before Hollywood. That meant I would have to watch them wheel my mother out of the house on my own.

“Ma’am, we’re ready. Did you want to say any last words before…” His voice trailed off as I stared at him aghast.

“She’s already gone and can’t hear anything I have to say, so you might as well…” I rolled my hands in the air in front of me, as if it was the universal gesture to get on with it. He gave a tight nod and then went back to my mother’s bedroom to get her ready. I must look like a cold bitch. The thing was, if I stopped to try to talk to my mother, I wasn’t sure what would come out - the anger and frustration or grief over her loss.

“Trinity!” I heard Hollywood yell out just as something crashed down in the other room. “Stay, I’ll go look.” He ordered and ran past me as I stood there and started to shake.

“Come on, I’ve got you.” Someone directed me over to the couch and sat down beside me. I was pulled into a man’s side as his arms wrapped around me, and without even knowing who it was, I leaned my head down on his shoulder and started to cry. He rubbed his hand up and down my back and cooed words in my ear that were probably meant to comfort me, but never penetrated past the grief, exhaustion, and confusing emotions that hit me all at once. “You’re going to be okay, Trin. I’ve got you. We’ll get you through this.”

Somewhere, in the midst of my breakdown, my mother was wheeled out of the house and Hollywood shut the door behind them. He moved in to sit on the coffee table in front of the couch where I was still tangled up in someone’s arms. “What happened?” I asked as I remembered there was a crash before I completely lost my shit. “Don’t worry about that it was all sorted. He gave a grim look to the man who was holding me and only then did I bother to look to see who had been there for me in one of the weakest moments of my life. To my complete surprise, it was Trouble.

“You okay, now?” He asked, and it sounded as if he really cared.

I nodded my head and pulled away despite his arms tightening on me, almost as if he didn’t want me to leave them. What a joke. OF course, he wanted me out of his arms. He was being nice because he must have been with Hollywood when I called. Then again, I knew that wasn’t right because Carson had been with a woman who he kicked out of his bed. Probably at the clubhouse then. No doubt, Trouble was doing the same thing when they met up and headed here.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to…” Fuck. What I was going to say.

“Trin, your momma just passed. I think it was to be expected. You need us, we’re here for you.”

I didn’t miss the questioning look Hollywood gave his friend. Clearly, he was not expecting this amount of chivalry from his club brother either. Carson leaned forward and took my hands in his. “Trouble is right. Whatever you need, okay?”

“I need answers that I will never get now,” I whispered.

“We can try to help with that.” I knew my friend was just trying to placate me because it wasn’t something that could be dug up. Well, not all of it at any rate. “I don’t even know if she still has a mortgage, if she owes more medical bills than what I already paid off, or if I can even stay in this house. Before I came to care for her, I think she hated me for some reason.” I shrugged my shoulders at that as if it didn’t really matter, even though it ripped my heart out to admit it, especially since someone other than Hollywood was there to hear me. “For all I know, she left the damn house to the animal shelter.”

“She would never do something that charitable,” Hollywood said and I glanced up and laughed at the thought. He was right. She wouldn’t have, and while it wasn’t a moment when I should have laughed, I did. I threw my head back and laughed with my whole chest as I pictured my mother doing anything altruistic.

“Come on, let’s get you a shot of whiskey or something. You went from crying to laughing far too quickly, and I don’t know how to deal with unhinged women.” I smacked at Hollywood’s shoulder, but followed him to the kitchen anyway. There was indeed a stash of liquor in the otherwise pitifully emptied pantry.

“How did you know this was here?”

“It’s where Trent always kept his stash. He said your mom couldn’t even see the top shelf, let alone reach it.”

I shook my head as I remembered how often I caught my brother creeping in and out of the pantry when he was still in high school. I figured he was sneaking the few snacks we had, but apparently, he had a different stash in there all that time. “I never even realized.”

“Of course you didn’t. You were still in middle school before he left for the Army.”

I watched as Hollywood poured a shot for me and then I knocked it back and relished in the fire that lit up my insides. I wasn’t much of a drinker, so I hissed as the burn finally settled. “Damn. That sucked!” Both men laughed as they each took a shot too. I held my glass out for another pour and didn’t even complain when Hollywood gave me half of what I had last time. “To Trent, who managed to be here for me even after he left us all behind.”

“To Trent,” Hollywood added as he held up his glass. Trouble followed it up with, “Trent, you’ve been missed, man.” Then, we all swallowed our shots and I looked around the sparse kitchen, almost as if I expected my brother to show up and tell me to stop being sad. He didn’t. My mother didn’t call out. When Hollywood and Trouble left, it would just be me and the silence here.

“Is there anything I can do?”

I shook my head. “I guess someone needs to call the home health place and tell them not to send the wicked bitch of the mountain here.”

“The wicked bitch?” Hollywood asked.

“Nothing to worry about, since she won’t have to come here anymore.” I muttered and moved to go to my mother’s room. For some crazy reason, I needed to see that she was no longer there.