CHAPTER FOUR
Thia
Ten years old…
It took me two whole hours to convince Bucky to bike with me the twelve miles to the pawnshop. After kicking rocks around with his shoe for five minutes, I told him I’d give him my best rod and reel, and he finally agreed.
“How much will you give me for it?” I asked the tall scraggly man with ears that stuck out sideways. I stood on my tippy-toes so I could lean across the scratched glass display case that doubled as a counter and gave the man my best “I mean serious business” face. The man behind the cage on top of the counter wore a nametag that said TROY. Troy looked down at me with one eyebrow cocked like he’d never seen a ten-year-old walk into a pawnshop and try to negotiate before.
“What the heck are you doing, Thia?” Bucky asked, leaving the display of model cars he’d been ogling to join me at the counter. When I roped him into riding his bike to Logan’s Beach with me, I forgot to mention the real reason why I wanted to go so badly. Bucky’s eyes widened in horror as they darted to the object I’d plunked down on the counter. “That’s your Donnie Mcraw buckle, Thia! You can’t sell that!”
“It’s mine, so I can do what I want with it,” I argued. I’d won the buckle when I’d gone to the rodeo in LaBelle with Bucky and his dad last year. Well, not so much WON, seeing as I was the only eight-year-old even willing to try and ride the sheep, but they gave me a prize anyway.
“So?” I turned back to Troy who held the buckle in his hands. He turned it over and banged it against the counter.
“It’s hollow,” Troy pointed out. Grabbing a small glass tube he closed one eye and held up the buckle, examining it through the tube.
“I don’t need cash. Just a trade,” I said. “For that.” I pointed to a chain in the display case. Troy didn’t look to where I was pointing.
“This thing’s silver coated. Ain’t worth much. Sorry, nothing I can do for you,” Troy said, taking the toothpick out of his mouth, pointing it as me as he spoke.
“What the heck do you even need that chain for?” Bucky asked.
I sighed, growing annoyed with his questions. “I got something I wanted to put on it, is all.” I shrank back down onto flat feet and Troy slid my buckle back across to me, adding yet another scratch to the top of the glass case.
“What do you want to put on it?” Bucky asked.
“It’s nothing,” I said, my shoulders falling in defeat. I eyeballed the silver chain through the glass for the last time before turning back around to Bucky.
“Tell Me!” Bucky demanded.
I reached into my back pocket and produced the skull ring and held it up for him to see, but only briefly because I didn’t want to lose it. I placed it back into my pocket, patting it to make sure it was in there.
“Where did you get that?” Troy asked suddenly, squeezing his lanky frame through the hatch in the cage as far as he could, his waist resting on top of the counter.
“Can’t tell you that,” I said, considering sticking my tongue out at him. “Come on, Bucky.” I grabbed his arm and we turned to leave.
“Wait!” Troy called out. “I was being hasty. You seem like nice kids. The buckle for the chain is a fair deal.”
“You didn’t even see which one I was pointing to,” I said, crossing my arms.
Troy shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, actually, keep the buckle. We have too many chains anyway, now show me which one it was again.” Troy slid open the case and grabbed the chain I pointed to. He tossed it through the cage as if I was going to bite off his hand. It hit the floor by my feet. I bent over to pick it up, dusting it off. “Are you sure?”
“I’m totally sure,” Troy said, waiving us off. “Now run along and make sure that if anyone asks you that you tell them Troy at Premier Pawn was good to you, okay? You gonna tell them that, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, although I didn’t really think that anyone was going to ask me to rate my recent trip to the pawnshop anytime soon.
Troy nodded so hard I thought his head might fall off. “Good. Now off you go,” He waved us off, snaking back down through the hatch in the cage, slamming it shut.
We left and Bucky was close on my heels as we rounded the building to where we’d left our bikes leaning up against the alley wall.
I took the skull ring from my pocket and slid it onto my new stainless steel chain, securing it around my neck. I popped the ring into my Future Farmers of America T-shirt.
“You gonna tell me what that is?” Bucky asked as we picked up our bikes.
“That’s my secret,” I said with a sly smile. The truth was that I had been dying to tell Bucky ever since Bear and his biker friends visited the Stop-N-Shop, but I wanted to wait until I was sure we were out of range of the ears of the small town gossips.
Which in Jessep, was pretty much everyone.
“I can keep a secret,” Bucky said, keeping pace beside me as we walked our bikes toward the street.
I stopped and turned to Bucky. I held out my pinkie. “You have to pinkie swear first and only then I’ll tell you, but only because you’re my best friend and I know you won’t tell anyone.”
“I’m your only friend,” Bucky reminded me, rolling his eyes.
“Don’t make me punch you in the gut, BUCKY,” I said. He might have been older than me, but he was small for his age. Kids made fun of his size as much as they made fun of me for my pink hair. We’d bonded over being outsiders in the second grade and became fast friends. And now we were swearing, the most sacred and serious promise in the world, so that I could tell him all about the blue-eyed man with tattoos who changed everything.
Bucky grabbed my pinky with his own. “You have to swear you won’t tell a soul what I am about to tell you, and when you’re old and grey that you will take this secret to your grave, and even then you won’t tell like other ghosts and stuff,” I said.
Bucky nodded, shook my pinky, and spit on the ground, sealing his swear. “I promise, now spill it Pinky,” he sang, throwing my own hated nickname in my face. This time I did stick out my tongue as we dropped our pinkies.
We didn’t get on our bikes when we got to the road. Instead, we pushed on the handlebars and continued to walk beside each other. I pulled the ring back out of my shirt so Bucky could see it, turning it over so he could get a good look of the skull.
“Is that a real diamond.”
“I think so,” I said, unable to help the huge smile that spread across my face.
“So how’d you get it?” Bucky asked.
“This here?” I asked, holding up the chain, “This is a promise.”
“Like a pinkie swear?”
I shook my head. “Nope, it’s way more powerful than that.”
“How’d ya get it? You steal it? Looks like it cost a lot of money.” He reached out to touch it and that’s when I tucked it back into my shirt.
“No, I didn’t steal it,” I corrected. “It was given to me.”
After a long dramatic pause, Bucky shrugged and waved his hand around. “By who? You gonna tell me or not, Thia?”
I patted the ring under my shirt as I recalled the day Bear walked into my life. In my excitement, I may have embellished a little, not realizing then how close to the truth I really was. “This ring was given to me by the biggest and strongest man in the whole wide world. He could’ve given it to anyone he wanted, and he chose me. It means that we’re linked…forever.”
Bucky’s voice got all high, like I’d just punched him in the nuts. “Forever?”
Just then, an older man riding a motorcycle, a big silver one with a tall windshield flew by us on the road. A small woman with grey hair sat low next to him in a sidecar. We fanned the dust away from our faces, and while Bucky was busy coughing, I watched the bike drive off, completely fascinated and in awe of the sound it made, how fast it was going, and how the old lady looked so comfortable in her little seat she could’ve been knitting instead of barreling at break neck speeds. I stared after it until long after it had disappeared around the bend.
I turned back to Bucky and smiled my biggest smile.
“Yep. Forever.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Thia
There isn’t much out there in the world that scares me. Life is way too scary to waste time being afraid of the unknown when the known is frightening enough. I was never scared of the boogie monster or anything lurking under my bed or in my closet at night when I was a kid.
The only thing I was scared of were things that could actually happen.
Like tornadoes.
It’s not like Jessep, Florida, my hometown, ever saw the kind of tornadoes that inflicted real catastrophic damage. The kind we got were the small ones. The occasional shingle-shifter or tree-toppler.
Yet somehow, all of my nightmares since Bear went away have revolved around the descending spirals of doom. Leveling buildings, farms, towns…
Lives.
The afternoon storms had been rolling in with a vengeance over the past several days. Darker. More menacing. Like they were trying to send me a message of darker days ahead.
The clouds were at war with the sky, just like I felt as if I was at war with myself. Love and hurt both existing in equal measure inside me. It turned physical and after a few days had developed into a devastating full body ache.
A dark line of clouds approached, encroaching on the blue sky as the afternoon’s impending storm made itself known. Rolling and billowing toward me, my nightmare coming to life.
I was swept up in the fear that—at any second, I was certain—spiraling clouds would descend from the sky right above my head. I found myself waiting for the moment that the tornado was going to strike and inflict more damage than most people could possibly imagine.
Than most people could handle.
I could almost feel the wind, the wreckage. The sensation of being picked up and slammed back down over and over again.
To me, a tornado has always been the force of nature capable of the most damage.
Until I met a force of nature that would make a tornado seem like a morning breeze. One that picked me up, made me feel like I could soar as it tossed me around, sent me reeling, and threw me back down to the ground, leaving me broken and fighting for my life.
And his.
Bear.
Before my brother died and well before my mother went off the mental deep end, my father used to stay out in the orange grove late into the night. I’d assumed he was fixing the always broken irrigation system or any of the other run-down and failing equipment.
One night I grew curious and snuck out of the house, but instead of finding him attached to the generator or the broken pipes, I found him on his knees in the dirt. The full moon shining down on his face, illuminating his watery eyes as he looked up at the trees as if they were more than just fruit on branches.
It wasn’t even the sight of him talking to the trees that surprised me.
It was that he was begging them.
Begging for a good harvest. For the Sunnlandio Cooperation to miraculously increase the contract, for gas prices to drop, for the workers to stop striking for more money, for the forecasted record frost to skip over our farm.
Then finally, for my mother to love him again.
My heart broke for him right there.
That was the night I realized that all the “Everything is fine, sweetheart” remarks my father gave me every night at the dinner table was the lie I’d always suspected it was.
On some of those nights when my dad was out late, my mother would come and drag me from my bed and into hers. We’d cuddle up and watch cheesy romantic comedies.
It was those movies, and not my parents’ cold/colder relationship, that gave me my first glimpse into what love was. I got so upset when the couple faced an obstacle that could prevent them from being together. I lived for the big romantic gesture at the end. The one that would finally bring them together forever.
Every single time when the movie ended and the credits rolled, my mother would sigh and brush my hair off my forehead. “You know that none of that is real, right? Movies are make-believe. That kind of love doesn’t exist.”
Unrealistic is what she’d call it.
Except, that was another lie, even if she didn’t know it at the time.
Because that kind of love did exist.
What I felt for Bear had simmered under the surface since I was ten years old, and when we met again, albeit under shitty circumstances, it had exploded into something more powerful than any cheesy romance could ever depict.
With one major difference.
Our story didn’t have a happy ending.
There was no chasing after me on horseback or confessing our feelings to one another in front of a crowd of teary-eyed people.
No, our story ended with Bear in jail, hell-bent on taking the rap for the murders of my parents, which my mother was ultimately responsible for.
When Bear’s lawyer, Bethany Fletcher, explained that Bear had signed a confession to spare me from facing the same threat from his former brothers, one that he himself now faced within the walls of the county jail, I didn’t want to believe it.
He threw himself onto the fire for me.
King is taking you home.
Stay there. Wait.
Trust me.
Bethany passed me a note in Bear’s handwriting minutes after he’d been arrested while I was still looking down the road as if he’d be back at any moment. I held on to it with shaky hands and turned it over and over wondering where the rest of it was.
“I don’t understand,” I said to Bethany through my teary eyes.
“Do what he says,” she’d said, you don’t need to understand. You just need to listen.
“Why did he do this?” I asked.
Bethany cocked an eyebrow at me like I should already know the answer. “The reason why any man does anything foolish and ridiculous. For love, of course.”
“It’s not safe for him there. We need to get him out!”
“Thia,” Ray said, coming to stand beside me. “Don’t you see? They were going to arrest you. Bear’s at least got a fighting chance where you wouldn’t. He grew up in the club. He knows how to handle himself. He knows what he’s doing. Bethany’s right. As hard as it is, you have to trust him, and in the meantime she’s going to do everything she can to get him home. We all will.”
King came to stand beside Ray and placed his hand on her shoulder.
I shook my head. “It should be me. He didn’t do anything. I did!” I turned to Bethany. “I’m the one who shot my mother. I’m the one who killed her. It should be me! Please, we can’t let him—”
Bethany clucked her tongue and waved her index finger back and forth. “That’s not what happened, my dear. Bear crashed his bike into their grove. He went up to the house to use their phone since his had no service. When he got up to the house, your mother was standing outside ranting about killing your father, waving a shot gun around. Bear grabbed a pistol from the porch and shot her with it in self defense before fleeing.”
“That’s not what happened,” I said flatly.
“According to his confession that’s exactly what happened,” King said. “You need to trust him.”
Trust?
Trust is a funny thing. Especially when both my patience and my sanity had already reached their limit, and the man I love had been arrested for something I did, leaving me with an empty heart and an infuriating note, ordering me to go back to the place I hated most in the world. I trusted him and I knew in my heart he was doing what was best for me.