Chapter 22
Nothing
I stood in my kitchen, everyone gone, and stood at the counter that I’d bent Charity over what seemed like forever ago, but shit, must’ve only been a few days gone now. A fresh bottle of Jim Beam rested within reach, an empty whiskey glass next to it but I just wasn’t feeling it. I felt shitty, I really did and decided I needed to shelve the fucking bottle this time.
Still, that didn’t mean I wanted to stay sober tonight, so I busted out my stash of weed instead, rolling a joint. I’d never been good at it, Corrine though, she’d gotten pretty decent at it. I went out back and dropped into one of the wooden patio lounge chairs, propping my feet up. It was peaceful, the crickets and frogs starting their serenade, the smell of fresh cut grass filling the air. I stuck the joint in my mouth and lit up, sucking in a lungful of green, sticky smoke and holding it until my lungs screamed and the mellow effects rolled out from my center.
I turned my head up and back when the screen slid back, Cutter coming out to join me. I frowned, “Back again, Cap?”
“Figured it was time you and I had a talk, man.”
I nodded, figuring that I was about to have my ass set straight, but honestly, I had no clue what the Captain was gonna say. You never did when it was Cutter. He dropped into Corrine’s lounge chair and set a six pack of cheap beer between us. I passed him the joint.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, taking a hit and propping his booted feet up.
“Come to tell me I’m bein’ an idiot?” I asked.
“Of the highest order,” he said, voice strained as he held his breath. He exhaled sharply and passed me back the weed. I took another hit and pinched off the cherry, figuring the tongue lashing I was about to get was gonna be epic.
Cutter pulled a beer from the pack and twisted the cap off the amber bottle, he leaned back again, crossing his booted ankles, frayed denim against worn leather. He’d ridden over here.
“Let’s have it,” I said.
“I think it’s time,” he said, “to set the record straight.”
I frowned and leaned my head back against the back of my chair, rolling it over to look at him, “What d’ you mean?”
“We’ve been waiting a real long damn time for you to show any fuckin’ signs of waking the fuck up out of this,” he gestured with his beer, “whatever the fuck it is.”
“Grief?” I supplied, and he gave me a flat, stone cold look like I was the biggest fuckin’ tool.
“Whatever you’ve been doin’ to yourself these last few years? The word ‘grief’ ain’t even come close to covering it, neither does wallowing, whatever you been doing, they ain’t got a name for, Dom.”
Oh shit, he used my real name… I sobered almost instantly, “You stripping my patch?” I asked and he frowned.
“Hell fuckin’ no! Once a brother, always a brother, lame ass. Point I’m trying to make is you lost your wife and baby girl, and ain’t none of that your fucking fault.” He raised his hand when I opened my mouth to protest and barked, “Shut it! I’m talking now, and you’ve had your fuckin’ turn. You’ve had your fuckin’ turn for three goin’ on four fuckin’ years now. Now it’s my turn. You feel me?”
I shut my fuckin’ mouth and swept out a hand in the classic ‘after you’ gesture and he nodded once, curtly.
“This back and forth you got going with Charity –“
“That’s done now,” I interjected, shifting uncomfortably.
“The fuck it is, I see it written all over your face. You forget I’m fuckin’ her sister? I know how addictive these women are. Hell, don’t believe me, just ask Marlin.
“I don’t have to,” I grumbled.
“That’s my point, Dom. You’ve got Corrine put on this pedestal so fuckin’ high ain’t no mortal woman down here on the ground ever gonna compare, and its fuckin’ bullshit.”
Charity’s words echoed back to me, “I can’t be the only one trying here…” which harkened back to what Corrine had said to me that night, before the crash.
“I blame myself for some of your marriage falling the fuck apart,” he sighed.
“We weren’t falling apart, Cap. It was just a rough patch, I would have pulled my head out of my ass and things would have been fine.”
“We’ll never know,” he said with a heavy sigh, “but Corrine came to me a few days before your accident. She told me she loved the club, but she loved you more and that we needed to let you go. We were building an empire back then, trying to help people, for profit, sure, but tryin’ to help ‘em none the less. She asked me to let you go, and I told her we needed you. Selfish as fuck, I know but it was true. You were pretty irreplaceable to the operation. She threatened to leave you and I told her she didn’t want to do that.” I was staring at him open mouthed as he dug around in his cut.
“Man, this whole time we wanted to tell you, but you’ve been on that fuckin’ razor’s edge and we were afraid if we did, you’d just end it.” He extracted a manila file folder, folded in half long ways and said, “Then Charity showed up, and we thought with how you two were magnets for each other, that you’d finally let Cor and Katy go, but then you had to go and fuck it up today, and I just don’t know what to think.”
A cold knot of dread took up residence in the center of my chest, my eyes locked on that fuckin’ file folder, and I asked, voice hollow, “What’s in the folder, Captain?”
“You ever wonder why we run Hossler’s ol’ man outta here?” he asked.
“You said he’d stolen from the club.”
“Yeah, about that, I’m sorry to have to do it this way, but it’s what he stole.”
He handed over the folder and I took it with numb and shaking fingers, opening it up to eight by ten glossy photos of my former brother, balls fucking deep in my wife. I dropped the folder, the photos sloshing out onto the fresh cut grass and shaking I put my head in my hands.
“Oh my god, man. This can’t be happening!” I said and tried to suck in deep and even breaths, except I couldn’t get any air. Cutter put his hand on the back of my shoulder giving it a squeeze.
“Take it easy, brother. I need you to breathe.”
“The fuck? What the fuck? Why would you keep this from me!” I shouted and Cutter sighed.
“I told you, man. We were afraid of what you would do. You weren’t in any kind of place to fuckin’ hear it.”
I launched to my feet and staggered to the edge of the grass, falling to my knees and puking up whatever was in my stomach. I’d only wretched once before on a super emotional call that involved a child that’d been exactly Katy’s age.
“This isn’t fucking happening!” I repeated and looked up at my Captain, the President of my club. The resignation was written all over him, and I could tell what a burden he’d been carrying all this time in keeping it secret from me. I asked him, “Why are you doing this to me? Why now?”
“Because you’ve got a real chance at something here, and I don’t want to see you fuckin’ piss it away on some illusion of what you thought you had. It wasn’t fuckin’ real, Dom. Maybe it was once, but by the time the shit got really real, it was pretty fuckin’ broken.”
I bowed my head and couldn’t hold the flood of grief and loss back any longer. Cutter came over and lent support, and I fuckin’ lost my shit, as much as any man would on discovering his entire fucking life had been a goddamned lie. My reality lay shattered around me, winking in the dying afternoon light.