Chapter Two
Dax
I woke up in my room behind the bar and thought about what I was going to do today. I couldn’t do what Olivia wanted me to and give up my quest to find out exactly who had me set up and why. I felt like if I did, I’d be telling them it was okay to fuck with my life…and it was definitely not okay. Even though I wasn’t giving up trying to figure this all out, I still needed to get on with it at some point. Sleeping in every day in the back of a bar was probably not going to get me anywhere.
I pulled my ass out of bed and got into the shower. While I was in there I prepared the spiel in my head that I was going to give my mom. I had almost three thousand dollars in my savings, but I was probably going to need three or four times that much to start. I was starting from scratch, so I’d need money for licensing and all of the equipment. I’d also need rent and deposit money for a building and probably deposits for all of my utilities.
I got out of the shower and pulled on a black Harley t-shirt and jeans. I pulled on my boots and went out through the back to get my bike. My dad and Bo were in the shop working on a couple of bikes.
“Hey! Decided to get out of bed today, huh?” my dad asked.
“Very funny.” I grunted.
“Where you headed out to?”
“I need to talk to Mom. Is she at home today?”
“As far as I know,” my dad said. “She was there when I left. What’s going on with you and your mom?” he asked.
“I just haven’t seen her in a day or two,” I said.
I straddled the bike and I was putting my helmet on when Bo said, “Missin’ his Mama! Ain’t that cute?”
Bo had something coming for him in the near future…I hoped.
When I got to the house my mom was out in her garden again. She had her back to me when I walked out and she had her earphones in. I knew I was going to startle her, but the little boy in me couldn’t resist. I went up behind her and touched her on the back. She was on her knees and she jumped back, landing on her ass and screamed. When she looked up and saw it was me and that I was laughing, I got smacked in the leg.
“You little punk!” she shouted as I held my hand out to help her up.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I couldn’t resist.”
She let me help her to her feet and then she reached back to brush the mud off her jeans. When she finished, she looked at me and said, “What’s up?”
“I just wanted to see my mom,” I told her. She rolled her eyes like she didn’t believe me.
“Have you had lunch?” she asked.
I grinned and said, “I haven’t had breakfast. I just got up.” She gave me a disapproving look. “I know. I’m burning daylight.” It was what she used to tell me and Brock when we were younger and didn’t want to get out of bed.
“You want a sandwich?” she asked me.
“I could eat,” I told her.
We went into the house and while she went to clean up and change I sat down and turned on the television. I stared mindlessly at a game show until she came back in. She had a tray with a ham and Swiss sandwich on a Kaiser roll, potato salad, a fruit cup and iced tea.
I shook my head when I saw it and said, “It looks awesome Mom, but you shouldn’t have went to all of this trouble.”
She waved me off like I was talking nonsense and asked, “What are your plans for the rest of the day?”
“Well, that really depends on you,” I said, taking a bite of my sandwich. Damn it was good. Way better than prison food.
“What do you mean?” she said, suspiciously.
“I’m still thinking about the tattoo shop thing we talked about a while back, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember,” she said. “Did you ever finish the list of what you’d need? I think I only got a partial one.”
“I did,” I told her. “I actually sat down and went online and priced out things like the tables and chairs and all of the equipment. There’s a little place right in town that’s for rent. It’s pretty cheap and I have about three grand left in my savings. So…this is what I think I’d need to borrow to get started.”
I handed her a piece of paper I had brought with me with the numbers on it. I ate my lunch and watched her face while she looked at it. She didn’t look enthusiastic, but she didn’t have a “no way” look on her face either. After a few minutes, she put the paper down and looked at me with a serious look on her face.
“Are you still trying to solve the mystery of who set you up?”
“Yeah, I’m doing what I can to figure it out." I thought I knew where she was going with this and I wasn’t sure I liked it.
“I wish you would stop that, Dax. You know that I do my best to stay out of that business of your father’s, but I’ve been around it long enough to know it’s not safe to cross these guys. They got you put behind bars for over two years, for what? You don’t even know, which means you didn’t really do anything. If you keep after them on this revenge binge I really don’t think they’d hesitate to hurt you…or worse. I don’t believe your father would have any part of that and if it happened he’d probably be on his own revenge quest. It would be too late for you. Please leave this all alone and get on with your life, Dax.”
“I can’t do that, Mom.”
“Okay, you’re a grown man and I can’t force you to do what I want. I can’t give you money for this business though if I don’t believe you’ll have your head in it a hundred percent.”
“Are you serious? What is this, blackmail?”
“No, it’s just what I said. You’re asking me for a lot of money to start a business. I have to see that you’re serious about making that business a success. I can’t see you having the time and the heart to do that if you’re still busy with all of this other nonsense.”
I was beginning to see as an adult how my mother was able to handle my dad all of those years.
“I feel like I’d be saying it was okay that they screwed up my life if I walk away now.”
“Then win by showing them they didn’t screw your life up, Dax. Open your shop, make it a success. Success is a fabulous fuck you to everyone who tried to hold you back.”
My mother never said the “F” word. I usually tried not to say it around her because she’d yell, “Dax! Language!” when I did. I guess she was trying to show me how serious she was. I needed her to help me or it would be years before I could earn the kind of money I needed to start this business and that was only if I could convince someone to give me a job in the first place. I knew she was right. I knew Olivia was right…I wasn’t going to drop this though until the Son of a Bitch who put me in prison and took everything from me had to look me in the eye and admit what he had done. So, I did what any bad son would do…I looked my mother directly in the eye and lied.
“Okay,” I said with a sigh. The sigh was to cover my guilty facial expression. “I’ll stop. I need to get on with my life and if that’s what I have to do then so be it.”
My mother’s face relaxed, a little bit. I knew she thought that was too easy though and she proved it by saying, “You promise?”
“I promise,” I lied again. Sometimes I despised myself.