Chapter 6

Trixie was driving her crazy, but Hilda understood why the girl hovered around her. Trixie’s mother had died from a severe infection that had settled inside a broken bone in her ankle. Telling her that there was little chance of an infection on severely bruised flesh and muscle resulted in nothing but a look of hurt.

Hilda gave up and let the women spoil her. It made them feel as if they were helping her instead of driving her nuts. She was sitting in the office with her laptop sitting on a swing arm table and listening to Chris Young through the headphones in her ears. The man had a seriously sexy voice, and he wasn’t hard to look at either.

The women in the house usually teased her unmercifully about her crush on the singer. For the past week they didn’t start singing random lyrics to his songs whenever they saw the headphones in place as they normally would. She actually had hundreds of songs by various artists on her playlist. Her mood determined the day’s music choice whether they knew it or not.

“Tomorrow” was their favorite song to torment her with for reasons that she would rather not remember. Getting drunk after a huge fight with the man that she had been in love with for ten years, had fueled her crying jag that night. It had gotten worse after a phone call from the other man that she’d been denying affection for, and all of it resulted in the biggest hangover she’d ever suffered. To top that off, she had stomach problems for a week after the fact.

If either of the men had followed the words in that song, drunk or not, she would have begged them to stay for one more night.

“Fuck that; you’re better off without them. They want to play, but if it came to an actual commitment, they would run far and fast in the other direction.”

Peanut ran into the room, and Hilda knew that it must be the night that the good old boy from the hills delivered a few jars of the smoothest tasting corn liquor that money could buy. The girl was grinning and showing off her ass in cheek-baring shorts. The shelf bra that she wore had obviously been bedazzled with hundreds of shiny studs.

Hilda smiled and told her how pretty she looked tonight. “You know, if that boy had a brain in his head, he’d ask you to go with him when he goes back home.”

Peanut shook her head back and forth. “Hilda, his family is different. They don’t allow outsiders to live with them, and I don’t want to live out every cliché that describes the hillbilly life. There’s almost no electric power to the family home, and you know that I wouldn’t be happy without my cell phone and curling iron. The only way to leave their place is in that old truck.” The little woman actually shuddered at the thought.

“I love Wesley, but I’m not going to sacrifice myself for love. Some women would go, they would tell themselves that they were happy as long as they were with him. All of the conveniences, the access to stores and friends, and even medical help would be miles and hours away. I won’t do it, and I won’t ask him to leave his way of life.”

She stood up and did some stretching on her way to the door. “We will make it work until it doesn’t but I will never regret the time with him, and I hope that he feels the same way towards me.” She waved goodbye and hurried to the front door of the house.

Three hours later she was sitting with Trixie curled up on her right side, with the newest addition to the family, Talia. Hilda was forty-one years old and had never been blessed with a child of her own, but on nights like this, she felt that the only things that she’d missed were dirty diapers and childhood illnesses. Her fingertips rubbed each woman on the temple and hugged them close to herself. They no longer had mothers that were alive and ready to fix their hurts.

Talia had not had a mother for seven or eight years now, and last year she’d lost her beloved father to prostate cancer. The girl was beginning to heal from the injuries that Diva’s relatives had inflicted on her. She was a very pretty girl. When she laughed at Trixie, Hilda noticed that Talia had a slight overbite. It lent her face a shyness that would have been absent without it.

The show was an older movie that none of them had seen before. Trixie was speculating about Jeremy something, and the probable size of his “equipment.” Hilda could see the attraction. She cocked her head sideways to try to peak at what his naked backside might suddenly show them. “Maybe he will swing around, and we’ll see his dick swing too.”

Talia looked shocked at the comment coming from Hilda, and Trixie laughed out loud. “Oh God, Talia, you should see your face. Hilda is as bad as the rest of us, so you might as well get used to it.” The raised eyebrows from the younger girl pushed a button for Trixie, and she was deadly serious when she said.

“She’s the closest thing to a mother as I’ve had since my mom died, and there isn’t one of us girls that would let her be hurt. If somebody hurts our Hilda, they will live just long enough to regret it.”

Hilda knew that the loyalty between the women in the house was strong, and she knew that they cared about her too. Knowing it and hearing it declared in such a serious manner made her heart smile and tears gather in her eyes.

She pulled the girls back down on either side of her and sniffed. “Let’s see if we get to see his naked ass anyway. Isn’t this a restricted movie? That means someone’s ass will be visible.”

*****

Krom sat on the cement bench that was situated in the corner of his mother’s flower bed. There hadn’t been anything left of the garage, but thankfully his tools and the equipment for his profession as an underwater welder were locked up in his work truck. It was sitting in the small warehouse that he’d inherited from his father near the mouth of the river that eventually led out to the Gulf of Mexico.

He was fortunate that whoever rigged the garage door hadn’t been skilled as a bomber. The house itself was basically intact. The morning sun would provide better light to see the damage, and he would get Fiddle and Gnome over to begin cleaning up the mess.

Trencher offered to come over when he’d talked to him, but Krom had refused to drag him out this late.

“No need, brother, I got this for tonight. You can come over in the morning if you have the time. I’m going to need some estimates, so bring your pad and ruler. The garage is gone, and the side of the house looks pretty damaged.

“The big question is, who did I tick off this time? I’d sure be happier if these fuckers came after me personally instead of vandalizing my parent’s home. This shit is just pissing me off. When I find the fucker that did this, he will be made an example of. They didn’t go after the club; this was personal.”

He’d been lucky that the new five inch well was working. The electrical box hadn’t been burnt because he had added the garage onto the house six months before. The electric service was in the kitchen of the house. By the time the firefighters and cops had gotten there, he had kept the flames from eating their way through the wall and into the house by using the garden hose to soak the shared wall between the house and garage.

The firemen had taken over, and he was ready to throttle one of the men that wanted to cut a hole in the middle of his roof. Pulling the dipshit off of his feet by grabbing the ax handle that the man was trying to carry up the twenty-foot ladder might not have been the smartest thing to do. But damn, the fire was all but out, and the fucker would destroy the home that his granddad built.

They were gone now, and he had a ticket for interfering with emergency personnel doing their job or some such shit. He would be fighting that one in court.

He didn’t really think that anyone would come back to finish the job, but it would have taken a lot to make him leave the house vulnerable like this. He was thankful that his parents were enjoying living in Florida two blocks from his sister and her family nowadays. If he was lucky, one of the well-meaning neighbors would wait until the afternoon to inform his parents of the latest episode in their son’s crazy life.

He rarely had visitors, and never held parties, loud or otherwise, but the neighbors seemed to always have accurate intel on his life to report to his parents each week. It pissed him off when he called his father and was congratulated on his contracts and the night that he’d beaten Mallord for sitting on his bike to impress a woman outside of the bar one time. Mallord didn’t own a bike. He didn’t even have a license.

What pissed Krom off, even more, was that his father had been the one to post his bond. Who knew that the court would take a credit card number to pay bail money over the phone? If he had known that at the time, he could have called and posted his own damned bail.

Trencher had sent the suit to the jail, and he was already being released. The lawyer asked who had posted his bond, and it had been his father. The man wasn’t psychic, but he knew way too much for Krom’s comfort. He was thirty years old for chrissakes, not a snot nosed eighteen. It was nice to know that the elders were there if he needed them, but the tattle telling did make him feel as if he were twelve years old again.

Bright sunshine woke him by streaming through the picture window in the living room where he was dozing on the couch. He heard the bikes coming down the road before they parked in his driveway, and wiped a hand down his face to try to wake up. A glance at the clock showed him that he’d only been asleep for a couple of hours, and he really wished he could go back to sleep, but this day had to get started.

He walked outside and was surprised to see two people with tape measures and clipboards walking around the burned out shell of the garage, while a third person was taking pictures of the mess. He hadn’t heard the vehicle pull in, but when he looked at the car, understanding dawned. It was one of those little smart cars. The motor was quiet, and as insulated as the house was; it was no wonder that they slipped in without his knowledge.

There were four bikes in his driveway, and Trencher was walking towards the guy with the clipboard. Tred came over to where Krom was standing and patted him on the shoulder in sympathy.

“Man, this sucks. I’m sorry to see this, but I’m happy that you didn’t get your pretty face all fucked up and melted by the fire. I saw a movie one time where the guy’s face had melted off, and he was so fucking ugly that he wore a mask to hide it. I guess he didn’t know about plastic surgeons and shit. Anyway, I’m glad that you’re okay.”

While Tred wandered off, Krom contemplated on how it was possible for a grown man to be so insensitive and so fucked up to not understand the difference between reality and a damned movie.

Rolf James was one of the few men that Krom could comfortably consider a living legend, and he was towering over his neighbors that were standing near the corner of the wide lot. He couldn’t hear what was being said, but seeing the nosy bitch from next door lay her hand on his forearm and laugh was enough to make a man gag.

She didn’t give Krom a smile. Nope. All he got from her was the privilege of jumping her car battery in the wintertime, and twice he’d had to help the old biddy break into her house because she’d locked the keys inside.

His mother had shrugged and told him to do what he wanted. “Betsy has been an attention whore for as long as I can remember. She used to try to get your father over to her place at least once a week when she figured out that he was a pushover for a sob story.” She gave him a satisfied smile and added, “I put a stop to her free handyman service. If anyone was going to use your father, it would be me at our house.”

If it weren’t for his father preaching to him that a woman alone needed a man’s help once in a while, he wouldn’t bother answering the damned door when she waddled her ass across the lawns to tell him what she needed at that particular time. His dad had pulled him aside just before they left for Florida and told him to be nice to the old girl. “She is bitter for a reason, try to ignore her meanness and be a good neighbor.”

The conflicting stories between his parents gave him reason to stop and wonder just what kind of help ol’ Betsy was after. He remembered once when his mother was talking to his father one night when he was a teenager, and he heard her accuse his dad of infidelity. He never heard the accusation again, or any further discussion on the subject. Looking at the pear shaped Betsy as she flirted with Rolf, he shook his head and forced himself to walk into the shell of what had been his garage.

Maybe Rolf could get some information about the person that rigged the garage door. If they could get a description, it would give him a little piece of mind. At least he would have some idea of who wanted him dead this time.