After Suzie’s revelation, I feel like I’m operating on auto-pilot. The lunch crowd slowly fills up the diner and I do my best to ignore the worried glances that my friend keeps flicking towards me as we go about waiting on the rapidly-filling tables.
“Catch you later Suze” is all I say to her as I leave at the end of my shift.
She nods quickly and we hug briefly before I walk out of the door. There are so many things I want to say to her; like she shouldn’t go on this date and that she knows she’s taking a huge risk.
The Bleeding Angels are known for getting what they want and if this biker has decided that he wants Suzie, then he’s going to get her one way or another. But at the same time I know that there isn’t much she can do.
If she doesn’t show up for the date with the man responsible for her black eye and for the look of fear about her, then he’ll find her anyway and things will be so much worse. I know this from personal experience that the Angels always get their man—or their woman as the case may be. They’d gotten my dad and they were going to get Jake, no matter how much I prayed that they wouldn’t. And they’re going to get you, the little voice in my head says, and I push it away, walking faster along the sidewalk.
I follow the same routine as I always do after a shift. I delay going home until the last possible moment. I find every reason that I can muster to avoid the dark silence of that house, the house that was once full of laughter and smiles and the smell of home-cooked meals. Now it’s nothing like that, not even close—you can’t even hear the echo of laughter if you listen really closely.
Instead I head for one of my homes away from home. The body shop is in the opposite direction to my house but, like I said, I’m in no rush. I pop my head around the door to the office and see that Jake’s Dad is on his own.
He barely even looks up from the sheets of paper that he’s squinting at and scratching his head over. He doesn’t have to look up—my visits are like clockwork; you could pretty much set your watch by them.
I have a special place in my heart for Bill. After my dad died he really stepped up out of a sense of duty or decency or whatever it was and he made sure that I was looked after. He did the dad stuff with me that I didn’t have anyone else to do it with. He vetted my high school boyfriends and taught me how to punch and even disable a guy if I had to.
He never tried to take the place of my father and we never really talked about the role that Bill had played, or even filled, in the years since I lost him, but I would be forever grateful to him for treating me like his family.
“He’s on the floor,” Bill says, nodding towards the area where they work on the cars and bikes.
“Thanks Bill,” I say, approaching his table and dropping off his favorite chocolate muffin from the diner, careful not to put it on top of any of the piles of paper that always litter his desk.
“You keep bringing these and I’ll start looking like those truckers that pitch up here—all gut,” he says mock-angrily, patting his flat stomach, but there’s a twinkle in his brown eyes and I’m struck again by how similar his and Jake’s expressions are. The apple really didn’t fall far from the tree in that sense.
“Fine looking man like you?” I tease. “Never happen,” I assure him solemnly and I’m rewarded with the twitch of a smile on his weathered face.
Bill was probably only in his late forties but, like everyone else in this town, he looked older. Painted Rock ages you, or at least the things that go on here do. I already feel like I’ve lived a lifetime and I’m not going to be in my twenties for a few more months yet.
“How’s your mother?” he asks gruffly. Although he puts a blunt, rough front on, Bill has a heart of gold—another way that Jake takes after him.
“The same,” I say, with a shrug like there’s not much else to say, and that’s because there isn’t.
I’ve been answering questions about Mom in much the same way over the past few years; I don’t think anyone ever really expects a different response. She never recovered after Dad died—or, I guess I should say, when he was killed. “Died” sounds more like he slipped away painlessly in his sleep rather than the reality: that he was gunned down in the middle of the street, shot like a stray dog.
I shake my head, trying to dispel the image of him reaching his hand out towards me as he fell. “How’s business?” I ask, going through our standard conversation.
“Oh you know, could be worse,” Bill admits shrugging and pushing his glasses back down over his nose and burying his face in the sheaf of papers in front of him.
It’s the exchange we always have, but there’s something in the older man’s expression that makes me wonder how much worse business could be before there was no business left at all. Bill had built this body shop from nothing and I knew that he dreamed of passing it on to Jake one day, but the way this town was going— well, no one planned that far ahead anymore.
It’s not a given that any of us will have what we want or what we think we deserve. I don’t dwell on what my plans would have been if the cards that had been dealt had been different. There’s no point in looking back, it doesn’t change anything and, as my dad used to say, it just gives you a sore neck.
“I’ll go find Jake,” I tell Bill, not wanting to go any further down memory lane.
“Sally would love to have you over for dinner; it’s meatloaf night,” Bill says encouragingly as I turn to leave the room. To be fair, Sally’s cooking is legendary and it’s been a while since I’d had a home-cooked meal made by someone other than myself—and my culinary skills were dubious at best—but it’s not going to happen for me, not tonight.
“Thanks, Bill, but I’m doing a double at the diner today. Gotta cover the graveyard shift,” I tell him. “Give her my love though, I’ll see her soon,” I assure him.
If Jake’s dad had taken on the role of kindly uncle to me, then his mom was most definitely my favorite aunt. When it became clear that my mom wasn’t going to get better anytime soon, Sally and I had started spending more and more time together.
She’d taught me how to put my makeup on, talked me through what to do when I got my period for the first time, and dried my tears on the days when I just couldn’t take the unfairness of it all anymore. Jake’s parents really are one of the few things in Painted Rock that give me hope. Knowing that people like them exist here makes me think it’s possible for things to get better.
Bill nods at my excuse and doesn’t ask any questions. He has always been a man of few words, but he is also a man that realizes there are some things he simply doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to know that I’m working myself into the ground, saving everything I can spare to find a way out of this town that has taken everything from me.
Apart from Bill and Sally, the only person I have left is Jake—even Suzie’s trapped here now; once the Angels have their claws in you, they don’t let go, not without a fight. And they always seem to win fights. At least there still might be a chance for Jake; I need to believe that there is.