CHAPTER ONE
Cooper Calderon jumpeddown from the U-Haul and looked up at the sky. The clouds were heavy and dark grey, and the air was so cold the vapor from each breath hung, frozen aloft, until a bitter gust of northerly wind broke it apart.
Pulling his phone from his coat pocket, he checked the weather app again—still no forecast for anything but cold and wind until mid-afternoon, and the storm was coming from the northwest. He had a few hours to get into Texas and clear of whatever mess the the weather gods would decide suited Oklahoma.
He would not miss Oklahoma winters.
After he pulled the overhead door down and locked it, and slid the loading ramp into its slot and secured it, he hitched the trailer to the back of the truck and walked his Softail up onto it. By the time he had the bike secured on the trailer, his hands felt stiff and brittle with cold. He cupped them before his mouth and blew hot breath over them.
He’d given up his Tulsa apartment when the setup crew headed to Laughlin in September. His mom had let him store his shit at her house—for a price—while he was in Nevada without a permanent address. He could have, and maybe should have, rented a storage locker instead, which would have been much nicer than the garage and probably more secure, but at the time that had seemed like a pain in his ass.
He’d told his Bulls brothers he’d hired a moving company and didn’t need their help today, but he’d been lying straight out his ass. The truth was he hated the sappy awkwardness of goodbyes. The thought of the Bulls all lined up to bid himadieu—or worse, ride him out of town—made his balls shrink up. He’d partied at the clubhouse New Year’s Eve party last night and said his goodbyes there, as they should be said: drunkenly and loudly.
Now he had only one goodbye left, and it would be plenty awkward but not the slightest bit sappy.
He stood for a moment and contemplated his mother’s house. He hated the fucking thing like he hated nothing else in his life.
The house itself wasn’t the real source of his hatred, of course. Well, itwasan absolute piece of shit, rundown as hell, with a roof so leaky his mother had a set of thrift-shop pots she’d collected specifically to catch the various leaks in rainy weather. The yard was nothing but weeds, the sidewalks were broken and heaved up, the driveway had barely any gravel left on it, and the garage was on the brink of collapse. He’d made the obligatory offers to help with repairs, but she’d shot each one down as ‘putting lipstick on a pig.’
And she wasn’t wrong. In most neighborhoods, his mother’s house would be an eyesore her neighbors complained about, but this was Muscogee, Oklahoma, Muscogee Nation territory, and most of the houses on this street looked about the same. Some were worse.
With no sign of his mother on the porch or at the door or a window, Cooper sighed and trudged back to the house. Though he doubted she’d really care, he supposed it would be shitty to move across the country without that last awkward goodbye.
He went in and didn’t see her in the front of the house. He found her in the kitchen, sitting at the table with the day’s issue of the TulsaWorld. An ancient beanbag ashtray sat on one of the tacky vinyl tablecloths she liked so much. This one had Christmas trees and ribbons all over it. A chipped mug of instant coffee sat beside the ashtray. Smoke from a More cigarette, probably at least her fifth of the day already, wisped up from the ashtray and mingled with the steam from the mug.
“I’m packed up,” he said, leaning against the side of the counter.
His mother nodded and turned the page of her paper. Without looking up, she asked, “Did you get that box of shit I put on the porch?”
That ‘shit’ was his trophies and plaques from soccer teams and Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournaments when he was a kid. But he was long past being hurt by his mother’s entire lack of interest in him. “Yeah, I got it.”
Cooper’s mother was half Muscogee Creek, on her mother’s side. Her father had been an Anglo white man who hadn’t stuck around to be a dad, so she’d been raised by her Native family here in Muscogee. Raised, but not necessarily accepted. Her family had some ideas about mixing with whites, so they’d looked on a mixed-race child as someone who, while family, wasn’t quite worthy. She hadn’t had an easy childhood, and it had made her into a bitter woman.
Then she’d gone and married an undocumented Salvadoran immigrant and did some more mixing. Cooper, with three ethnicities pumping through his veins and accepted by none of them, hadn’t had an easy childhood, either. There was a reason he’d earned his first-degree black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu when he was nineteen years old, at the earliest possible chance.
He’d worked hard not to let it all turn him into an asshole, and he thought he’d mostly succeeded. But he was pretty sure it had turned him into someone who’d never really connect with anyone in a significant way.
It had been better when his father was alive. He hadn’t been an easy or loving man, either, but he’d been more interested in Cooper than his mother ever had been. Their marriage had been shit—they’d gotten married for a lot of reasons, including Cooper himself, but none of those reasons were love or even much affection.
Also for a lot of reasons having nothing to do with love, they’d stayed together. They hadn’t had any more children, however. Cooper wouldn’t be surprised were he ever to learn they hadn’t fucked each other again after he’d inconveniently popped up as a line on some plastic stick.
This house had always been tense as fuck, but his father had tried to be a decent-enough father most of the time. As an adult, Cooper could look back on his childhood and be pretty sure his father had paid attention to him because it was a way to make Mom look bad by comparison, but whatever. At least back then, someone had made sure he got to his soccer and BJJ shit, signed his report cards, remembered his birthday, all that. He might also have given Cooper a good hard smack on the regular, for reasons that weren’t always legitimate, or even comprehensible, but, you know. Take the good with the bad.
Anyway, his dad was dead, and his mom was ... this woman right here, small and skinny, with a pack-and-a-half habit, looking like a hunk of beef jerky with a grey buzz cut, and with a personality to match.
“I’m gonna go, Mom.”
She picked up her brown cigarette in brown fingers wrinkled and scarred from years of beadwork and took a long drag. She didn’t speak until she’d savored it and blown it back out.
“Okay, then.” She set the cigarette back in the ashtray and pushed her chair back. When she’d stood and taken the three steps that brought her from the back of the table to the middle of the kitchen, she said, “I guess you want a hug?”
He laughed. Shit like this didn’t hurt anymore. It didn’t. “Not unless you want to hug me.”
She considered the question for a moment. Then she put up her arms. Cooper went to her, bent practically in half, and hugged her. She was about as soft as jerky, too.
“Bye, Cooper. Don’t fuck it up out there.”
Yep. Incredibly awkward and not the slightest bit sappy.