Page 23 of Rolling Thunder

The next morning, she had an early trail ride to lead. It was a struggle to keep a friendly smile on her face and she was relieved when they left. As she groomed the horses, she heard Evan’s bike. The roar of his motor was like a knife to her heart. She already had her back to the road and didn’t move to acknowledge him.

As soon as the sound of his motorcycle dwindled into the distance, she let her shoulders sag. The horse began to fidget and stomp, and she realized she’d been brushing the same spot for five minutes straight without moving. She wanted to run out into the road to try to yell for him to stop. But she couldn’t face him knowing what he would think of her if he knew…

She unclipped the horse and let him walk himself down into the back pasture. Her one-night stand with Evan had backfired magnificently.

She sat down on an overturned bucket, lost in another time long ago. Another motorcycle heading off down the road—another motorcycle that couldn’t be stopped. This one ridden by Canyon Bill. Like everything else in Kayla’s life, he couldn’t be depended on. And Kayla’s mother, Leanne, had never let a chance to rub it in her face go by, to angrily remind everyone that Canyon Bill wasn’t her father and she didn’t want him around.

Nonetheless, Canyon Bill remained the ever-present, colorful male figure in all their lives. He was a contradictory hybrid of hippie, cowboy, and biker, who had often sat outside at night under the full Florida moon smoking pot and strumming an acoustic guitar.

Canyon Bill was always riding in and out of their lives. He wasn’t a man who would commit, not a man who could say where he would be next year. He wasn’t usually gone for long. His leaving wasn’t usually angry. It was as if the wind blew him, and sometimes, he just had to go. There was hardly ever an argument between them that Kayla could remember. Just Bill, scanning the horizon, and Grandma Kay looking wistful and sad because she knew he might leave.

Sometimes he arrived in a conversion van packed to the roof with junk, towing a broke down motorcycle. Once he had arrived in an old RV. The last time, all he had had was the Victory motorcycle he’d spent six months rebuilding in Kay’s barn. And then, just like that, he rode away, taking with him the only semblance of male stability that she’d ever had. The last time was different, and they all seemed to know it, even though it was never said. Bill was drinking heavily, and it seemed to douse the endearing charm he had when sober. Bill had never been an angry man, but he’d grown quieter and drank more and more, until at last he’d packed up and left never to return…until now.

Kay, normally stoic and graceful, withdrew. Everyone could tell this time was different. The wind of wanderlust didn’t blow him down the road. Some darkness opened its gaping maw and swallowed him whole. Although he was a colorful enigma, Kayla didn’t depend on Canyon Bill. But Kay did, and when she became a shell of herself, compulsively soaping and oiling leather tack that already gleamed, muttering to herself and unable to notice that Kayla needed her as badly as ever because Leanne was always high or obsessed with some new dangerous man. Kayla’s world began to slowly fall apart.

It hadn’t meant that much to her at the time, watching Canyon Bill disappear in an old tie-dye shirt, but in hindsight, her throat closed despite her best effort to blink it away and swallow it down. He’d been the glue holding together their fragile little existence. Kay was herself; she would always notice when Leanne was on a bender and spirit Kayla away to the barn, telling her how much she needed her to groom the horses. There would be meals covered in saran wrap in the small fridge of the single-wide on the far side of Kay’s farm. A trailer she’d put there so she could keep an eye on Kayla, because Leanne wasn’t doing it, but nor would she just turn her over to her mother and leave.

Laundry would miraculously appear, washed and folded. Gram Kay would always make sure the burden on Kayla wasn’t too great. But when Canyon Bill left, it was as if he took the rain and the sun with him and things began to wither. Kay didn’t have an argument to stop Leanne when the roof on the trailer began to leak and she decided to move to an apartment in Fort Myers with Kayla. Kayla didn’t yet drive and was marooned in the city with her mother. There was no way to get back to the farm. There was no way out.

“And that’s why you can’t trust a man,” Leanne would say to Kayla, her unwilling but apt pupil.

Kayla looked across the farm where the old trailer still sat, mostly because she didn’t have the money to tear it down. She should just take a can of gas and a match to it. Maybe that would wipe the memories out of her mind: the back of Canyon Bill’s tie-dye and his blond braid whipping near his waist as he rode away down the road, Kay staring after him. Leanne, packing the car with their meager belongings, and Kayla staring out the back window as the farm receded from view. A domino effect of destruction.

A deep regret, a deeper loss opened like a cavern in her chest that seemed like nothing could fill. She stood up, dusting off her jeans. It was eleven a.m., and the sun felt like fire on her shoulders. It was too hot to do anything else with the horses in this blazing sun. That Evan was so different made it that much harder to shrug her shoulders and let him go.

She walked up to the house, standing in front of her freezer for five full minutes telling herself she wouldn’t drink before noon. But then she did.

CHAPTER 9

She’d disappeared from his bed and house as mysteriously as she had appeared. He was left with the swamp singing its night song all around him in the muggy air and the little black dog who flopped dramatically at his feet as if she were offended that he’d gotten laid.

He finally fell asleep with the taste of her in his mouth and the smell of her on his sheets. He was still thinking about her when he woke up the next morning. He decided it was best to go try to get some work done to take his mind off her. He fired up the bike and rolled out onto the pavement, cruising down toward her farm. He could see her as he approached. She had a horse tied in the wash rack, with her back to the road. She wore a racerback tank top, and the muscles and the tanned skin of her shoulders captivated him. But she didn’t turn. He knew she heard the sound of his bike, because every other time he rode by, she would turn or at least wave. Now, she did neither.

His first impulse was to kick the bike into gear and roar off, but, remembering the day they met, he thought better of it. He’d spooked enough of her horses. Instead, he just cruised on by, mystified by how his gut clenched when she ignored him. It shouldn’t matter. He’d had plenty of one-night stands that he literally never thought of again. Why was this girl under his skin so badly? A long ride in the sun down to Dan’s latest acquisition ought to cure him of his sudden addiction to her. He swung out onto State Road 31, put his boots on his highway bars, and settled in to try to forget her.

“Evan, we got a problem,” was the first thing Dan said, exacerbating Evan’s already foul mood. He shouldn’t care so much that some chick snubbed him after a hot night of sex, but he did.

“Hit me,” Evan said, expecting to hear of some ordinary complication, like rotten wood they hadn’t expected to find, or an addition with no permits.

“Remodel Network called me this morning. They said that someone contacted them about you. They wanted to know if it’s true you were in prison.”

The bottom fell out of Evan’s world. Dan’s idea to help the victims of Hurricane Ian with their show had been brilliant. The thought of Evan’s prison time ruining it for Dan, ruining it for the people they were helping, ruining his own second chance, was more injustice than Evan could stand.

“What did you tell them?”

The years of rage that he had tamped down, swallowed down, drowned with booze and loud motorcycles, suddenly boiled up in him unchecked with a fury that almost frightened even him.

“Why the fuck did they call you and not me?” He slammed his fist down on the folding card table so hard that it cracked and collapsed.

“Jesus, man—” Dan started.

“What, calm down? Don’t tell me to fucking calm down!”

Evan turned to storm out and realized to his worsening horror that there was a crew from the show unloading in the driveway.

“Maybe we can keep it quiet,” Dan said. “I wanted to talk to you before I got serious with them. They just want to know if it’s true. I get the feeling they’re going to find out pretty quick even if you don’t tell them.”

The front door opened, and Evan saw that Duckie had arrived and was panning across the room, taking in the broken table and the fuming scowl he knew was on his face. Dennis flanked her, carrying the tablet that was more like an appendage.

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