Page 90 of Snake

Immediately, he rolled to her. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled his head to her chest. He lay perfectly still, perfectly silent, and eventually slipped into the amnesiac peace of sleep.

Autumn lay her head on his and held on.

Chapter Twenty-One

Cox stood at his kitchen sink and stared out the window. A normal summer weekday was happening out there—Johnny Davis, Jarod Allieri, and Brandon Pak on their bikes doing wheelies in the street, the Felton twins drawing hopscotch squares in pink chalk on their front walk, Mr. McRae trimming his hedges while his son, Toby, washed his beater Corolla on the driveway.

All those people out there having a regular day. It pissed him off.

From somewhere in his house behind him, Autumn was on the phone, speaking with clarity and purpose, all business. He didn’t bother to listen hard enough to determine whether this call was her business or his.

Seemed like she’d been on the phone most of every day since Tally had called him to his mom’s house. He was paying enough attention, barely, to understand that she was making the arrangements he should have been making. She came to him to make decisions, and he thought he made most of them. When he couldn’t, for whatever reason, she made them herself, and it was fine. None of it mattered, anyway. His mother was dead; she wouldn’t care one way or another how she was buried, and he didn’t care one way or another about any fucking thing at all.

His mother was dead. She’d done it herself, choked down all the pills she had in the house, from Tylenol to Xanax to Vicodin, a trove of empty pill bottles like she’d been hoarding the fuckers, and about half a bottle of gin, and somehow kept it all down. Probably she’d done it slowly, methodically, to make sure she got it done right.

She’d been leaving him for thirty years. Three days ago, she finally got it done.

So now he had nothing.

Autumn’s voice grew louder as she approached and then entered the kitchen. “... Okay, yeah, that should work. Do we need to go into a bigger town to get that done?”

He felt her hand on his back. She leaned around him, and he blinked away from the window to see her turning off the tap. How long had he left that running? Why was he standing here? She took the empty coffee cup from his hand and set it in the sink. Right; he’d meant to rinse out his cup.

Standing beside him, gently rubbing his back, she told the person on the other end of her call, “Well, I need to get a black dress anyway, so I can—” She listened for a moment. “That would be great. Let me talk to Cox and make sure, but tomorrow afternoon? ... Okay, excellent. Thanks, Ade. Talk to you soon.”

Ade. Adrienne, Badger’s old lady. More funeral planning, and at some point, Autumn had become friendly enough with the Horde queen to call her Ade.

“How d’you feel about getting an update?” she asked as she set her phone on the counter.

Cox turned and stared at her. Charlize, one of his rats, was perched on her shoulder. She made the grabby-hands gesture she made when she wanted him to pick her up, but he barely noticed and didn’t drag up the energy to give the rat his hand.

Autumn was watching him, waiting for an answer. He dug around in his head and found the question. Did he want an update?

He didn’t care about anything, so he had no opinion about getting an update on anything. None of the words he had seemed worth the effort of speaking them, so he didn’t bother.

If his silence bothered her, worried her, whatever, she didn’t show it. She proceeded as if he was part of the conversation. “There are a couple errands I need to run out of Signal Bend. I’m going to have the programs professionally printed, and I need to do a little shopping. Adrienne will drive me. Will you be okay if I’m away for a few hours tomorrow?”

He was a grown man, pushing forty. He’d lived alone for close to two decades. What did she think he would do if he was alone for an afternoon?

Yeah, he knew the answer, and yeah, his heart could shut down anytime and that would be just dandy with him, but no, he was not going to do that bullshit his mother had done.

Fuck that coward.

He’d been here. All this time, all these years, he’d fucking been here. His mother had lost her man and been halved, and then she’d lost her firstborn son and quit right there and then. She’d stopped living twenty years ago, when she decided she’d lost everything.

But she had two sons. Why hadn’t he been enough? Why hadn’t she cared enough to give him even half of herself?

He was her son, too, and he had been here. He’d been only eighteen years old when Billy came home in a flag-draped box. Barely grown and fully lost. He’d been drowning in his own grief, his own hopeless fury at what the world had stolen from him, and he’d had nowhere to turn for comfort. He’d needed his mother, but he’d left her in that cemetery, beside Billy’s grave. All he’d brought home was a phantom, a fading shadow where his mother belonged.

For twenty years, he’d tried to keep that wispy form bound to the earth, to his life, but really he’d buried his mother with Billy.

So it didn’t fucking matter how she got buried for the second time.

A white-hot burst of rage exploded through him, and he kicked out, sending his boot into the door of the under-sink cabinet and cracking the fucker in half.

Autumn reacted calmly to his outburst; it wasn’t her first rodeo around here. For the most part, Cox felt indolent, too lost in his thoughts and too beset by his stormy emotions to react to or engage with anything going on outside his head, but occasionally, rage would explode like lava from a volcano. He wasn’t counting, but he’d thrown a few glasses and mugs to shatter against walls, he’d punched the mirror over his bathroom sink and needed fresh first-aid on his knuckles, and now he’d broken a cabinet door.

She seemed concerned by those outbursts but not afraid. He could snap her in half, but even in the face of his unpredictable violence, she trusted him not to hurt her.

---