Page 51 of Rebels and Roses

He’d been about thirty years ago when he was just a kid, playing ball with Zack out on the front lawn. His mother would have brought out popsicles for them if it was a warm day or maybe hot chocolate if it was cold. She’d sometimes sit on the front porch, sipping her coffee and watching them while they played. Later, she’d shoo them into the house when it was dinnertime.

Cooper hadn’t been here in a long time, but the pain of losing his mother so abruptly and with no answers was as keen today asit had been so long ago. He could feel the crushing weight of loss on his chest, barely allowing him oxygen.

“We don’t have to go inside,” Jane said softly. “We can just turn around and leave. You don’t have to do this.”

“I think I do.”

“You don’t.”

“Do I look that bad right now?”

“Like you’re dying inside.”

That was how he felt. Jane was an excellent reader of expressions. It was almost killing him to do this. He wanted to rail against the universe, shake his fist at the heavens. It wasn’t fair or right that his mother had been taken away, and so young, too. She’d been a good person. The kind that liked to help people. She loved her family, and she’d been a devoted mother. But she was the one chosen to die. Why?

Joel should have been the one to disappear. He should have met an untimely end. He didn’t do anything positive for humanity, but somehow, he was still standing causing fucking chaos wherever he cast his fickle eye.

Cooper wasn’t a child who expected the world to be fair. He wasn’t that naive. Yet it always confounded him how the good die young, and the assholes lived to a ripe old age.

I guess I’ll live forever.

“Dad is up to something,” Cooper said. “I don’t know what, but I need to find out. There is no good reason to want Fiona here. I’m not buying this whole wanting to comfort Fiona and Erica. He has ulterior motives.”

“He might just want to piss you off,” Jane countered. “Make you crazy like this.”

“He’s succeeded,” Cooper replied. “But there’s more than just messing with me. Dad wouldn’t bother with that. It’s bigger.”

“He wants you back in the family.”

“Yes, that’s probably it, although he’s delusional if he thinks Fiona can convince me.”

“Maybe he’s just using her presence as a way to get you here. It worked, right?”

“You’re probably right. It did work. Fuck me anyway.”

Fiona and Erica stepped out of the front door and onto the porch, waving at Cooper and Jane. Fiona already had a cocktail in her hand.

“Should we stay out here?” Jane asked. “We can eat in the car just like at Steak N Shake when I was a kid.”

“Unfortunately, my childhood home doesn’t employ any carhops. We’ll have to go in.”

“Okay, but you’re not moving.”

He wasn’t. His body and heart rejected the mere idea of going inside that house. But his brain was firmly on the side of entering and finding out what Joel was up to tonight.

Reluctantly pushing open the car door, he stepped out into the night air. The sun was going down and the temperature was dropping. By the time they finished dinner, the lightning bugs would be flying around the large front yard. How many times had he and his siblings run around on a summer night trying to catch them in their hands?

Whatever Joel was up to tonight, Cooper would figure it out. His dad always thought he was the smartest person in the room, but he was getting sloppy in his old age. Ten or fifteen years ago, Joel wouldn’t have been this blatant. Either way?

Bring it, Joel. I’m watching you.

13

Jane had grown up in a relatively normal middle-class home. Three bedrooms and two bathrooms with a two-car garage. They usually took a vacation every other year that consisted of a hellscape road trip to a relative’s home in some other state. It wasn’t always the same relative, but somehow, she’d always end up with a sleeping bag in the basement. When they didn’t do a road trip, they went camping which Jane also hated. Mosquitos loved her but hated the rest of her family. She’d end up covered in itchy bites, and her mother would rub calamine lotion on her and say that it wasn’t that bad.

It was all part of thefun.

She hadn’t received a car on her sixteenth birthday or a trip to Europe. She’d driven her grandmother’s old Buick that could only be described as a family heirloom. There had been holes in the floorboards, and the heater didn’t work well. She’d had a fast-food job in high school, and later paid her own college tuition while working full-time in retail. She didn’t own anything with a designer label.

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