Page 24 of Of Angels & Absolution

Straightening up with a grin, she grabs a towel on her way around the front end. I hand over a can, and she pops the top. “Don’t tell on me,” she says, tipping her beer toward me before taking a swig.

“Hey, I’m twenty-one. Mom can’t give you hell anymore.”

“Anymore,” she says, shaking her head. “You little shit.”

“Not my fault you snuck me beer when I was underage.”

“What are favorite aunts for?” she asks, sinking down on the bumper of my truck. “Besides, if she accuses us of day drinkin,’ you can tell her it’s like the old song goes. It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

I scoot my ass onto the bumper next to hers. “Pretty sure no one has said that in at least three decades.”

“Oh, right,” she says. “What is it you kids are saying these days? YOLO?”

“Fuck no,” I say, holding up a hand to stop her. “That’s worse.”

She grins and rubs a strand of hair off her cheek with the back of her hand, leaving a smudge of grease behind. “What brings you to this neck of the woods, kiddo?”

“You got the mods done on that Trans Am?”

She sighs. “Sure did. You know that was your aunt’s car back in the day. She okay with you tricking it out like this?”

“She gave it to me,” I point out. What I don’t point out is that Scarlet is not my aunt. She’s my sister. People get weird about that, even people who are related to us and know the whole story, including what relation we are to each other. It’s more comfortable for Charlie to refer to Scar as my aunt, so I lether. She’s my favorite aunt, the only person on earth who can make my southern accent come out, even though I swear I don’t have one.

I fuck with her, because she’s the only adult who I could always shoot the shit with like we were equals, even when I was a kid. She never treated me as anything less. She’s the one who took me to get my ears pierced, and later, my first tattoo. If I asked her to keep a secret, she did it, even if it meant I was doing some dumb shit that might put me in danger. She trusted me to learn my own lessons, and she’d come bail me out instead of calling my mom if I got busted by the cops.

“Come on back,” she says, standing and waving a hand for me to follow. She ambles deeper into the garage, her dark hair hanging halfway out the back of her ballcap in a messy loop, her Docs scuffing the cement floor, grease rag hanging from a back pocket of her Levi’s. In the far corner, she pulls the cover off our latest project—my half-sister’s 1994 white 25thAnniversary Pontiac with blue trim. It was her daily driver for years, and once she upgraded, it sat rotting in Dad’s garage for over a decade before they wanted to get rid of it. They were happy to let me take it off their hands, and if they don’t know what I did with it, well, that’s probably for the best. Charlie might be cool, but it didn’t rub off on the other adults in my life.

“Your mama’s gonna kill me double if you get hurt in this thing,” she says.

“I know how to drive,” I say, though I’ve never driven what she just got done putting under the hood of this beast. It may have been garage kept all those years, so it looks pretty damn good for its age, but besides the exterior, not much is original. That’s just another excuse to take her out tonight, though, get her on the road and test her before I race her against other cars. Most of the guys in the circuit are rich assholes like Royal Dolce who can afford a shiny new Lambo if they wreck.Only a few old heads remain, and they come to reminisce and ogle the cars, not drive.

“You gonna watch me take her out next time there’s a race?” I ask.

“I never miss,” Charlie says, reaching into the car to snag the keys. “Take care, kiddo.”

She tosses them to me, and I catch them in my fist while she hits the button to open the back door of the garage so I can pull out. I slide behind the wheel, start her up, and wave to Charlie before I tip my seat back, shift, and gun the engine a few times. She stands in the open door, fists planted on her hips, squinting into the sun. Whenever I start to wonder how the fuck I came from my lame-ass parents, how Eternity did, I think about Charlie in her garage, and I think maybe I belong in this family after all.

I take off before that thought can really take root, and this time, I don’t have to rely on my feet to carry me away. This time, I’m not limited by my own body. I have Charlie’s beast purring, then whining, and finally roaring as I let her go on the open road. Behind the wheel of the car that belongs to the sister who’s old enough to be my mother, I’m finally fast enough to outrun the family name, the family shame.

That’s why I race.

Not for the money or the title; not for the thrill or the girls or the glory. For this.

So for an hour now and then, everyone can forget that I’m the son of a scandal, the brother who raped his own sister.

And I do it for her.

So we can both be winners again, no matter our name. So that I can pretend she’s beside me like when I was sixteen and I’d hotwire a car and sneak out with her to meet our friends; that if I look over, she’ll be in the passenger seat, flattened from the acceleration, her mouth stretched into a grin of puredeviousness and delight. So that for a moment, she’s still with me, and that moment is all of eternity.

eight

The Merciful

“Shouldn’t you be in class right now?”

I look up to find Manson falling into step beside me. I duck my head, my face an inferno when I think about him seeing me the way he must have the other day. The only pair of eyes I dared meet was Father Salvatore’s, and I instantly wished I hadn’t. I didn’t keep my eyes open to see the other students in the common area staring at me, watching. I don’t want to know what the others thought. It was stupid of me to even hope we could be friends.

“How do you know that?” I mutter at the ground when Manson doesn’t walk away. His black boots appear in my line of vision with each step, leather with straps crisscrossing over them, his regulation uniform trousers tucked into them in a baggy, casually disheveled look that no one else on earth could pull off. At least not while making it look like a high fashion ad from a coveted designer brand.

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