by Roxy Wilson
Oh, there were some tough guys, and weight class wasn’t a thing anyone gave two shits about in the underground circuit. It was challenging sometimes, and they kept throwing bigger and bigger guys at me to see who I could take; but I was a lifelong fighter. I’d been doing this since I was a kid, and when it came to training champions, Tully had a reputation as an almost mystical instructor, turning lead fists into golden gloves, like some kind of alchemist.
When did it end? Fifty thousand was back then. The interest rates on a loan from these kinds of people were not mandated by the feds. It wasn’t a mortgage, and the whole point was to squeeze people for everything they had—and make them scramble to find what they didn’t. No matter how much I won Logan, the debt was always deep, the interest always compounded; always, he needed more, and more.
“Stop brooding,” Tully barked gruffly. “Up. Again.”
I obeyed, and took to the heavy bag again. It had to be done. I had to fight hard. I had to do what I could, and what Logan couldn’t. Tully was right. It’s what Dad would have wanted—for me to look out for my kid brother. When I thought about that, I was fifteen again, and Logan was ten, and he was just a kid that needed someone to lean on now that Dad was gone.
“Work hard,” Tully said as I did exactly that. “That’s what you can do. People only think they have other options, but they don’t. That’s all you can control, Riley.”
He was right. Tully was always right. “I need a fight,” I told him, my words huffed out to the rhythm of my body’s movement. “A big one. The kind that can get Logan free. I need to fight a fucking monster and win.”
Tully was grim as he watched me. “Watch that bag foot,” he said. “Don’t plant your heel.”
I adjusted, pivoting on the ball of my foot like I knew I was supposed to. Maybe all this was starting to weigh me down. Literally.
“I can put out some feelers,” Tully said. He didn’t sound happy about it. “Get someone down here that normally wouldn’t. You got a record. I might can talk you up. Might get somebody angry.”
“Don’t care,” I told him.
“Might be a real killer,” he said. “Dangerous.”
“They’re all dangerous.” I grunted through the end of my set. The last jab rocked Tully back on his heels. “I just have to work hard, right?”
Chapter Seven
Zahra
Two days later, I took my first scheduled day off in a year. No one was surprised; I’d taken this day off since I started working, except for the year it fell on Labor Day.
Every year, on the anniversary of when Daddy was killed, I woke up to a world that felt the same every time. No matter what the weather was like, no matter what had happened the day before, I woke up to a world without color. Gray, like Dorothy still in Kansas, storm clouds on the horizon. Except no tornado ever came to deliver me into a world of Technicolor; I just had to wait it out like everyone else.
I used to think that it would hurt less one day. And, in a way it did; but not the way people talk about in self-help books. I know, I’ve read them all. You would think that in my line of work I’d have mastered the process of long term grieving, but if there’s a professional secret to it, then it’s one they don’t give out in school. A secret cabal of counselors somewhere might have had it stored away in some vault, but if that was the case they were stingy with their secrets.
This year, though, when I woke up, I had the strangest thought.
For a moment, I wished someone was here with me, someone who wasn’t my mother, who I’d see later in the day; someone who could just hold me and tell me it was okay to still be hurting. Someone who could try to make me feel better, even though they knew there wasn’t really anything they could do. Someone who would work hard to do it anyway, just because they wanted to.
At first I didn’t specifically think of Riley.
And then I did.
I sighed, and rolled slowly out of bed. Along with all the color, the energy in the world seemed to have drained away over night. Everything was too quiet, the world too still. In another month, it would be my birthday and I always thought about that; always at the same time, too. Soon as I got up I remembered—another year Daddy didn’t see.
I hated this day. It had become a kind of inverted holiday. Yes, there was a day with my mother, and yes there would be food. But no matter how good she cooked, it wouldn’t taste like anything. She would tell me how proud he would be of me if he were here and all I would hear would be the part about ‘if he were here’ and I would get angry because being angry at least made it feel like there was something inside that big hole in my chest. Something fiery and brief, but something instead of nothing.
I knew all of this because every year it was the same. Every. Year.
Like always, I got up, made coffee, and showered while it brewed. Same day as any other. Inside, though, I was thinking back to all the other years Daddy would have been proud of ‘if he were here’. It seemed like a dumb thing to say, really. Whenever Momma said it, it seemed to mean something. When I said it, they were just words that didn’t make sense.
My mother was a religious person. Church every Sunday, and every Wednesday. She and her church-lady friends got together to talk about the good Word, and she never swore, never drank, and never forgot to say her prayers. She was bound and determined to get to heaven to be with her husband, who she still considered herself married to all these years later and swore she always would.
That was Momma. A one man kind of woman. Before my father, there had been no one else and there would be nobody after him. She wasn’t that old, really. She’d be fifty one this year, December 23rd. Daddy used to say she’d been his early Christmas present that just got sent to the wrong address and took twenty years to catch up to him. Only fifty one, with maybe another thirty or more ahead of her to spend all alone. But, then again, according to her she was never really alone. I wished I could feel that way.
I cried in the shower. Just like last year. I don’t know; maybe I needed more church.
The rest of the morning passed by on mute. I drove to Momma’s house, one of several in a row that looked exactly alike, except that Momma’s house was the prettiest. She had always had a green thumb but it had gotten greener since Daddy died. The pansies and sunflowers and lilies and daffodils that wound around clumps of gardenias and rose bushes were some of the first colors I really noticed that day.
Maybe Momma was right. Maybe she wasn’t alone. There was definitely a presence here. Not always, at least not to me. But on this day, I could almost bring myself to expect to see him when I opened the door; still in uniform, either putting his side arm on or taking it off. Funny, really. In almost all my memories, Daddy was in uniform. Maybe because he’d been buried in one and that was the last way I saw him.
He didn’t answer the door, though. Momma did, and she didn’t even have to say hello or talk about what day it was. She just opened her arms to me, pulled me close, and rubbed my back while I cried again. Just this once, she’d said before. Just once on the day he died, I could cry on her shoulder. Then, there would be no more sadness—only celebration for the life he gave me and the joy I brought to his life. “I won’t have you spoiling your Daddy’s memory by crying over him when all he wanted was for you to be happy,” she’d said, the year after he died. “Trust me, he’s at peace now and he is so, so joyful watching over you.”
I could do that, if I could do this first.
“I know, baby,” Momma said now. “I know. Come on inside. I made soup and your grandma’s pumpernickel bread.”
Try as I might, I couldn’t cook like Momma. I never really picked up the skill for it. She said I was more like my father, and that that was okay. I breathed in the smell of her house as we walked to the kitchen.
When we sat down to bowls and plates of soup and fresh bread that melted in my mouth when I bit into it, Momma watched me eat. She smiled patiently. “You get more and more beautiful every year,” she said.
“You’re one to talk,” I told her. “What are you, aging backwards?”
She chuckled, and shrugged. At fifty one she could have been thirty. “Well I’ve got to look good when I see your daddy again, you know.” She feigned checking her hair with one hand; the same elaborate perm she’d had since I was a baby. Momma was a creature of habit. She picked a hairstyle, picked a wardrobe, picked her interests, and they’d never really changed. Even now, the shoulder pads in her dress were her own personal holdover from the eighties that she would probably keep on trotting out until her final days. Nothing, she said, was a glamorous as the eighties. That was when she’d met my father, and I thought maybe that was why.
“Just don’t get any younger,” I said. “I don’t want everyone thinking I’m the momma here. I can’t take that.”
“I’ll do my best,” Momma said. “So, how is life? Busy, I take it?” Her way of politely excusing me for not visiting as often as I should.
“Busy, but good,” I said. “I’m working with some really good kids. And some not so good adults but…mostly I think they get lonely.”
Momma knew the score on my client load. The young and the old; almost no one in between. Kids and old folks had a lot in common, though. They both complained about their lot in life; they both picked fights whenever they could to assert their independence.
“Well, I imagine you’re a welcome light in their lives,” Momma said. And then she said it. I could almost hear it coming before she did. “Your father would be so proud of you.”
“Thank you, Momma,” I said quietly, and focused on eating before I lost it again.
“So,” she said lightly. “What else is going on? Catch me up. Any young men I should know about?”
I rolled my eyes. “You know I don’t have time for men, Momma.” I shrugged a shoulder.
“What was that?” Momma asked.
“What was what?”
She pointed at my shoulder. “That. That shrug.”
“I don’t know. It’s just body language.” I sighed. “That’s all, Momma.”
“You only ever say you don’t know when you don’t want to talk about something. And you shrug when you have a secret, ever since you were three years old.” She narrowed her eyes at me in an expression I had seen in the mirror once or twice. Maybe I got my cooking from my Daddy, but I got my bullshit meter from Momma. “Are you seeing someone?”
It was a slippery slope. In what she considered to be her advanced age, Momma badly wanted ‘grandbabies’. Mind you, not grandchild, grandbabies. For a woman who only ever had one and never wanted more, she was insistent that she’d need me to have at least three or four. Minimum. So every whiff that she got of some ‘young man’ became a fight to get me hitched and pregnant as soon as possible.
“I went to lunch with a man,” I said. “Just lunch, and I won’t be seeing him again.”
“Oh,” Momma said, only a little crestfallen. No babies in the near future. “Well, that’s too bad. How come?”
“He lost his temper,” I said. “I don’t need or want that in my life.”
“At you?” she asked, horrified at the thought.
“No, not at me,” I said quickly. “But in front of me. A wild kind of anger, too, like he had the devil in him.”
Momma nodded sagely.. “Oh, I know that look. Just like your Daddy.”
I stared at her. “Daddy? No. Daddy never lost his temper. Maybe you’re getting old.”
“Well,” Momma said, “my bones are almost certainly older than my face looks. But I remember your Daddy just fine, thank you very much. He had a temper. A powerful one. You don’t remember because he never lost it with you. He only lost it with me once.” She held up a well manicured finger. “And just once. I told him I’d have none of that and if he made that mistake again I would take you and we would leave and not come back.”
I flinched as though she’d hit me in the face. “Momma…why am I just hearing about this?” I didn’t want to believe it. It didn’t fit with the narrative I’d built up about him. My daddy was a gentle, wise, hard-working hero who always knew what to say and what to do. I knew that like I knew my heart was beating.
She waved her fingers at me, “Oh, it was so long ago. You were barely four, or five, and it was just the once—after that, he never turned his anger on me again. And, well; you know it was always up to me to dole out spankings and ground you. Your daddy didn’t have the heart to do it.” She chuckled. “We’re rarely just one thing, you know. And you have a temper too—you get that from him.”
“This was different,” I said, in defense of my judgment on the matter; although, I supposed I wasn’t strictly on trial but it sure felt like it. “Riley hit someone.”
“Riley is the young man?” she asked innocently.
“Yes, Momma; his name is Riley and he hit someone in the face. Right in front of me.” I bit another hunk of dark bread and chewed fiercely.
“Well, random, unprovoked violence is certainly a sign of instability,” Momma conceded. “To just go and hit another man for no reason like that. You must have been terrified.”
“It wasn’t for no reason,” I said. “But it was still awful.”
“What reason was it?” she asked, intent and curious.
I saw what she was doing. I knew Momma, even if she knew me better than I knew her. That’s the way of mommas. I told her the story anyway. Maybe part of me hoped she’d talk me around.
Instead of doing that, though, she nodded thoughtfully and let me finish eating. She ate like a bird herself, picking at her bread and taking tiny sips of soup. She wasn’t always like that. Momma could eat. This was her grief, however peaceful she tried to feel on this day. The cooking was for me, and for her to feel closer to Daddy. Pumpernickel bread was his favorite, not mine. Momma didn’t even like it.
When we were finished with the early lunch, or something like it anyway, we moved to the living room and looked at pictures. The same pictures we always looked at. And Momma told the same stories she always told. I didn’t mind. I liked hearing them from her more than I liked remembering them myself.
Except, she slipped in one I hadn’t heard before.
“This is from nineteen ninety…two, or three,” she said, tapping a photo of her and my father in their twenties. I would have been about a year old, but I wasn’t in the photo. “We’d left you with Gramma,” she said, “and Ronald and I were invited to a party with some of his friends. This was before he was on the force.” She grinned, remembering. “We dressed up to the nines. Since I’d had you, you know, we didn’t really go out much.” She said it with a bit of humor and a dose of ire.
“But we did that night,” she went on. “Your father didn’t drink, you know, so he was sober but he was probably the only one. And some other young man wanted to dance with me.” She shook her head slowly. “Ronald was on him like a flash of lightning, and of course it got bad, fast. They were hitting one another, screaming awful language…eventually, some other people broke them up. No one called the police; now—back in those days we never did that. He was wound up for the rest of the night, I thought he’d never calm down.”
I looked at the picture of my father. I recognized him, of course, but at the moment it was like seeing a picture of him that I’d never really looked at before. He was dressed up; slick, probably like whatever music or movie star he was into at the time, like any other kid his age. He was just a little older than Malcolm in this picture; still impressionable and full of himself. More than I thought. He wasn’t always the man I’d known, I realized. He’d grown into it.
“So you’re saying I should give Riley another chance?”
Momma closed the book and waved a hand to dismiss any such thing. “I’m just telling you about your daddy and me,” she said. “That’s all. There were times I wasn’t sure about him, you know. But…in the end, it worked out. We helped one another; I had my flaws, too. I was vain—still am, in fact, in case you can’t tell.” She touched her go
ld earrings and smoothed her nice dress even though I was the only visitor she meant to receive today. “And I was impatient, and there were times I was sure he was going nowhere in life. But, he promised that he would take care of me, and of you. And in the end, your father always kept his promises. He knew the value of hard work in all things.”
I soaked all that in, and thought about it all day, while Momma and I told stories, and went shopping—she loved to shop—and even dropped by church and said a few prayers and chatted with the preacher, who as far as I knew had always preached at this church and would, forever more, be there at any hour of the day. Pastor Charles, Momma called him, and I thought there was more than a little friendliness between them but kept my mouth firmly shut about it. What would be would be—but I knew for a fact that Pastor Charles’ wife had passed of a heart attack two years ago and maybe Momma was dressed up for a reason after all. Pastor Charles certainly noticed.
Momma always spent the last couple of hours before bed by herself on this day. So at about six o’clock I hugged her, told her I loved her and, like I had last year, said that I would visit more often. She said that would be nice, like she did every year.
This time, though, I meant it. Just like I did last year.
On the drive back, some of the color was back in the world. Some of the ache was just a little less. It was like an iceberg, though. The more I chipped away each year, the more I realized just how far down it went, and how little I really understood about how deep it ran.
Still, for the moment, I didn’t hurt quite so much, and I was beginning to think that maybe, if he came around again, I might be able to give Riley Dern one more chance.
Chapter Eight
