Page 32 of Viper's Desire
He has never told me he was wrong. Not once, about anything. I don’t trust myself to speak, so I don’t.
“It’s handled,” Viper says. No edge in it. “Her school, the house, whatever she needs. She won’t go without.”
My father holds his eyes across the table. He can’t bless this. He won’t pretend to. But the man sitting at his table is taking care of his daughter, and he’s been told, plainly, that he can stop carrying that worry.
“Good,” he says.
My father goes back to his roast, and my mother refills Viper’s sweet tea without being asked, and the supper continues.
Nobody storms off. Nobody quotes Leviticus.
Later, my father asks whether the house has good bones. Viper says yes, and they leave it there.
It’s not good. It’s not even close to good.
It’s a start.
At the door, my mother hugs me, then looks up at Viper.
“You’ll bring her again,” she tells him. “This isn’t a one-time supper. We’re family now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
My father stands behind her in the hall. He doesn’t offer his hand, and Viper doesn’t reach for it.
But he watches me put on a leather cut, and he reads the white stitching.
He says nothing about it at all.
What he says is, “Drive careful. The county road’s bad at night.”
He knows exactly what found me on a county road at night. We both hear everything underneath it.
“Always,” Viper says.
We leave my parents’ house, hand in hand.
I swing on his bike behind him and lock my hands around his waist.
The streetlights quit at the edge of town, and then it’s saguaros and dark and the road home. I press my cheekflat against his back, where the engine and his breathing run together into one rhythm I know now.
At the stop sign by the feed store, his gloved hand drops to my knee and squeezes once.You okay?I squeeze his ribs.Yeah. I am.
I’m a different woman than I was when I came across Viper on that road.
The good girl is gone, and she isn’t coming back.
Even though my father doesn’t like my choices, he decided not to lose me over them.
And something is waking up in my mother. She stood up to him tonight. And I want to be around when she finally comes out of her shell.
Viper opens the throttle. The desert pours by in the dark, and every mile of it is carrying me toward an eventual porch on Cholla Road and a life I chose.
I hold on tighter, and we ride home.
EPILOGUE
EDEN
