Lola on Fire Read online

  Brody finished his chores, then showered and took up his post. He scoped the rear of the property until sundown.

  * * *

  It had been a warm day, but by six-thirty p.m. the temperature had dropped to the midthirties, and with the window open (for optimum visibility), Brody was forced to put on his dad’s motorcycle jacket. He studied the cold twilight through the thermal scope—which he had switched himself—but a heavy layer of disquietude had obscured his concentration. Brody tried to shake it off. He paced, stretched, and splashed his face with icy water, but his unease only deepened. So he wrapped the jacket tighter around his body and went to see his mom in the spare room. She was alert, as ever, not behind the rifle but sitting against the wall, rolling a quarter across her knuckles. It glinted in the subdued lamplight.

  Brody stared at her, his arms folded.

  “What is it?” Lola asked.

  “I don’t like doing nothing,” he said. “Molly might be in danger, and we’re sitting here with our thumbs up our asses.”

  She stopped rolling the coin, flipped it, snatched it out of the air. “Okay. So what do you propose?”

  “Maybe we should take the fight to Jimmy.”

  No response. No expression, even. Brody sat against the adjacent wall, one knee drawn to his chest. They looked at each other, their breaths visible in the cold air.

  “I know you’re frustrated,” Lola said at last. There was thoughtfulness in her tone, but her eyes were still blank. “And angry—”

  “Yes, I’m angry,” Brody snapped. “I’m fucking furious. And I’m still grieving my father—the kindest, best man I’ve ever known.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t. You ran away. You don’t know shit.” Brody sighed and said under his breath, “This is all your fault.”

  She heard him, at least he thought she did, but she showed no sign of objection. She slipped the coin into her pocket and watched her breath flower in the air.

  “I’m sorry, I just . . .” He ran one hand along his stubbly jaw. “I’m scared for Molly.”

  “I understand,” Lola said. “And believe me, I want us all to walk away from this, alive and together. But that won’t happen if we take the fight to Jimmy.”

  “Why not? It worked last time.”

  “Last time was twenty-six years ago. I was reckless then. And talented.” She lowered her head. “Things have changed.”

  “But we have to do something.”

  “We’re outgunned, Brody, and outnumbered. This house, with its open land and good visibility, is the only advantage we have, and I don’t want to give it up.” Lola gestured at the rifle in the window—the defensive center of her operation. It appeared, at that moment, quite inadequate. “Jimmy is too impatient to hold out much longer. So we’re going to sit tight and see what we’re dealing with.”

  “If he was going to attack,” Brody said, “he would have done it already.”

  “Maybe. Probably.” She blew into her hands and rubbed them together. “But not definitely. We hold our ground, maintain our advantage. At least until we get more information.”

  The next few minutes passed without a word between them. Brody listened to the chickens bristling, the cows mooing, the evening breeze whispering through the ash trees. A truck bounced and rumbled along Big Crow Road. He returned to his window, but only for a moment. The scene out back was dark and empty.

  “Nothing,” he reported.

  His mom nodded, then looked at him—a double take, of sorts. A small, knowing smile touched her lips.

  “What?” Brody asked.

  “That jacket,” she replied. “It was your dad’s.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “Jacket first, motorcycle later. Am I right?”

  “That was the plan.”

  She stared for a long time, not at him, he realized, but at some memory induced by the jacket. This angered him a little, although he didn’t know why. Perhaps because, until now, she’d barely mentioned his father, and had shown no remorse.

  “You have my eyes,” she said, coming out of her reverie with a long blink. “My mouth. But you have his profile. I look at you in that jacket and keep thinking it’s him.”

  “Don’t,” Brody said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Talk about him.” He shook his head. “You don’t deserve that.”

  This drew a rare beat of emotion: hurt. Brody saw it in her eyes. Just a flash, then gone.

  “Okay,” she said. She took a breath that filled her chest and let it out slowly. “Then let’s talk about you.”

  “You’re suddenly interested?” Brody spread his hands. “You want me to summarize twelve years in . . . what, five minutes? Ten?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Lola said patiently. “I know what you’ve been up to. You took drumming lessons when you were fourteen and started a band called Righteous Mojo, but then broke your ankle wakeboarding on Lake Murray and never drummed again. You had a dog-sitting job for three days, but got fired after you lost the dog. You sold your PlayStation to buy Molly a ticket to see Lady Gaga. Your first car was a 1999 Pontiac Sunfire—”

  “First and last.”

  “You dropped out of high school when you were seventeen—a year from graduation. And oh, Brody, I was heartbroken, but I get it, and I have no right to be mad.”

  “No right at all.”

  “You got a job bussing tables at Angel’s Diner, then working the drive-through at the McDonald’s on Aqua Street. You dated Emily Knowles for four months, and Bianca Ciaramella for—”

  “Okay, okay, I get it.” Brody held up his hands. “So you’ve been stalking my Facebook.”

  “Your Instagram, too,” Lola said. “And your Myspace, when that was a thing.”

  “Doesn’t make you Mom of the Year.” Brody leaned against the wall, then dropped into a sitting position. He was still mad, but it was oddly comforting to know that his mom had been watching him from afar. She loved you, Brody, Renée spoke up in his mind again. It would have broken her heart to run away. He looked at her and shrugged. “Is this it? Are we talking now?”

  “Yeah,” Lola said. She checked the time on her cell: 19:46. “You can tell me the fun stuff later. Right now I want to know what happened to you, and how you found me.”

  * * *

  The story itself didn’t take long—he’d become adept at telling it—but he paused twice to scope the back of the farm (while Lola checked east and west), and again to fetch provisions from downstairs. By the time he’d finished, it was almost ten. The floor of the spare room was littered with empty juice boxes and assorted wrappers.

  Lola sat pensively. Every now and then she blinked slowly, or creased her brow. Otherwise, she was still.

  “Not one part of this has been easy, Mom,” Brody said. “It’s been a long, hard road. And scary. But here I am.”

  It occurred to him that this was the first time he’d called her “Mom” since arriving. There’d been no hesitation, no stuttering. The word had popped from his mouth with surprising ease, leaving a trail of odd feelings. Lola registered it, too; her eyes glistened with an ambivalent light, somewhere between happy and sad. She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again.

  “You,” Brody added quickly, not wanting to dwell on these feelings, “are either my savior or my sacrifice. I had no choice but to find you.”

  The lamp hummed. A candy wrapper skittered across the floorboards, prompted by a breeze through the window. Lola stood, worked a kink out of her lower back, and walked slowly to the bulletin board. From the position of her head, Brody thought she was looking at Blair, not Jimmy.

  “You did the right thing,” she said.

  Brody hadn’t felt the cold for some time. The atmosphere in the room was not warm, but it had a blanket-like weight that covered every molecule of air. The same could be said of Lola’s emotion. It couldn’t be seen, but it was there—a heavy, volatile energy.

  “I’m sorry for
everything you’ve been through,” she said. “And I’m sorry for what happened to your father. I did everything I could to avoid that.”

  “I believe you,” Brody said.

  She turned around and looked at him for a long time, or at his jacket, perhaps—his father, the memories dry but still bright, like drifts of dead leaves beneath the porch. He thought for one moment that she was going to hug him, cry on his shoulder, but she only nodded and turned back to the photographs of her enemies.

  “Get a couple of hours’ rest,” she said. “If they come, it’ll be between midnight and dawn. I want you alert and at that riflescope.”

  “Right,” Brody said. He stood up, shuffled to his mom’s room, and shaved the edge off his tiredness with a thin sleep. He then rolled out of bed and looked through the riflescope until a tangerine light edged into the east.

  Nobody came.

  * * *

  They breakfasted, after which Brody collected the eggs, watered the animals, and shoveled more shit. Lola told him to expect the alarm to sound at nine a.m., and again at nine forty-five. It did. Farm business on both occasions. He kept working.

  “It’ll be today,” Lola said when he came back in.

  “Today what?”

  “Whatever Jimmy is planning.” Her face was gray. She looked so tired. “We’ll find out today.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Experience.”

  The UPS truck arrived that afternoon.

  * * *

  Brody assumed Lola had slept in increments—ten minutes here and there, just enough to recoup some drive. When he got out of the shower, he found her curled up on her bed. If this was a nap, it had gotten out of control; she was deep, and would likely sleep the entire day if he didn’t wake her.

  He couldn’t bring himself to do it, though. Not yet. The early warning system would snap her out of her dreams—within seconds—if it went off. Her resting was to their advantage. He could hold the fort for now.

  He managed eighty minutes; Lola had unnerved him when she’d predicted that Jimmy would play his hand that day, and Brody felt safer with her awake. So he brought soup and toast to her room, and gently woke her. She cracked one eyelid, looked at him, then jerked awake.

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “Not long enough.” He placed the tray down on the edge of her bed. “I made you soup, inasmuch as I poured it from a can and heated it on the stove.”

  “Thank you.” She smiled, but there was more to it—a softness in her gaze, a delicate hitch in her breath. She was touched, and in a way she hadn’t been, perhaps, for some time. “Thank you, Brody.”

  “Okay.”

  He went to check the side and front windows, but before he left the room she said to him, “You were always a good kid, with a big and genuine heart. I’m so proud of you.”

  * * *

  In the hour before the UPS truck rumbled onto the property, delivering the item that would incite a desperate and terrifying course of action, Lola and Brody sat together in the spare room. They talked. Not easy conversations, but a distance was narrowed as Brody began to determine the overlap between Lola Bear and her other personas.

  He said, “There’s so much about you I don’t know, and may never know, but the one question I keep coming back to is, why? If your life is so dangerous, why did you get married and start a family?”

  “The simple answer is because I chose to,” Lola replied. “I didn’t want to deny myself happiness, or the chance of a normal life. If I’d done that, Jimmy would have won. He would have killed me inside.”

  “That’s a selfish answer,” Brody said honestly.

  “Your great-grandfather would agree,” Lola said. “He warned me about putting down roots, but you have to remember that I thought I was in the clear. I met and fell in love with your father quickly. Too quickly. Jimmy was on life support at the time. Karl told me that his family—his brothers and sisters, there were eight or nine of them, I think, a big family . . . Karl told me that they considered pulling the plug, because even if Jimmy survived he would have no quality of life. He’d be brain-damaged—you know, eating baby food, buzzing around in a motorized chair.”

  “Jimmy wasn’t ready to die, though,” Brody said. “He had unfinished business.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Jesus, you should’ve put a pillow over his face while he was in the hospital. Gone back and finished the job.” Brody looked at her, his expression puzzled. “Why didn’t you?”

  “There’s more than one answer to that question,” Lola said. There was a weariness to her voice, as if she’d had this conversation with herself on numerous occasions. “Firstly, sneaking into a hospital to kill someone isn’t as easy as the movies would have you believe. There are people everywhere. Not just nurses and doctors, but orderlies, security personnel, other patients, visitors. Witnesses, in other words. There are also security cameras on every floor, in the stairwells and elevators. Additionally, Jimmy had people around him all the time—that big family I mentioned, and his other family, too. La Cosa Nostra. He was still a made man at the time, and the big boss—Don Esposito—made sure he was protected.”

  “Even so,” Brody said, “a few security cameras and mobsters should’ve been no problem for Lola Bear.”

  “If he was at home, I would have risked it,” Lola said, looking stormily at Jimmy’s photograph on the bulletin board. “Soldiers or not. Shit, I’d done it before. But he was under constant surveillance in the hospital—first in Pittsburgh, then New York City. There was no way I could get in and out cleanly.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” Brody said, and shrugged. “Sometimes, being tough is not enough.”

  “It’s never about being tough, Brody. It’s always about being smart.” Lola turned her gaze back to him, still stormy. “Which brings me to the final answer to your question: I didn’t think I had to finish Jimmy off, because Jimmy was going to do that all by himself. Jesus, he had his last rites administered twice—twice! And when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to die, I figured him being a vegetable for the rest of his life was a reasonable punishment. Perhaps even a better punishment.”

  “That didn’t happen, either.”

  “Right. The Italian goddamn Cat.” Lola breathed deeply through her nose. A muscle in her jaw twitched. “So he’s back on his feet, making moves, building a crew. No longer with Don Esposito, but forging deals of his own. That would’ve been the perfect time to go back and finish the job, but I had you at my knee and Molly in my belly. I was in a different place—a different world—slowed down by two pregnancies, mentally and physically. I simply wasn’t ready.”

  Lola rolled her eyes to the ceiling, remembering. It might have been the cold, but Brody noticed her hands were trembling.

  “I used to go behind your dad’s back,” she continued after a brief but heavy pause. “Sneak off to the range every couple of weeks, try to stay sharp. But it wasn’t enough, and I was terrified, Brody, for the first time in my life . . . terrified that Jimmy would not only come after me, but after my family, too.”

  “Yeah,” Brody said. “That’s a tough scene.”

  “I had Karl, though.” A fragile smile touched Lola’s lips. “We’d looked out for each other since day one. He was a good friend to have.”

  “Renée told me how close you were,” Brody said. “She said you kept your alliance on the down-low.”

  “In that line of work, it helps to know if someone is whispering behind your back.”

  “Was he there the night you went after Jimmy?”

  “No,” Lola replied. “Him and a couple of other guys were in New Mexico, some counterfeit money thing that Jimmy was trying to get off the ground. Jimmy called them back—he wanted boots on the ground—but it was all over before their plane touched down in Pittsburgh.”

  “One of Jimmy’s few surviving soldiers,” Brody noted. “And close enough to keep you in the loop.”

  “I called him twice
a day to begin with, fully expecting him to tell me that Jimmy was dead.” Lola blinked brightly, dazedly, as if she still couldn’t believe that Jimmy had pulled through. “That didn’t happen, obviously, but Karl and I kept in touch—usually by phone, sometimes in person.”

  Brody nodded. “I remember him coming to the house.”

  “A few times, yeah. He’d play catch with you, have a beer with your dad, then he’d quietly tell me what was going on with Jimmy.” Lola drew her knees up, looped her arms around them. “That’s why we moved from Minneapolis to South Carolina. We said goodbye to a comfortable life—a nice house, a safe community, good jobs. But Karl told me that Jimmy had invested in a payday loan company in the Twin Cities, so that was it. We had to relocate.”

  “How did you swing that with Dad?” Brody asked.

  “I didn’t swing it. I told him I wanted to leave and he agreed.” Lola smiled. “He was a good man. He loved me.”

  A horse whinnied, probably wanting to escape the stall; they’d all been stabled since Brody arrived. Crows called from the trees. Every now and then one would swoop past the window. The sky beyond was gray and carried rain. It all looked and sounded so ordinary out there that Brody couldn’t imagine it changing.

  “And there was Vince,” Lola said. “It’s probably not appropriate to talk about my first boyfriend with you, but he’s important, because he awoke so many feelings inside me. I would not have fallen so hard and fast for your father if not for Vince.”

  “I get it,” Brody said. “He taught you how to love.”

  “Yes, but that sounds so cliché.” Lola paused, trying to find the words. Brody waited silently, watching the first raindrops streak the window, until she nodded and placed one hand against her chest. “Balance. That’s what Vince gave me. You hear martial artists talk about balance all the time, but it applies to everything—to every pursuit. Talent, achievement, love . . . they represent the balance of heart and ability. When one aspect falters, you draw on the other.”