Raven's Peak: Cold Hard Bitch by Cole Savage

Author:Cole Savage [Savage, Cole]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2018-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

No one could explain Karen’s bitterness or declaration of war on the world, but Trent had left Karen with a grasp, in the form of a debt, of the complexities of pari-mutual betting, a couple of garish trick shots at Eight ball, a malice for racetrack wagers, gambling halls, poolrooms, and the cave dwellers inherent in those institutions. Battling Karen was fun when Trent was young, but somewhere between the time that Nicki was born and left the house, Trent had lost his capacity for celebrating an enemy’s defeat. Trent had pegged her as a fetching scatter-brained spitfire that tried incessantly to relinquish her dark and painful history at the hands of anyone who would give her an ear, and when no one wanted to listen she tied them down and sizzled them with caveats that would bring down the Roman Catholic Church. Trent’s death amounted to nothing more than Karen feeling that she was living only to care for her late husband’s gambling foibles. Karen was a creature bound to pursue Trent no matter where he went, whispering the foulest terms in his ears, related to her crimes and blackness of her soul. Karen was the classic mid-century democratic idealist who had lived long enough to see hope die time and time again. The neighbors suspected Karen of sending their pets into an unseen graveyard because of her sadist propensities, so she had alienated even her closest friends. If not for Nicki’s gregarious and cosmopolitan personality, not to mention pure hotness, Karen would be living inside a bubble by herself.

Living with Trent, Karen had observed that what got labeled karma in their marriage was really stubbornness married to a knack for observation, a fluid sense of truth, a sharp ear for bullshit, and a deeply suspicious nature because of Trent’s indiscretions. Unlike Karen, Trent was uncomfortable with fairy-tales, but his fixation on self-reliance made him secretive about his exploits. Karen was always threatening rain or snow, so he always kept an umbrella and a snow-shovel on hand to stroke her fears, because most of the things Karen worried about never happened. Nicki was the only child fathered by Karen and Trent, born from unsaid hope, expressed by their mutual disdain for birth control, as they lit a candle one special night after Trent won a parlay at Kentucky Downs— a project they embarked on with equal zeal in their young marriage, with a fixity of purpose that had over time faded in vigor, as it became apparent that one could beat the house on very few occasions. The news that Karen had finally conceived a child was so welcome to Trent, a child so eagerly anticipated, that for an instant the joy of it outweighed everything else, that in essence showed that the pregnancy of Nicki would be the only necessary condition for the loss of on track-betting and other vices in their lives that they discharged as a couple, except for Trent, who reverted back to the

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