The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller

Author:Jennifer Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

19

THE HOT WHEELS GRILL was a strip club minus the strippers. The waitress uniforms left little to the imagination, and the banquettes were predictably covered in purple velvet that was oddly similar to the velour on King’s Gold Wing. They were also speckled with rough black patches that, if you were being generous about it, could be dried gum.

Reno slid into a booth at the back of the room and lit up a cigar. A waitress came to take his order and he asked for a chicken salad sandwich and a beer. His crew sat across the room, and Bull stood chatting up one of the waitresses, taking advantage of his relative youth among the bikers. He leaned against the jukebox, his hips thrust forward, redundantly broadcasting his intentions. Becca was nowhere to be seen.

Reno knew he was being juvenile, refusing to tell Becca what was in Kath’s letter. At first, he just hadn’t wanted to deal with it. But now his increasing proximity to Kleos filled him with dread. He needed to treat this situation like he would a Band-Aid: rip the protective cover off, get the pain of it over fast. Reno told plenty of war stories about his time in the service, but this was not one of them. Others were bloodier. Objectively speaking, they were more traumatic. But there wasn’t a one-to-one correlation between the amount of violence in a story and the way it affected you. Telling this tale meant inviting in a complicated and unhappy set of emotions. He just didn’t want to go there. And yet he had been, quite literally, speeding in that direction for the past five days.

Reno had not looked at Kath’s letter once since the Love’s parking lot. Now he pulled it from his jacket pocket and flattened it across the table.

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