“And where’s Holler?”
“On a run. Club business.”
I look at her. “She had a crown?”
“Caroline?”
“Yes.”
Lottie is quiet for several miles.
That is answer enough to make my pulse pick up.
“Depends who’s telling it,” she says finally.
I turn fully toward her. “What does that mean?”
“It means some women patch in. Some women just leave blood on the floor and get remembered anyway.”
The words slide under my skin.
“My mother was a Queen?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say she wasn’t.”
Lottie smiles faintly. “Look at you learning outlaw language.”
“Lottie.”
She sighs. “Caroline ran with them for a while. That’s what I heard. Lonerock had a King chapter back then, before Hot Mama took the reins and men started clutching their pearls through their leather. Caroline was young. Wild. Tangled up with Mike Welles when he was out there playing Romeo in every state that would let him. She wasn’t the kind of woman men forgot.”
“She never told me.”
“Women don’t always tell their daughters who they were before fear got to them.”
That lands hard.
I think of my mother at our little kitchen table in Paducah, hair messy, cigarette burning down between her fingers, saying Mike Welles was trouble with a smile and a knife. I think of her snapping at me for asking too many questions. I think of her crying when she thought I was asleep. I think of the stories she almost told and swallowed instead.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Hot Mama’s story to tell.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s got knives in it, and I ain’t cutting my fingers on somebody else’s blade.”
I hate that answer.
I respect it too.
August wakes somewhere in Kansas and announces he is hungry enough to eat a criminal.
Lottie says that is concerning but resourceful.
We stop at a roadside diner where the waitress calls everyone sweetheart and looks at the bruise-shadow under my collar with eyes that know too much. Lottie sits facing the door. I sit beside August. He eats pancakes shaped like bears and tells Lottie that Derby’s pancakes were black.