For Whom The Bell Tolls

ONE.

⸻ ⊹ ⸻

MAY, 1983.

Josephine Carson glared at the yellowish water-stain above her head. She glared at most things in recent months, since her father's arrest. Her ringed hands were clasped over her stomach, her messy hair draped along the bed in no particular manner. She crossed her legs at her ankles, her feet clad in boots, her jeans loose around the tops of them. Her patched leather jacket was resting on the hook on the back of her bedroom door, the colors standing out starkly against the blandness of the rest of the room.

She never referred to it as her room, or her house. Because it wasn't. She had a home, and she wasn't allowed to return to it for a month after it had been labeled a crime scene, the majority of their belongings being taken in as "evidence." Joey tried to go back home, she truly did, but that trailer wasn't the same without the loving presence of her only other family member.

Josephine missed her father more than she liked to admit to people. She missed Saturday morning breakfasts and Friday night take-outs. She missed riding around the city with him, blasting metal and swerving between the cars like the world was going to end at midnight. She missed working on the shop's project of the week with him, absorbing any and everything she could about engines and their components. And more than anything, she missed how he understood. How her father could read her like an open book with nothing but a glance. How he would pull her into his chest and tell her Whatever it is, Joey, you know I got your back. I love you to the moon, kiddo.

Her eyes trailed from the ceiling, to the clock on the wall that read 2:18 A.M. to the dimly lit patches on her jacket. A jacket that had come to be her most prized possession. Her father gifted it to her on her thirteenth birthday, along with a Chicago Pistols patch, claiming that as the Gang's princess, you ought to wear your brand proudly. Over the next four years, she'd acquired other patches; mostly those of bands she greatly admired. Black Sabbath. Judas Priest. Mötorhead. Iron Maiden. Pantera. Slayer. Bands that she and her father spent countless hours listening to. Bands that she spent countless hours replicating the bass riffs to in hopes of perfecting them in case she ever met them.

That was something that Joey couldn't get used to, the lack of noise in her Grandmother's trailer. It was always far too quiet, far too empty. There was no music, no stupid movies on VHS playing at all times, no clanking and grumbling of engines and vehicle parts in the yard, no boisterous laughter of five or more bikers out front. She'd be lucky to hear the news play at five.

Sometimes she ached for the silence, though. Like on nights like tonight, where her Grandmother Rose would wake up screaming that there were rats crawling inside of her mattress; yet another symptom of her daily worsening dementia.

And on these nights, Joey would sigh, rub a hand over her face and clamber down the narrow hallway until she reached Rose's bedroom. She'd hold her hand and softly assure her that there were no rats, that there were no critters of any kind. She'd assure the eighty-seven year old woman that she was safe and sound.

She didn't sleep much, her mind never ceasing to spin a new series of questions. What's going to happen when Granny passes? Who ratted out Dad? Why is Mason being so secretive? What if I ran away? Where would I even go? Questions that she would never find the answers to, no matter how hard she searched.

Once Joey made it back to her bedroom, she sat on the edge of the twin-sized mattress, her elbows resting on her bent knees, hands rubbing at her face in frustration. Nothing was working. Nothing was going to plan. Her life was going to Hell in a handbasket and all she could do was watch it and miss what used to be. And tonight she missed her father.