Harder (Caroline & West #2)(15)

“Please,” I beg.

She meets my eyes, and her gaze tells me she’s no stranger to this kind of thing. The people out there are her family. She made them with her body, watched them make others, weathered years’ worth of this behavior.

Drinking problems, health problems, abuse, alienation, violence, death.

I wish she’d at least had a chance to bury her no-good son with some dignity, but I want her to step in and help West even more.

“He’s on his own out there,” I say.

She closes her eyes. Sighs.

Gets to her feet.

When she walks across the threshold, I want to go with her, but I’m worried about Frankie. I can’t protect her and be with West both.

It’s killing me not to know what’s happening to him.

“Will you stay here?” I ask.

She bites her lip. Shakes her head.

“I’m supposed to keep you out of trouble, but your brother …”

Is out there.

Is the only thing I care about anymore.

“You really love him, huh?” she says.

I feel the tears coming up, but I take a deep breath and swallow them back down. “Yeah.”

“I won’t come all the way out,” she says. “I’ll stay in the doorway, so I can see what’s going on.”

“Good enough.”

We hustle toward the front of the funeral parlor. I’m halfway down the hall when she takes my elbow. “Caroline?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

Her apology rings in my ears as I hurry away.

Sorry. As if this is her fault.

I hear sirens in the distance. Did the funeral director call the police? I think he must have, and it feels like overkill until I step through the door and into a disaster.

I see a man in a suit jacket throwing a punch. A woman teetering on high-heels, bent double. I hear a high-pitched whistle, the smack of bone against bone.

I watch a stranger head butt another stranger, the spray of blood the single most repulsive sight I’ve ever witnessed.

This is a brawl, I think. This is what a brawl looks like.

The chaos is random, not coordinated like in a movie, and I can’t locate West, can’t even penetrate the first layer of heaving bodies, which is hard for me to understand because there aren’t a hundred people in this parking lot. There are … twenty? Twenty-five? I should be able to get to the middle of them.

I try, but my instinct for self-preservation is too healthy. Every time a hip or fist or elbow comes at me, I jerk back.

Then suddenly the melee breaks open and I see West’s mom and Bo. He’s got his arms around her from behind. She’s completely wild in his grip, shouting obscenities, trying to break loose. She looks like the madwoman in the attic, her hair wild, voice rough, mascara streaking down her cheeks.

I glance toward the entrance and locate Frankie where she said she would be. Seeing this.

I’m sorry, too, Franks.

Bo’s trying to get Michelle out of the middle of the tumult. West’s grandma is helping, I realize—she’s the one who cleared the path, the one whose shrill whistle keeps cutting through the noise—and West is holding the crowd off Bo’s back.

He shoves someone. Throws a punch.

He takes a hit to his cheek, his head snapping back, and then I’m running right for him. Sprinting toward West as the air starts to flash and bleed red.

The screams of the sirens split the sky.



A policeman has West facedown over the back of a patrol car with his legs spread. His forehead is mashed against metal, the seam between the shoulders of his suit jacket split open, the white of his shirt showing through.

“Excuse me.” I grab a passing officer’s arm. “Excuse me!”

She shakes me off, talks into her radio. I step closer to the car and try to get the attention of the guy with West. “Is he being arrested? What about his rights? He didn’t do anything, it wasn’t his fault, he’s not a criminal—damn it, you’re not listening to me—”

West barks, “Caro!”

How mean he looks with that bruise blooming on his cheek. How much like the man they think he is. A roughneck brawling at a funeral.

“Knock it off,” he says. “Let them do their jobs.”

“But it wasn’t your fault!”

“They’ll f*cking figure that out if you give them a few seconds’ peace.”

When a third cop takes my upper arm in a tight grip and leads me away from West, I bite my tongue. I end up against the building, beside Joan.

“I can’t believe this,” I say. “He was trying to stop it.”

“If he keeps ahold of his temper, he’ll be fine,” she says.

“Nothing about this situation is fine.”

I press the back of my head into the building’s vinyl siding and try to breathe.

West’s mom is bundled into the back of a patrol car, where she abruptly flips from blank catatonia to screaming again in her hoarse, ravaged voice.

“His funeral!” she’s yelling. “His f*cking funeral!”

Bo gets taken to the station in another car. West’s uncle Jack goes to the hospital with a broken nose, and the rest of the aunts and uncles and cousins disperse. I don’t know if they’re heading to the hospital, the police station, or if they’re just done with the whole scene.