“No, Priest can go.” Duke sent a stern look my way. “A ride’ll do you good. You can take some time to think while you’re on the road. Clear your head.” I gritted my teeth, annoyed that he was throwing me into Bard’s run like I wasn’t VP and didn’t have my own shit to do. It was a power move to remind me that while I was VP, I wasn’t prez yet, and if I didn’t get my shit together, I might never be.
Duke waited to see if I’d disagree and start some shit but I knew better. I nodded and took another sip of my coffee. I’d be damned if I rose to his bait. I smiled placidly over my cup, leaving Bard to fill the silence.
“Okay, so me, Sticks, Thor, Tank, and Priest. We’ll leave next Saturday morning, probably around eight o’clock, giving us time to make it there and scout the meeting site before we make contact. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”
“Sounds good, Bard,” Duke said, reaching out to pat Bard on the shoulder. “Nice work.” Bard nodded to Duke and slapped me on the back on his way out of church. The door snicked closed, leaving me and my old man alone for the first time since the night I fucked things up and disappointed him.
Duke sat back in his chair and gave me the good ole silent treatment. We’d seen each other around the compound and at our weekly familydinner, but Duke and I hadn’t had a real conversation about anything other than the club in weeks. Clearing my throat, I tried to bridge the gap that’d formed between us by bringing up the woman we both loved: my mother.
“I saw Ma in the kitchen before I came to church.”
Duke lifted his eyebrows, causing his forehead to crease in deep grooves and making him look much older than his fifty-five years.He harumphed a bit. “Well, it is her kitchen.”
I set my mug down and leaned back in my own chair, mimicking his body language.“She’s not doing well. She’s still…struggling with losing Ellis.” My dad sat up a little straighter, ready to defend his wife from criticism. Before he could work himself up into an indignant huff on her behalf, I continued. “I’m not saying this to be a dick. We’re all still struggling with it, missing her…we always will. But Mom’s retreating into herself, and I’m worried if something doesn’t change or she doesn’t get some help, she may never come all the way back. She’s like a zombie sometimes, and I worry about her. I just wanted to bring it up, make sure you knew. She needs help or something, Duke.”
“Well, we all can’t go around torturing girls when we need to take the edge off our grief now, can we?” Duke’s words cut me just like he intended them to, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me get defensive or angry. I owned my shit, and he wasn’t wrong.
“I fucked up, and I paid the price.” I sat forward, bracing my arms on the table and clasping my hands together. “I was right about her hiding something, but I was wrong about how I went about questioning her. I went against your direct order, and I was punished for it. She obviously said enough to establish some level of trust with you and Bones, or else she wouldn’t still be here. I’m not telling you about Mom to criticize how she’s handling the loss of her baby girl.”
I looked into the face of my prez, my father, and saw the toll his own grief had taken on him. He looked like he’d aged ten years in the two since Ellis was taken from us, and his shoulders slumped as he heaved a deep sigh. Mom wasn’t the only one whose heart was still bleeding from a wound that would never, ever heal. Duke might keep his shit together better on the surface, but one look into my old man’s eyes at thismoment spoke volumes to the pain he lived with every time the sun rose and his daughter wasn’t here to see it.
“I just wanted you to know, so you could keep an eye on her. Maybe you can convince her to talk to somebody… a doctor or something. You’re the only one who can tell her anything, she’s so stubborn.”
A whisper of a chuckle escaped Duke. “Where the hell do you think you got your stubbornness from? When that woman digs her heels in, there ain’t no movin’ her.” He might be calling my mom a pain in the ass, but the gentle smile on his face and the softening of his eyes spoke volumes of the love and respect my parents had for each other. They weren’t perfect, but no one who really knew them could deny that they shared a rare and enduring love.
“Jesus, keep it together before I tell everyone in the clubhouse you were back here making doe eyes over your ole lady.”
Duke huffed out a laugh and told me to shut up. We both left church and went our separate ways to get on with the business of the day, but it felt like we’d taken the first steps toward repairing the relationship I damaged with my rage and grief. We weren’t okay yet, but we were closer than we were yesterday, so I counted that as a win. It was nice to take a step forward for once, no matter how small it may be.
I groaned as I stood from my office chair, cracking my back and neck after too many hours going over Bard’s plans for the Alvarez job. I’d spent my day looking at maps, aerial views of the meet site, and Bard’s detailed file on all the major players within the cartel. Nothing significant was leaping out as a red flag for our upcoming run, and I needed to tell Bard what a good job he’d done organizing it. Sticks used to be the man who handled our business with our neighbors south of theborder, but he was getting up there in age, and riding for ten-plus hours one way to run guns wasn’t something he relished. Not that the bastard would ever admit it out loud, and anyone suggesting he was too old to handle his shit would quickly get an up close and very personal reminder that Sticks could still take care of business. This was Bard’s first time handling the prep work for a run without Sticks at the helm, and I couldn’t find anything to criticize.
It was Friday, which meant it was family dinner night. As I left my office, I could hear the ole ladies clucking away in the kitchen, so I stuck my head in to see if my mother was among them. The delicious scent of fried chicken wafted from the kitchen, and I took a deep breath in through my nose as I walked into the room. “Smells fantastic, ladies.” My hand darted forward to snag an apple slice from the counter, but before I could pull it back with my prize, Rose, Knuckles’s ole lady, slapped the back of my hand with a wooden spoon.
“Lochlan Abbott, you better get those filthy hands away from my apples! Go on now, shoo.” Rose was one of the only people who refused to call the younger Crows by their road names. She was like a grandmother to most of us even though her own two kids decided not to be affiliated with the club. We still saw them occasionally at family dinners, but they lived a few hours away and didn’t visit as much as Rose and Knuckles wished they would.
“Aw, come on Rosie!” I kissed her on her cheek. “You wouldn’t deny a hungry man some food now, would ya?” Rosie giggled like a girl fifty years her junior and pushed me away. The other ole ladies chuckled and continued their conversations while they prepped sides for the chicken. Rose kept peeling apples for pie, I assumed, so I leaned my hip on the counter and lowered my voice a little. “Have you seen Ma today?”
Rose’s hands deftly peeled an apple, its dusky red skin parting from the flesh of the fruit in one long ribbon. “She left here a while ago with that girl, the new one.” She gestured with her paring knife. “The one with the hair.”
“Indigo?”
Rose nodded and put another apple peel into the trash can. “That’s her. When we came in to start on dinner, your mom was sitting here, and that girl was just talking her ear off, mouth goin’ a mile a minute. Imentioned that we needed another dessert for tonight, and they headed off to your parents' place to rustle something up.” I gave Rose a quick hug, squeezing her slight frame and placing a kiss on the top of her head. That earned me a playful swat, and I left the clubhouse and made my way toward the part of the compound that held the single-family homes.
It took me less than ten minutes to walk from the clubhouse to the ranch-style home where Ellis and I grew up. When my parents got married, Duke helped Blaze, the Crow responsible for running Harrison & Sons Construction, build the house, and they’d lived in it ever since. I hadn’t been back to the house much since we lost Ellis because the memories were more difficult to stave off here than in the clubhouse. If I squinted, I could still see Ellis and Lennon playing Barbies on the front porch.
The mailbox at the end of the driveway still had a dent from an errant baseball thrown by a thirteen-year-old Bones. I knew without looking that the tire swing hanging from the tree in the backyard was still there, twisting on its ropes and blowing forlornly in the breeze. Cricket and I hung the swing for Ellis during our freshman year of high school, and I still remember the glee on her face when we took turns swinging and spinning her until she threw up popsicles all over the back porch.
I shook my head a bit to dislodge the memories and strode through the front door. “Ma? You here?” I toed off my boots at the front door like I’d done every time I entered and heard my mom’s answering call come from the direction of the kitchen.
“In here, Priest!” I followed the comforting scent of cinnamon back to the kitchen to find my apron-clad mother watching Indigo remove a sheet pan from the oven.
“Look, Priest! We made snickerdoodles!” Indigo proudly held the sheet pan so I could see what she and Ma had made. “Rose said we needed another dessert for dinner tonight, so your mom and I teamed up and made cookies. I may be biased, but I think these might just be the best cookies in the universe!”
Indigo beamed at my mother, who gave her a soft smile in return. I was flabbergasted because I couldn’t remember the last time I saw my mom smile. A few weeks ago, I’d have been pissed that Indigo could finally get my mom to smile when she hadn’t been able to muster up onefor me in recent memory. Now I was just pathetically grateful that she was able to bring my mom a moment of happiness, no matter how small. I tried to school my face so my mom wouldn’t see exactly how relieved I was to see her active and engaged, but Indigo caught a glimpse of my expression before I could hide it. Indigo chattered on to avoid an uncomfortable silence.
“Lorna couldn’t believe that I’d never ever baked before, but I mean, it isn’t that surprising if you think about it. It’s not like I had an oven behind my dumpster in my favorite alleyway, ya know?”
My mom nodded and began to use a spatula to transfer the cookies from the sheet pan to a cooling rack. “I had no idea she was interested in learning how to cook. It’s nice to have one of the club girls contribute around here for once.”
