“Yes please,” my dad says enthusiastically. “Cream and—”
“Two sugars. Got it.” Patti chuckles and walks off, stopping to chat with a few of the other tables on her way to the back, while other waitresses circulate around the diner.
“Sorry I’m late. Justice called right as I was heading out the door. Rita was at the club doing an interview for a new cleaner and she couldn’t answer her phone.”
“Uh oh.” I love my stepbrothers, I really do.
They’re Rita’s kids from a previous marriage. They might be extremely rough around the edges, prone to throwing fists and cussing, but they’re good kids who love their mom more than anything. They’re extremely loyal to their friends and family. I know they’re both hoping to prospect at the club oneday. It’s not that kind of club where it accumulates bad elements. At least, not bad elements who want to keep on being bad. As far as biker clubs go, this one is pretty awesome. My dad wouldn’t be a part of something that treated women badly or took advantage of people. They might do some illegal things, I’m sure, but their Prez is an all-round good guy who wants to contribute positively to the community he grew up in.
“Yeah. It was an uh-oh thing.”
“What did he do?”
My dad sighs. “Justice is sixteen. The hormones are gonna be hard to handle even for someone who doesn’t have a hot temper. He started dating Nora a few weeks ago. I think sixteen is too young, but we had a conversation about being responsible and how to treat a woman anyway, because teenage boys aren’t known for listening to their parents. He’s his own person. He’s gonna do what he wants to do. He’s a good kid and I know that he’ll treat Nora like gold. I guess she picked him up from work yesterday and this morning, one of his co-workers said something about her body.”
“Oh my god, so this kid probably has a bloody face now?”
Dad shakes his head ruefully. “The kid happened to be a full grown man, who Justice threw through the window of the gas station.”
“Holy shit.”
“I had to go down there. The guy’s not gonna press charges. He knows who I am, but I don’t like throwing the club’s name around like that. Tyrant and Raiden don’t want anyone to be afraid of us. We don’t do the fear and intimidation thing in Hart.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Is he at home?”
“Yeah. Fired. I wanted to find him something through the club anyway. He wants to weld, but Rita thought it would be good for him to go through the process of getting a job himself. We can’t do everything for him.”
“Yeah, but he’s going to prospect when he’s out of high school. She knows that.”
He sighs again. “She does, but she’s still hoping for college before the club. She loves it, don’t get me wrong, but she worked hard to give both boys that opportunity.”
I cover my dad’s hand with my own. “There’s still time. People can get a degree at any age. There’s always online options too.”
He nods. “But that’s not what we came here to talk about, is it, sweetheart?”
One of the waitresses stops by the table at exactly that moment, so I have a brief break to try and arrange my scattered thoughts into something that I hope my dad can understand.
I know he’s going to freak out, and I’d really like to minimize the impact, if I can.
I make the choice to start out by telling him what he already knows, trying to ease him back into the past. “You already know that Mom tried to keep you from contacting me all those years. I managed to get your address from a birthday card you’d sent me that I found in her drawer, and that was when I sent you the letter.” It was the start of our adult relationship. It was probably one of the hardest letters I’d ever written.
I loved my dad, and I loved my mom. I knew what happened between them didn’t have anything to do with me, but it changed my whole life. I didn’t want anyone to hate me for going behind their back, and at the same time, I knew that I couldn’t.
Dad grasps my hand and holds it tight. “It’s all the stuff you haven’t told me that you want to talk about, right?”
I study my water glass again, staring down the lemon wedge so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t wither. “Yeah.” I clear my throat. We haven’t done this before. It’s impossible to catch up on a whole lifetime. The first time I visited Dad here in Hart, I drove across the country while I was on a break. I stayed with Dad, Rita, and the boys in their spare room. I only had five days. We talked before that and after, of course, but Dad’s never pried.
I trace my free hand down the water glass, gathering up more water droplets. “The night you left, you told me that you’d never stop loving me. You’d do everything in your power to make me welcome if I wanted you in my life. Do you remember what else you said when you came into my room that night?” He nods, his jaw ticking.
“You told me there would be things that I’d hear and probably wouldn’t understand. You said you had plenty of regrets, but that your greatest one was hurting me because you had to leave.”
Dad swipes a grease-stained finger with a heavy eagle ring across his eyes. He’s the strongest man I know, and that means that he’s never been afraid to have emotions. “You were such a brave kid. Your lip was trembling and you had tears in your eyes, but you wouldn’t let them fall, even though I’d told you so many times that it was okay to cry and that you should never beashamed of what you were feeling. You told me that you knew your mom and I were having problems. You knew that we hadn’t been in love with each other for years.”
“I also said that you hadn’t been in love with the church ever since I could remember. You’d just get up and go there. You helped people because you loved doing it and you loved them, but what most of the people in church thought and did made you sad.”
“You were only eleven and yet you already knew more about the world than I ever did,” Dad says, voice gone husky. “Children sometimes see things and understand right away what it takes adults years to comprehend.”
“I didn’t understand how complicated things were when I was younger. I just knew that you loved me. I said that too.”
