Chapter 5
Austin
Nobody tells you about three a.m.
They tell you it's hard to be a dad. They tell you it changes everything.
Pops told me I'd love him more than I thought I was capable of loving anything, which turned out to be true but also not particularly useful information at three in the morning when EJ has been screaming for forty minutes.
I've tried everything I know to do and some things I made up, but he's still going.
I'm walking him around the kitchen of the house on the compound, the small one that Razor sorted out for us two months before EJ arrived, the one with the hot water heater that knocks and the back door that sticks in the rain.
I've been walking him in circles for twenty minutes.
My shoulder is damp where his face has been pressed against it and he's making this sound that isn't quite crying anymore, it's more like complaint, like he's pissed off at the world and he's decided I'm the right person to hear about it.
"I know, buddy," I tell him. "I know."
He doesn't care. He keeps going.
I don't know what's wrong. I've checked everything.
Fed him, changed him, checked his temperature, walked him, rocked him, stood in the bathroom with the shower running because Seb swore blind the steam helps and Seb was full of shit.
I've been a father for eighteen months and most days I feel like I'm figuring it out as I go, which I suspect is how every father feels but nobody admits.
The back door opens.
Rosie comes in still in her scrubs, her bag over one shoulder and her keys in her hand, just back from a hospital shift by the look of her. She's one of the old ladies, married to Prez, and she's been checking on us since EJ was six weeks old without ever making it seem like checking.
She looks at me. She looks at EJ. She drops her bag on the kitchen table and holds out her hands.
I hand him over without a word.
She tucks him against her chest and starts walking, the same circuit I've been doing around the kitchen table, except she does it differently, some angle or rhythm I haven't cracked yet. EJ makes the complaint sound twice more and then it drops off into something quieter and then nothing.
I sit down at the kitchen table.
She keeps walking him for another ten minutes until she's sure. Then she lays him down in the basket we keep in the corner of the kitchen for exactly this situation and she straightens up and looks at me.
"When did you last eat?" she says.
"Lunch."
"It's three in the morning."
"Yeah."
She opens my fridge, which has beer and leftover pasta and something in a container I can't identify.
She takes out the pasta, puts it in a bowl, puts the bowl in the microwave.
While it heats up she leans on the counter and looks at me with the same expression she probably uses on patients who are being stupid about their own care.
"You need sleep," she says.
"I know that."
"Tomorrow night, bring him to mine at ten. I'll take him through till six. You sleep."
"Rosie, I can't ask you to do that."
"You didn't ask." The microwave beeps. She puts the pasta in front of me with a fork. "Eat."
I eat. She sits across from me with a glass of water and we don't talk much, just the odd word, and EJ breathes quietly in his basket in the corner, and outside the compound is dark and still and somewhere down the row one of the other houses has a light on.
She leaves at quarter past three. She doesn't make a thing of it. She just picks up her bag and goes.
I sit at the kitchen table for a while after she's gone. EJ's chest rises and falls in the basket. I can hear the hot water heater knocking in the back room and the wind doing something to the back door. My pasta bowl is empty and I'm tired in a way that goes all the way down.
I think about my mother for a second, which I don't do often.
She'd have been good at this part, the three a.m. part.
She had that practical warmth that some women have that doesn't make a production of itself, it just shows up when it's needed and gets on with it.
She died when I was twelve and I don't have enough memories of her to do her justice, just impressions, the smell of her, the sound of her laugh, the way she'd put her hand on the back of my neck when I was sick.
Rosie does that sometimes. It’s not the same, but something registers the same.
The compound is quiet outside. I can hear someone's dog down the row, the low rumble of it as it settles, and then nothing.
In a few hours the garage will start up and the yard will fill as another day begins.
Right now it's just me, the noisy hot water heater, and EJ breathing in his basket. We’re wrapped up in that particular hush that falls over a place when the rest of the world is asleep.
This is what family looks like. Not blood, not obligation. A woman in scrubs at three in the morning who takes a screaming baby out of your arms because she knows you need her to, and heats up your leftover pasta, and tells you to sleep, and leaves without waiting to be thanked.
This. This right here.
I check on EJ one more time and then I go to bed and for the first time in weeks I sleep straight through until six.
EJ at Four
The bike has been in the garage since before EJ could walk.
He's been aware of it the way kids are aware of things that belong to the important people in their lives. It’s not something he can touch but something that exists in the landscape of who his dad is.
Every time I roll it out he watches from wherever he is with this particular stillness he gets, like he's storing the information for later.
Today I lift him up and put him on it.
Engine off. Bike on the stand. I'm right there with both hands on him and he's not going anywhere. But I put him on it and I wrap his small hands around the handlebars and I step back just enough to look at his face.
His face does something I don't have words for.
It's not excitement exactly, though his eyes go wide. It's more like recognition. Like something he already understood in theory just became real under his hands.
"Dad," he says. Just that.
"Yeah," I say. "That's your seat, buddy."
I don't know where that comes from. But I mean it.
The brothers have drifted over from wherever they were, the way they always drift when something's happening in the yard.
Cash is leaning against the wall with his arms folded and a grin that means he's about to say something.
Pops has come around from the back of the garage and he's standing with his hands in his pockets looking at EJ the way he looks at things he finds genuinely good.
"Look at that," Pops says. "He’s a natural."
"He's four," I say.
"So? Some men are seventy and never sit on a bike right. He's sitting on it right." He points at the way EJ's shoulders are, relaxed and forward. "See that? That's not taught. That's instinct."
"Don't tell him that or he'll want to start the engine."
Cash pushes off the wall. "I'll give you a hundred," he says to Ramsey, who's appeared at his shoulder the way Ramsey always appears, quietly and without announcement.
"For what?" Ramsey says.
"That the kid rides solo by ten."
Ramsey looks at EJ on the bike. EJ is now making engine noises with his mouth, which is the best thing I've ever seen. "Fifty," Ramsey says. "He'll do it by nine."
"You're betting against me?"
"I'm betting he's faster than you think."
"Done." Cash holds out his hand and they shake and I look at my son on my bike making engine noises and I think I might be in trouble with this kid.
EJ looks up at me with both hands tight on the bars. "Can we go fast, Dad?"
"Not yet, buddy." I crouch down so I'm level with him. "We've got time."
He considers this with the seriousness of someone who is four years old and has decided that speed is the point of everything. "How much time?"
"Enough."
He thinks about that and apparently decides it's an acceptable answer, because he goes back to his engine noises. Cash and Ramsey are still arguing about the terms of their bet. Pops is watching EJ with that look on his face, the warm one he doesn't dial down the way the other brothers do.
I stay crouched next to the bike and I watch my son and I think about the fact that I didn't plan any of this and it's the best thing in my life. All of it. The kid, the club, the house with the knocking hot water heater. None of it was the plan, but all of it is mine.
Knuckles comes out of the side door of the garage and stops when he sees the scene.
He looks at EJ on the bike, at Cash and Ramsey arguing, at Pops, at me.
Something passes across his face that on anyone else I'd call fond.
On Knuckles it's a slight reduction in the default level of menace and that's enough.
"How old?" he says.
"Four."
He nods slowly. "My old man put me on a bike at three. I fell off."
"What happened?"
"Got back on." He looks at EJ again. "Make sure he knows that part. The getting back on part. That's the only part that matters."
He goes back inside without another word and that's Knuckles delivering the most complete piece of parenting advice I'm likely to get from him, and I'm going to take it seriously because he meant every syllable.
EJ has progressed from engine noises to also doing the handlebars, turning them back and forth like he's navigating something I can't see.
The brothers have started placing additional bets on the side, something about whether he'll ask to go on a real ride before his birthday.
Shadow has appeared from somewhere and put five dollars on yes before this afternoon.
"EJ," I say.
He looks at me.
"You like it?"
He looks back at the handlebars. He looks at the tank. He looks at the exhaust pipes and the forks and the mirrors. He does a full survey of the bike with the thoroughness of someone who wants to get his answer right.
"Yeah," he says finally. "It's mine too, right?"