Chapter 9
Austin
EJ's settled with the other kids. Rosie has looked him over and told me with the quiet authority of a nurse who's seen worse, “He’s absolutely fine. You need to stop hovering.” I let him go and find Prez.
I know I shouldn't be doing this. I know the rule and I know the rule exists for good reasons. I know that walking across this yard with what I'm currently feeling visible on my face is a bad idea. I do it anyway.
"You knew she was opening this week," I say. "Both of you. You knew I'd been driving past that corner and you knew today was the day she'd be open and you said nothing."
Prez looks at me. He's got the measure of my mood and he's not moving away from it. "You want to have this conversation right now, Sprog?"
"Yeah, I do."
Brick is standing off to Prez's left, and he has the look he gets when he's decided he's going to take what's coming and not argue with it. That look makes me angrier.
"I knew she was back. I've known for three weeks.
I've been managing it." I keep my voice down because the yard has ears and I'm not putting this in front of the whole club.
"What I haven't been doing is walking into her office with my son bleeding in my arms without a second to get my head right first. A heads-up would have been something.
One sentence. She opens tomorrow. That's all it needed to be. "
"You want to be angry at me, Sprog, you do that.
" Prez's voice is level and it has the particular quality it gets in Church, the one that means he's not managing a situation, he's leading it, and the difference between those two things isn’t subtle.
"But I need you to hear me before you decide how angry. "
I say nothing.
"Three weeks ago, Brick told you she was back.
You were already distracted. You've been riding past that corner every couple of days and coming to work and getting under trucks and not talking about it.
I watched that. I watch everything in this yard.
" He steps forward, not aggressive, just closing the distance so I can't look away from him.
"If I'd warned you she was opening today, you'd have spent last night awake planning what you were going to say if you saw her.
You'd have come to Church this morning with half your head somewhere else when we needed you clear for a real threat.
I protect this club. That's my job. That includes you. That includes your head."
I have nothing to say to that.
"I'm still angry," I say.
"Yeah," he says. "You're allowed."
He holds my eyes for another second and then he nods, the nod that means we're done here, before he turns away. Brick stays. I look at him.
"I should have said something," Brick says. "I knew about the surgery when you asked me about Ruby's that day. I made a call. I might have made the wrong one."
The fact that Brick will say that, just straight out, is why he's Brick. He doesn't dress it up or defend it. He made a call and it cost me something and he's saying so.
"She was right there," I say. "I had no warning. I walked in and she was just..." I stop.
"I know."
"She was incredible with him. She talked to him the whole time, answered all his questions, didn't talk down to him. EJ loved her." I say it before I've decided to say it and once it's out I can't take it back.
Brick is quiet for a moment. "Yeah," he says. "That sounds about right."
He puts his hand on my shoulder briefly, the way Brick does things, quickly and without ceremony, and then he goes back inside.
I stand in the yard by myself for a while.
"Church in ten minutes," Prez calls from the doorway. "Lose the attitude before then, Sprog."
"Yes, Prez," I say. And I mean it.
Rosie and Meg are with the kids when I find them, and when I walk in they both look at me the way women look at you when they've already been having a conversation about you before you arrived.
"He's fine," Rosie says. "Color’s good, no sign of dizziness. Savannah did a good job."
I grunt.
"What's going on, Austin?" Meg asks.
These women. They've helped me raise EJ from the beginning, shown up in the middle of the night with pasta when I had no food in, just a screaming infant and no idea what I was doing. They've never once made me feel like I should have been doing it differently. I don't hide much from them.
"Sav's the new doctor. She's the one who patched EJ up."
They exchange a look that tells me this isn’t entirely news to them.
"You knew she was opening this week," I say.
"Rosie heard about it at the hospital," Meg says carefully. "We assumed you knew too."
"I knew she was back. I didn't know today was the day I was going to see her for the first time."
"Oh, Austin." Rosie puts her hand on my arm. "Walking in there like that, no warning, with EJ in your arms. That's a lot to land on you at once."
"Yeah."
"What was it like seeing her?" Meg asks. Meg is the practical one. She asks the actual question.
I sit down on one of the compound's mismatched chairs and I look at my hands.
"Like no time had passed. I walked in there ready to demand she look after my son and then I saw her face and I wanted to put him down and just..
." I stop. "She was calm. She was completely calm.
She went straight to EJ and started working and she was kind to him, Meg.
Not kind like you're being professional.
Kind like she actually cared whether he was scared. "
"She's a good person," Rosie says quietly.
"She is. She always was." I look up. "She said no when I asked her to dinner."
"You asked her to dinner?" Meg says.
"To say thank you for EJ. She told me to take EJ's mother out instead."
They both absorb this.
"She doesn't know there’s no EJ's mother," Rosie says. "Not anymore. She wouldn't know anything about what happened with Raven after she left."
"She assumed," I say. "I didn't correct her."
"Why not?"
Because I was standing in her surgery with my son bleeding on her table and her hands were shaking slightly, not from fear, from something else. I couldn't make myself say another word that wasn't about EJ.
"I don't know," I say.
Rosie and Meg look at each other over my head the way they do when they've already reached a conclusion and they're deciding who's going to say it.
"She's been back three weeks," Rosie says. "How many times have you driven past that corner?"
I don't answer.
"Austin."
"A few times."
"And you never went in."
"No."
"But today you walked straight through her door with EJ in your arms and she took care of him," Rosie says quietly. "And you watched her do it."
"She's good at what she does." The words come out rougher than I intend.
"She's really good. I knew she would be but seeing it?
" I stop again. "EJ was asking her questions the whole time she was stitching him up and she answered every single one.
She treated him like he had every right to understand what was happening to him.
He told me after that she was brilliant. "
"He's right," Meg says. She lets a beat pass. "Ask her again. Not because of EJ. Because you want to. If she says no, at least you know. But ask her like a man who means it, not like a man offering a transaction."
"I've got Church," I say, which isn’t an answer and everyone knows it. I stand up and find EJ across the room. "Hey, buddy. How's the side?"
"Fine." He comes over and I put my hand on the back of his head. "Dad, Dr. Savannah was really cool."
"Yeah, she was." I ruffle his hair and smile down at him. "I've got to go to Church. Stay with Rosie. Don't do anything with your side."
He gives me the look that means he's already planning to ignore this instruction. "I'll be careful."
"EJ."
"I'll be careful, Dad."
Church runs for an hour. Braxton and Meg tracked the shooter's bike back to the Lost Carousel Motel on the road out of town. High Stakes MC, confirmed. They went into Trudy's diner and were overheard talking about moving guns and muscling us out. Whatever they're planning, it's soon.
Prez locks the women and children down formally. There's going to be some noise about that from the old ladies, and I don't envy him the conversation, but it's the right call.
I go back to pick up EJ, take him home and make him dinner. We sit at the table, eating in silence. I keep looking at his side like I'm going to be able to see through the dressing if I look hard enough.
"Dad," he says, around a mouthful of pasta. "Dr. Savannah was your girlfriend, wasn’t she?"
I look at him. "Who told you that?"
"You did. I heard you telling Rosie."
I put my fork down. "You weren't supposed to be listening to that."
"I wasn't trying to." He considers. "Why isn't she your old lady now?"
"It's complicated."
"Why?"
"Because I made a mistake a long time ago and it changed things between us."
He chews this over along with the pasta. He's got the same look he gets when he's working out a math problem, like he's identified that there's a solution and he's just locating it. "What kind of mistake?"
I think about how to answer that honestly for a nine-year-old. "I made her think something that wasn't true. Because I thought it would be better for her if she believed it."
"You lied to her?"
"Yeah. In a way."
He's quiet for a moment. "Like when I broke Pops' trophy and told him I didn't do it?"
I look at my son. "Exactly like that."
"But I did it because I was scared he'd be mad at me. Why did you do it?"
There it is. The question I've been carrying for ten years and never had to answer to anyone quite so directly.
"Because I loved her and I was scared that if she stayed, she'd give up things she wanted so she could stay. And I couldn't let her do that."
EJ thinks about this very carefully. I watch him process it, the small shift in his expression as he puts the pieces together. "So, you lied to her because you loved her."
"Yeah."
"That doesn't make sense, Dad."
"No," I say. "It doesn't."