Chapter 8
Beckett
The club's last gathering of the season was on the final Saturday of October, which is, in Ember Falls, the day the leaves are at their best and the air has not yet committed to winter.
The compound had been Iron Vow's heart for as long as I had been alive.
Diesel had bought the property back in the seventies when it was a failing horse farm and the town had been small enough to fit on one road.
He had built the main house himself, with help from men who were now dead or grayed past recognition, and he had built it the way men of his generation built houses — heavy, square, with rooms larger than they needed to be and porches that ran the length of every side.
The compound had grown around the house over fifty years.
The shop building. The barn for the bikes.
The fire pit ring. The covered pavilion that Razor and Liam had put up six years ago for the cookouts.
The string lights overhead, hung by Sienna two summers in a row because Sienna had decided string lights were non-negotiable for any gathering of more than ten people, and the club had learned that arguing with Sienna about lighting was a fight you lost on purpose because the lighting was, in fact, always correct.
We came in on the bike I had built myself.
The bike had been the last piece of work I had done before the Indian's fender.
I had been finishing it in the corner of my forge for three years, on the long evenings when the commission work was caught up and the gallery pieces could wait a week.
It was a custom hardtail, low-slung, the frame welded by hand, the tank painted by Ezra with an anvil and hammer wreathed in flame in the small intricate art-deco style that had become Ezra's signature.
Every component was either bought, modified, or hand-forged by me.
The exhausts were mine. The fenders were mine.
The handlebars I had bent over a hot bar and a forming jig in a single afternoon two years ago, and I had been so proud of the bend that I had photographed the bars in the morning light before I had welded them on.
Alma rode behind me. She wore my jacket — she had her own, a denim one she had been working through the season in, but for the cookout she had wanted leather, and I had insisted she wear mine even though it was three sizes too big on her, and she had pretended to fight me about it and then put it on and not given it back.
Her hair was loose under the helmet. Her arms were wrapped around my waist. When I parked the bike, she climbed off it with the easy slide of a woman who had grown up around motorcycles and who had ridden behind men her whole life, and she stood there for a second with her hand on the back of the seat, looking at the compound with an expression I had not seen on her face before.
It was the look of a person seeing a thing she had been told about and finding it true.
The compound was full.
Diesel and Sadie were at the grill — Diesel because he was Diesel and the grill was, in his theology, a position of office, and Sadie because Diesel could not work the grill without Sadie nearby pretending she was not supervising.
Razor and Bree were on the porch with their daughter Nola, who was seven and fearless and had just announced to anyone who would listen that she intended to be a stuntwoman when she grew up.
Havoc was at the fire pit with Noelle, who was holding a baby — they had a baby now, the youngest one in the family, his name was Reed — and Havoc was making the kind of expressions that men who had not previously thought of themselves as soft made when they were holding their infant sons in public.
Liam was at the long table under the pavilion with Thea and Oliver.
Oliver was twelve. Oliver had taken to calling Liam Dad the previous spring, and Liam, who had walked the line of stepfather for two years without once asking for that title, had cried about it in private in a way that I had only heard about because Thea had let it slip and immediately asked me to never tell anyone, which I have honored except, now, for telling you.
Ghost and Poppy were near the bar. Colt and Willa with their two girls.
The security boys — Shield with his wife at the far table, Gunner with Celeste, Byte with Marsha, Axle with Greer.
Reaper and Joey, who had brought a tray of the small dense lemon bars Joey made for every cookout because she believed, correctly, that a cookout without something sweet was a missed opportunity.
Knox and Margaux, sitting in the camp chairs Knox always brought because he refused to sit on a picnic bench at his age.
The next generation, in pairs and clusters all over the property — Rebel with Catalina, Dash with his Willa, Ember with his Thea, Maverick with Sienna, Jinx with Noor, Saint with Delilah, Wren with Roz.
Half a dozen children running between them, three dogs, a kid I did not recognize who was sitting on the porch teaching another kid how to whistle through a blade of grass.
I had been to every one of these gatherings for the last ten years. I had stood on this property at every life stage of every person in front of me.
I had never, until that day, stood on it married.
Alma slipped her hand into mine. She squeezed it once. She said, "Show me where to start."
I said, "Wherever you want."
She said, "Sadie."
She said it because Sadie had been kind to her at the courthouse and on every cookout day since, and Alma, I had learned, repaid kindness with prioritization.
We walked across the compound to the grill.
Sadie saw us coming. She set down her tongs.
She wiped her hands on her apron. She said, "Mija," because Sadie had picked up Spanish words from Sienna and Maverick and used them with no regard for whether she had the right to, and Alma had, the first time Sadie had called her mija, gone soft in the eyes the way she did.
Sadie hugged Alma. Diesel, behind the grill, looked at me over Sadie's shoulder.
He nodded. I nodded. That was, in the dialect we spoke, an entire conversation.
I let Alma move into Sadie's orbit. I walked across the compound. I had a thing I wanted to do.
Gunner was at the camp chair circle by the fire pit. He saw me coming. He stood up. He met me halfway across the gravel. We did not hug. We had hugged in our lifetime, but not often, and not in front of the family, because we were both Holts and Holts did most things in private.
He said, "You came on the bike."
I said, "I did."
He said, "Looks good."
I said, "Thanks."
We stood there. I waited. I knew he had something to tell me. He knew I knew. He took a breath through his nose, the way he always did before he said something he had been carrying.
He said, "Dad called."
I felt my chest fold inward.
I said, "When."
He said, "Last night."
I said, "What did he say."
He said, "He asked about the forge. He asked about business. He asked about Alma."
I said, "Did he — by name."
Gunner said, "By name. How is Alma. He used her name. He has, I want you to know, said her name now twice in his life, and both times to me, but he is using it."
I said, "Did you tell him."
He said, "I told him she was good. I told him you were good. I told him you'd built the bike I'd been hearing about for a year and that you were riding it to the cookout today. I did not editorialize. I let him ask his own questions."
I said, "Did he ask any."
Gunner said, "He asked if you were happy."
I had been waiting for it. I had not known I was waiting for it.
Every man waits, I think, in some way, for his father to ask if he is happy.
Some men wait their whole lives and never get it.
I had spent eight years in the position of a man who had assumed I would be one of those, and I had made my peace with it the way you make peace with a long winter — by accepting it, by not letting it sour you, by building yourself a fire and getting on with the work.
I said, "What did you say."
Gunner said, "I said, call him yourself. I said, he wants to hear it from you, not from me."
I said, "Gun."
He said, "I'm not doing your work for you, Beck.
He's trying. He has been trying for about a year and you didn't see it because you weren't looking.
He won't say it. He won't say it. He will, for the rest of his life, never say I was wrong, I am sorry, I have missed you.
But he is asking through me. He is asking am I allowed to ask.
And the answer to that is yes, if you decide it is yes. "
I looked across the compound. Alma was with Sadie.
They were laughing. Diesel had said something Alma had not been expecting, and she had laughed, fully, the laugh I had only heard for the first time on a Saturday morning in the gravel behind a dumpster, and I felt my chest unfold and re-fold around the laugh, accommodating it.
I said, "I'll call him."
Gunner said, "Today?"
I said, "Tomorrow. I want to be — I want it to be a private call. Not one I make from a cookout. I'll call him tomorrow."
He said, "Good."
He clapped me on the shoulder. He did it the way he had done in the recruiter's parking lot eight years before, when I had been eighteen and unsure and had put the pen down, and he had called me on day two and said you good and I had said I think so and he had said then I'm good.
I had carried that small phone call my whole life.
I was, now, going to make one to my father, and I did not yet know how it would go, but I was going to make it.
Gunner said, "He asked one more thing."
I said, "What."
He said, "He asked if you'd send him a photograph of the bike."
I closed my eyes for a second.
He said, "I'll send him the one you sent me last week."
I said, "Thanks, Gunner."
He said, "It's a good bike, Beck. You should be proud."
I said, "I am."