13. Levi
LEVI
Somewhere between Tucker saying he’s thinking about pulling the baffles and Tucker saying whatever came after that, Josie’s tucked up under my arm saying something about family, and I’m nodding along with about forty percent of my brain.
The other sixty percent’s a mess, if I’m being honest about the arithmetic.
Some of it’s on the beer in my hand—number four?
four and a half?—and the project of pacing that’s been losing ground all night.
Some of it’s on not looking at the back wall, which is a full-time job, you wouldn’t think not looking at something takes effort but it’s like holding a magnet off a fridge.
And some of it, the dumbest slice, is on later—the zipper, the list, the trouble dress currently pressed up all warm against my ribs—because I’m four beers deep at my own party with my girl under my arm and my brain’s got the impulse control of a golden retriever.
“What if we started our own?”
It gets to me late. Like sound crossing a lake. Started our own—I look down at her and my brain, swear to God, actually goes to work on it: started our own what?
“Started our own what?”
“Our own charter.” She’s looking up at me with her whole face. Cheeks pink. Eyes huge and green and fixed on mine like—like something. Like a lot. “Only takes two people to start one, you know. We’d already have our two.”
Charter.
And for one second, something in me almost gets there.
Almost. Her face is doing that—that lit-up, terrified, offering face, the face from the mirror when she doesn’t know I’m in the doorway—and her hand’s flat on my chest right over the heartbeat, and the word two just sits there, and some slow gear in the back of my head starts to turn.
Two of who, Levi. Look at her hand. Look at her face. Count again?—
—and then four and a half beers and Tucker’s elbow on my shoulder get there first, and what comes out of me is a laugh. Big, loose, stupid. The laugh of a man picturing himself and his old lady in a rival MC, two-member club, meetings at the kitchen table.
“Babe, we can’t start our own club. Wyatt would take my patch back himself.”
Tucker cracks up next to me. “Ford Valley MC. Death before dishwashing.” And then he’s off, running with it, because Tucker with a bit is a dog with a sock: “Two-man charter. Who’s president?
She’s president. You’re the whole rest of the org chart.
Church every Sunday at the kitchen table, attendance mandatory?—“
“Prospects gotta do the dishes,” I say, because I’m an idiot, because the bit’s rolling and I’m four deep and rolling with it, grinning down at Josie like she’s in on it?—
—and she’s saying something. Under the noise, under Tucker’s cackling. Her mouth’s moving and I catch maybe half of it—starts with two of us or we’ve got our two, something—and I lean in with my ear going what, babe?—
And right on top of it—right exactly on top of it, the timing so bad you’d think the night planned it—half the room starts hollering my name. Reyes, up front by the speakers with a bottle raised: “Levi! Get up here, we’re doing shots for the man of the hour, move your ass!”
Hands are on me. That’s how it goes at these things, you don’t walk to the front of the room, you get passed there, Tucker shoving, somebody’s cousin grabbing my shoulder, everybody laughing—and I’m three steps gone with my beer still in my hand before any part of me catches up to the transaction that just happened.
Before it registers that she went still under my arm right before the hands came.
That she said something with her whole chest and I gave her a punchline back.
I get one look over my shoulder, between heads, through the crowd.
She’s standing where I left her. Hasn’t moved.
Hand sort of curled in the air at chest height, holding nothing.
And her shoulders are doing something—set wrong, braced wrong, wrong in some way I don’t have a name for and no time to get one—and some sober minority stockholder way in the back of my head stands up and says go back.
Says that mattered, whatever that was. Says she practiced that, you dumb son of a bitch, did you see her face, she practiced it?—
“SHOTS!” Reyes hooks my neck and there’s a glass in my hand and the crowd closes up the space between us like water—and here’s the truth about a club party when you’re the man of the hour: you don’t steer.
You get handed around like a trophy, turned by shoulders, aimed at cameras, poured into.
I’ve loved it my whole life, being the thing this family passes around.
It’s the warmest place on earth, the middle of this crowd.
Tonight it’s a current with my whole life on the far bank, and I let it carry me anyway, because I’m four beers deep and slow, and because thirty-one years of instinct say family first, the girl keeps?—
She keeps. That’s the actual sentence in my head, God help me, moving away from her through my own party. Jo keeps.
The tequila’s the cheap stuff, ceremonial-grade, and it goes down like a lit match, and everybody roars, and somebody immediately hands me another because apparently the man of the hour drinks doubles, and Wyatt’s arm lands across my shoulders like a roof beam and he’s telling the Bozeman brother-in-law the winter run story—again, second time tonight, it gets longer every telling, the drift’s up to six feet now and I’m carrying the bike on my back by the end of it—and I’m laughing on cue at my own frostbite, and Casey’s lining up limes with production-line efficiency and telling everybody within earshot that if we’re doing this we’re doing it right, and Reyes is conducting the whole thing like a man who’s waited all year for jurisdiction over something, and it’s a good party.
It’s a great party. Any other night of my life I’d be having the time of my life.
And the whole time I’m up on my toes over the crowd trying to find a green dress.
Can’t see her. Too many heads. The stockholder in the back won’t sit down—practiced it, practiced it—and I tell him after this story.
Two minutes. I’ll find her, pull her out to the cool air by the trucks, make her run the family thing by me again with a functioning percentage of my brain, and whatever I stepped on back there, I’ll fix it.
She’ll do the thing where she pretends she’s mad longer than she’s actually mad, and I’ll do the thing where I let her, and by midnight it’ll be a bit we do. Us versus the party. Later.
I got such a supply of later. Whole warehouse of it.
“Speech!” somebody yells, and Reyes points at me like a game show host, and the room picks it up—speech, speech—and I wave it off, both hands, no chance, I’m saving whatever I’ve got for whenever Wyatt does the real toast. “The man won’t speech!
” Reyes announces, delighted, like it’s a character flaw he’s been documenting for years.
“Three years with that woman and he won’t speech!
This is what I’m telling you about him!” And the room laughs, and Tucker yells something about how I proposed to my truck with more ceremony, which isn’t even based on anything real, and I stand there grinning and taking my beating like the guest of honor does.
And the whole time, under it, the stockholder’s still up. Practiced it. Her face. The shoulders.
Second shot’s in my hand. And between two heads, for half a second, I catch a flash of green over by the drink table—there she is, fine, see, getting a drink, talking to somebody, party’s got her—and the crowd shifts and closes before I can see who.