Chapter 8
Callum
Tuesday morning I wake up at five-fifteen because I cannot sleep any later, and I lie in Noor's bed in the dark for forty minutes listening to her breathe, and I think about the day in front of me.
I think about it the way I imagine a man thinks about the morning of his wedding, except no one is getting married today, and the only ceremony on the schedule is a meeting in a room I have been in eighty-six times, and the only thing that is going to happen is a vote, and the vote is — I want to be clear about this — a vote that has been a long time coming and which I have spent two years trying to earn, and which I am no longer certain I am going to get.
I am not certain because I am Callum Brennan, and Callum Brennan does not get certain about a thing until the thing has happened.
I have had certainties pulled out from under me before.
I had a father who was certain to come home from work and didn't. I had a tuxedo that was certain to fit.
I had a Sportster that was certain to start every morning until the morning it didn't.
I do not say any of this to Noor. Noor is asleep.
Noor will not be awake for another forty minutes, because Noor is, post-rally, in the deepest sleep of her professional life, and I am not going to disturb it.
I get out of bed. I walk to her kitchen.
I make her tea — green, with the small amount of honey I have learned she pretends she does not take but does — and I leave it on the counter beside a note that says for the queen of the rally, love jinx.
The jinx is in lowercase on purpose. I am demoting the road name.
The road name has had a long run. The road name is, by my schedule, retiring next week.
I drive to the compound at six. I am on prospect duty until five o'clock, when church starts, and I have a list of things to do that is, I have realized recently, my absolute favorite list of things to do.
I sweep the floors. I empty the trash. I refill the coffee.
I check the fluid levels on the trucks. I count inventory in the supply closet.
I do all of this with the kind of cheerful diligence that has, for two years, been mistaken for prospect-eagerness, and which is — I will tell you the truth — just how I prefer to spend a morning.
Manual tasks. Lists with checkboxes. The orderly satisfaction of a clean room.
The brothers come in throughout the morning.
Each of them stops by at some point. Each of them says something, in their own way.
Mateo brings me a coffee at nine and says, "Big day, Brennan.
" Razor walks past me in the supply closet at ten-thirty and just claps me on the shoulder and walks on.
Havoc finds me at noon at the truck-fluid checks and squats down next to me and says, very quietly, "I voted yes a year ago, kid.
Just so you know going in." I tell him to be quiet.
I tell him he is not allowed to tell me how he voted.
He tells me I am a prospect for one more day, and I cannot tell him what to do, and he is right, and I let him have it, and I appreciate it more than I can say.
At noon, Diesel comes out of his office. He stops at the door of the kitchen, where I am rinsing out a mop bucket, and he looks at me for a long moment, and he says, "Brennan."
"Pres."
"You all right?"
"Yes, sir."
"You eat lunch?"
"Working on it."
"Get yourself something. The next few hours are going to be long."
"Yes, sir."
"And Brennan."
"Yes, sir."
"Whatever happens at five, I want you to know that this club has been better for having you in it the last two years. That is true regardless of how the vote goes."
I have to look down at the mop bucket for a second.
I have to take a moment with the mop bucket.
I am twenty-four years old and I am being told a thing I have wanted to be told for a long time, and I am being told it by a man whose approval I would have walked across glass for, and the mop bucket is — for the moment — the only thing in the room that is okay to look at.
"Yes, sir," I manage. "Thank you, sir."
He nods. He goes back to his office.
I eat lunch. I sit at the bar in the main room with a sandwich Sienna brought over earlier — she does this on important days; she does not need to be asked — and I eat slowly, and I watch the light come in through the high windows of the compound, and I think about Sean Brennan, my father, and I think about whether he would be proud of me, and I decide that the question is unanswerable and not worth answering, because Sean Brennan is dead, and the man who has to be proud of me today is me.
I am proud of me today.
That, I think, is enough.
Five o'clock arrives. The brothers file into church.
I am the only prospect in the room — the others are out front, manning the door, doing their own duty — and I take my position at the back of the long table, standing, the way a prospect stands during a vote.
Diesel is at the head. Razor is at his right.
The officers are flanking. The patched members fill the chairs around the table, and the rest stand along the walls, and the room is full, and the door closes, and the room goes quiet.
Diesel does not waste time. Diesel never wastes time.
"Brennan," he says. "Step forward."
I step forward. I stop at the foot of the table. I put my hands behind my back, the way I have been taught to stand at attention. My hands are shaking. I keep my face neutral, but my hands are shaking, and I am glad they are behind my back, and I am glad nobody can see them.
"Callum 'Jinx' Brennan," Diesel says. "Two years as a prospect.
You have, in that time, broken my Shovelhead, set off the silent alarm, started a fire in the kitchen, fallen off a bar stool with sufficient force to shatter the bar stool, the table, and the jukebox, and triggered a sprinkler system in a parking lot that, to my knowledge, did not contain a sprinkler system. "
The room laughs. It is a warm laugh. It is not, as the laughs sometimes have been, at me. It is, I think, with me. I let myself smile, just barely. The smile costs me nothing.
"You have also," Diesel continues, "reported to duty earlier than any prospect in club memory, departed later than any prospect in club memory, read every page of the club's official archive going back to 1987, fixed Havoc's wife's bike on your own time, driven my grandmother to dialysis on Wednesdays for fourteen straight months, walked into a rival clubhouse to support a contractor who needed backup and represented this club with the dignity it deserved, and, at four-fifteen p.m. last Saturday, fixed a dead generator in front of three thousand people with a clamp and a roll of duct tape and saved a rally that was, by my count, four minutes from becoming a riot. "
The room is still.
"The disasters are part of the package," Diesel says. "So is the heart. And so is the work."
He looks down the table. He looks at every man in the room.
"I move to vote on Callum Brennan's full membership in Iron Vow MC. All in favor."
The hands go up.
I do not — I will tell you the truth — I do not look.
I keep my eyes on the wall behind Diesel's head, because I cannot bear to look around the room and count the hands, because if even one hand is down I will see it and I will know, and I do not want to know yet, and I want this last second of not knowing.
I hear Razor say, from somewhere on my left, "Unanimous."
I look down. I look at the floor. I close my eyes for one full second.
Diesel says, "Brennan. Step up."
I step up. I cannot feel my legs. I walk to the head of the table.
Diesel reaches into the inside pocket of his cut, and he pulls out a folded patch — the full Iron Vow MC center patch, the bottom rocker, the territory rocker — and he places them on the table in front of me, and he says, "Welcome home, son. "
I touch the patches.
They are real. They are heavier than I expected, which I think is true of every important thing I have ever held.
I look at Diesel. I cannot speak. I am twenty-four years old and I have lost a father and crossed a country and broken several pieces of furniture, and I have been, by every reasonable measure, a disaster, and I have done it anyway, and I have done it long enough that the brothers have decided I belong to them, and I am, for one of the very few times in my life, completely without words.
Diesel sees it. Diesel knows.
"Brennan."
"Yes, sir."
"Don't cry yet. We have to do the ceremony first. Save it for after."
"Yes, sir."
The room laughs. I laugh — wetly, because I am at the line and there is no pretending I am not — and Diesel claps me once on the shoulder, hard, the way an old man claps a son, and the meeting moves on, and the patch is mine, and the road name is, technically, retired, and I am — at five-eleven on a Tuesday afternoon in early October — Callum Brennan, full member, Iron Vow MC.
The party is in the main room.
The party is loud and immediate. Sienna has shown up with food.
Razor's wife has shown up with cake. The kegs, which were rolled in earlier in the afternoon for exactly this purpose, are tapped.
The jukebox — replaced six months ago after the bar stool incident, in a colossal piece of irony I will be reckoning with all night — is on.
The brothers come up to me one by one and embrace me, and several of them kiss the side of my head — Mateo, Razor, Havoc — and one of them, an older member named Thatcher who once told me to come back when I had a bike, takes my hand and holds it for a long moment and says, "Knew you'd get there, kid," and I have to step away for a second to gather myself.
I am stepping away when the door opens.
Noor walks in.
She is wearing jeans and a cream-colored T-shirt and, over the T-shirt, the women's leather jacket from Brigid that I gave her for the Stallions trip and which she has, since the rally, been wearing as her own.
She has the small gold horseshoe at her throat.
Her hair is down. She is not carrying a tablet.
I have not, to my knowledge, seen her without a tablet in eleven weeks.
The room registers her. Every member in the main hall turns and looks.
There is a pause, the kind of pause that happens when an outsider walks into a room they have not been in before, and then the pause breaks because Diesel — Diesel, of all people — turns and lifts his beer and says, very loudly, "Ms. Abbasi!
Welcome to the compound!" and the room erupts in cheers, half of them at me and half of them at her, and the welcome is total, and she is, in this moment, no longer a contractor.
She crosses the room. The brothers part for her. She walks straight to me. Her eyes are bright.
"Congratulations, full patch."
"You came."
"I planned this party in my head three weeks ago. The execution is a little rough."
I laugh. I pull her in. She comes in. I hold her in the middle of the compound floor with the brothers cheering and the jukebox playing and the kitchen smells of Sienna's cooking in the air, and I press my forehead to hers, and I close my eyes, and I just — let myself stand inside it for a moment.
The brothers stop cheering eventually. The room moves on to other conversations.
Nobody is looking at us, because the brothers, for all the things they will tell stories about, know when to let a man have a private moment in a public room.
"Noor."
"Yes."
"I want to tell you something."
"If it involves a spreadsheet, I'm in."
"Noor."
"Yes."
"I love you. No rules. No contract. No end date."
She looks up at me. Her eyes are wet. She does not let it show in her face — she would not, not in a room of bikers, not on a day like today — but the wet is there in her eyes, and the wet is for me, and I have it.
"I love you too," she says. "And I'm keeping the spreadsheet. It's an artifact."
I kiss her.
I kiss her in the middle of the main hall of the Iron Vow compound, on the day I patched in, with my brothers at my back, and the jukebox plays a song I will not remember the name of, and the universe — for once, for one time, in the entire twenty-four years of my life so far — does not break a single thing.
The party goes long. The party goes until two in the morning.
I drink more than the prospects can drink — the prospects, of course, can only drink water at the parties; prospect rules, though tonight is technically my last night under them — and at one point Razor takes me out back of the compound to a quiet corner of the gravel lot and hands me a flask and says, "From your father.
He never met you, but he made me. And I'm passing it forward," and I drink from the flask, and I do not cry, because a man does not cry on the day he patches in, except behind the compound, where nobody can see, and only briefly.
I find Noor at midnight on the front porch.
She has been talking to Sienna — they have, I have learned over the last week, become friends quickly, the way two competent women in adjacent industries do — and she is sitting on the porch step with a paper cup in her hand and her jacket pulled around her against the late-October chill, and she scoots over for me to sit down beside her, and I sit, and she leans against my shoulder, and we look out at the lot full of bikes.
"Callum."
"Yes."
"Thank you for letting me be here."
"Thank you for being here."
"I was scared they wouldn't let me in."
"You were scared?"
"I was very scared. I planned a contingency. I had a backup outfit in the car in case the jacket was wrong. I had a fallback excuse to leave at six-thirty if it was clear they didn't want me. I have never been to a club's compound as a not-vendor. I did not know how to be."
"You did it perfectly."
"I love you."
"I love you."
"This is going to be a problem, you know. The spreadsheet. I'm going to need to add about fourteen new tabs."
"I look forward to all fourteen."
She smiles into my shoulder. We sit on the porch and we look at the bikes and the cold air comes in off the field, and a man named Callum Brennan and a woman named Noor Abbasi sit with their shoulders touching on the front step of a clubhouse on a Tuesday night in early October, and the universe, which has been clearing the path for so long, finally — finally — sets the path down at our feet, and there is nothing in the way, and there is nothing left to break, and there is, for both of us, the rest of it.
The rest of it.