Chapter 20 #2
"Six years ago a man rode up to my gate with a fake name and asked for work." Amara's voice carries clear across the yard. "A few weeks ago I found out the name was fake and I found out why, and I found out he'd been sitting on a threat to this club for six years without saying a word."
Nobody moves.
"I put him in front of that table and let every officer I've got take a piece out of him.
He didn't defend himself once." She turns the box in her hands.
"Then he told us what his silence actually cost, in front of fourteen people, and he cried in front of men he has to look at every day for the rest of his life, and he never once asked a single one of us to feel sorry for him. "
I've got both hands over my mouth.
"He informed on a white power group at twenty-five years old to keep his mother breathing.
Then he spent ten years paying for it by himself, with nobody at his back and no name to call his own.
" She looks around the yard, face by face.
"That's a man who understood what this life costs before he ever laid eyes on our patch. "
Finn isn't moving. He isn't moving at all.
"Then a woman walked up to that gate." Amara tips her chin toward me and I nearly come out of my skin.
"And this man had every chance to protect himself.
Lie to her. Lie to us. Keep his head down and ride it out.
He told the truth at the exact moment the truth cost him everything, and then he stood at my table and told a room full of armed men that she was the love of his life and he had no right to her. "
Behind me, somebody makes a sound.
"A prospect who won't defend himself but will stand up for a woman with no standing and the women she left behind in a hole isn’t a man I have to worry about." She holds the box out. "You've earned it three times over. Take your damn colors."
He takes the box.
He gets the lid off with both hands, and I watch a thirty-five-year-old man's shoulders start going.
He lifts out a leather cut with a full patch on it and a bottom rocker that reads MEXICO.
The yard comes apart.
They're on him before he can get it on.
Boulder's got him around the neck with the crutch clattering into the gravel.
Python's shouting in his ear.
Zorro picks him clean up off the ground and sets him back down.
And Doom, who I have heard say maybe four words in eight weeks, puts one hand on the back of his head and says something to him nobody else can hear, and Finn shuts his eyes and nods.
Ruby's crying. Marie's sobbing outright into Kelsey's shoulder.
I stand in the middle of it with my hands over my face, watching them put a cut on the back of the man who let a muddy dog into his mother's kitchen for me twenty-eight years ago.
Then Amara says my name. "Camila."
The yard turns around.
She's got a second box.
I look at it, and at her, and my feet don't work.
"Get over here." Amara doesn't move an inch. "I'm not carrying it to you."
I go.
It's smaller than his. She sets it in my hands and it weighs almost nothing, and I stand there with forty people watching me and I can't make my fingers work on the lid.
"Open it," Ruby calls.
I get it open.
Leather. Black, cut small, a woman's shape, and I lift it out with both hands and I don't understand what I'm holding until Kelsey says, "Turn it over, honey."
I turn it over.
On the back, in white:
PROPERTY OF ROOSTER
The yard is making noise and none of it reaches me.
Because I have been property.
I've been a line item with a room number and a duration and a dollar figure beside it.
I've been a thing men shared on a schedule the way you'd share a boat.
I've been inventory that got replaced inside a season, and a shape somebody built a plan around, and a body in a room, and the word for all of it is stitched across the back of the jacket in my two hands.
My throat closes. My eyes go hot and full.
And I keep standing there holding it, because nobody's put it on me.
Nobody bolted a door and told me what I was.
Somebody sewed this and put it in a box and set it in my hands, and it's not going anywhere near my back unless I carry it there myself.
Nine years, and not one person asked.
"Somebody should make it official," Python says loudly, from somewhere behind me. "That's all I'm saying."
"Python." Amara doesn't turn around.
"I'm saying it's a hell of a thing, handing a woman a cut before you've asked her—"
"Would you shut up," Ruby says.
"I'm only saying—"
"Everybody shut up." Amara doesn't raise her voice, and forty people go silent.
Finn takes the cut out of my hands.
He's got his own colors on and there's still a smear of somebody's blood dried along his jaw from Arizona.
He holds my cut folded over one arm and looks at me like the two of us are the only people standing in that yard.
"I want to say something first."
"Okay."
"I didn't order this." He says it fast, low, only for me. "Ruby did. Ruby, Kelsey, and Lashes, weeks ago. I found out an hour before you got in that truck to Arizona and I've been sick about it ever since."
"Why?"
"Because of what that word did to you." His voice drags rough.
"Because of what you were to those men and what they wrote you down as.
It isn't the same and I know it isn't the same, but you'd have to hear it every time somebody read it off your back, and it's not my call whether you can stand hearing it. "
My eyes spill over and I let them.
"So I'm not assuming." He shifts his grip on the leather. "I'm not deciding this one for you. I'm asking you in front of everybody, and you can tell me no in front of everybody, and tomorrow we'll eat breakfast and nobody will ever bring it up again."
He holds the cut out on both hands.
"Camila Bacani." His voice cracks straight down the middle. "Will you be my ol' lady?"
I look at the black leather sitting on his palms.
And I think about a hallway eleven feet under the ground.
I think about a woman who used to lie on a concrete floor and hear a door open and count the footsteps coming.
Who had nothing left to take and made that her armor.
Who knelt in front of a fifteen-year-old and said I'm sorry it took me this long.
She'd have laughed at this. She'd have said the word on that jacket is the same word they used, and it doesn't matter one bit whose hands are holding it out.
But she isn't standing in this yard.
I am.
She never got to decide one single thing about her own body for years.
I've decided every single thing about mine since the night I climbed out of that hole.
Walking up to this gate. Telling this club what they owed and what they didn't. A green dress. A cold bench. A door I chose not to lock.
And this.
"Yes," I say.
The yard goes up.
Finn's hands are shaking so badly he can't get the cut open, and Ruby has to reach in and hold one side, and between the two of them they get it up behind me and I put my arms into the sleeves of a jacket with that word on the back.
It fits.
Kelsey guessed my size off the green dress.
His hands come down on my shoulders from behind and stay there, and I stand in the middle of a yard in Chihuahua with a club roaring around me and eleven women in the doorway of the main room watching.
Lucia's got both hands over her mouth.
Yoli's on the porch in a chair Sakura carried out for her.
I came to this place months ago with a notebook in my shirt and one thing I wanted, and it was for a man to look me in the face and tell me why he left.
I got that in a sunroom in about four minutes.
Everything since has been things I never asked for and never once thought I'd get to keep, and I've spent every week of it braced for somebody to take them back, because that's what nine years teaches you.
Everything's on loan. The loan gets called.
I stand there in a borrowed jacket that isn't borrowed and I wait for the bracing to start.
It doesn't come.
There's a fire pit, too much meat, and a woman named Ruby already fighting the survivors over who does the dishes.
A fifteen-year-old on a porch with a bullet hole in her and a whole life out in front of her.
A man from across the street with his hands on my shoulders.
Finn puts his mouth close to my ear. "You okay?"
I turn around in the middle of my club, in my cut, in the country I've decided to live in, and I put both hands flat on his chest the way I've done since a cold sunroom in the dark.
"I'm home." I say.