Chapter 10 #2
I think about how to answer. Take my time. The room is quiet around me.
All of them looking at me, waiting.
"Because if we pull her, this man wins. If we pull her from Abilene, we tell him he was right.
We tell him she's afraid of him. We tell him he gets to choose what she does with her life.
And the woman in that house is not built that way.
She would ride Friday with a fractured rib if her father told her to scratch.
So, my answer is she rides. With me at the rail.
With another patched member surveying everything.
With a perimeter on her motel room, she should be able to ride. "
Phantom looks at me a long time. "And if something happens at Abilene?"
"Then I handle it, Prez. The way you taught me."
He’s quiet for a long time.
"All right," Phantom says. "She rides."
He looks around the table. "Spur and Rogue on the road with her. Rogue, you're running the digital end—anything that hits her phone, you see it before she does. Banshee runs the property while we're gone. We leave Thursday night. Back Saturday before sundown."
Rogue nods once.
"Anything else?"
Nothing else.
Phantom dismisses church. Brothers stand up.
Some go back to their farm duties, while some go for coffee.
Phantom waits until the room has cleared. Then he tilts his head toward the back hall. "Spur, office."
I follow him.
Phantom's office is small. Smaller than the office in the main house.
A desk he built himself out of cypress from the back pasture.
Two leather chairs older than I am.
A window that looks out at the back of the clubhouse and the stand of oak that separates the clubhouse from the main barn.
A bottle of bourbon on the corner of the desk that he hasn't drunk from in years, but keeps because brothers come in here with bad news sometimes and a man with bad news drinks better than a man without one.
Phantom pours two fingers in a glass and slides it across the desk to me. "Sit down, Spur."
I sit. Phantom sits across from me. He doesn't pour himself a glass yet.
"You know what scares me, Spur?"
"Tell me."
"It's not you. Not the relationship. I should have seen it years ago.
What scares me is that I'm asking my Road Captain to protect my daughter from a man who wants to hurt her, and now my Road Captain is also a man with skin in the game.
And a man with skin in the game makes different decisions than a man doing a job. Do you understand what I mean?"
I think before I say anything back to him. Take my time.
The afternoon light through the window catches the side of his face and he looks older than he did this morning—like a man who has been a father for over thirty years and just realized one of his daughters is past needing him to fight her battles.
"Yeah," I tell him. "I do."
"I need to know which one you are when it matters."
"I'll be both, Prez. I'll do my job for the club because that's who I am. And I'll do whatever it takes for Dakota because that's who she made me. If those two ever pull in opposite directions, I'll make a call, and I'll live with it."
He looks at me a long time.
Pours himself a finger of bourbon. The first time he's drunk in front of me in five years.
He raises the glass. "To new beginnings."
"To new beginnings, Prez."
We drink.
"Spur."
"Yes, Prez?"
"If you hurt her, you know what I'll do."
"I know."
He sets the glass down. "Get out of my office. Go find your woman."
* * *
Marlena is in the kitchen of the main house when I come in.
Cal is asleep on a quilt on the living room floor with a pacifier on his cheek and one fist closed around a stuffed cow.
Dakota is on the back porch—Marlena tilts her head that way without speaking, then she stops me. "Spur."
"Ma'am?"
"She loves you."
"I know."
"She loves you the way Phantom loves me. Don't waste it."
"No, ma'am."
She turns back to the sink, and I walk through to the back porch.
Dakota is on the top step with her elbows on her knees and her hair drying in a long, loose braid down her back.
Her own jeans now. Her own boots. A tank top of hers I haven't seen.
She doesn't turn around when the screen door opens.
"Did he kill you?" she says.
I keep my voice flat so she doesn’t sense the sarcasm in it. "Close enough."
"What’s that supposed to mean?"
"He poured me a drink instead."
She turns to look at me. "You drank with him."
"I did."
"What did he say?"
"What I needed to hear."
"Spur."
I sit down on the step beside her. Not touching her yet. Letting her have the next move because Dakota always knows which move comes next when I stop guessing.
She leans into my shoulder, and I put my arm around her.
She closes her eyes for a second.
"What about Friday? Are we good to go to Abilene?"
"Yeah, you’re cleared to ride."
"He let me?"
"I told him pulling you tells the man with the camera that he won. He agreed."
"Good."
We sit on her father's back porch in the afternoon sun, watch the mustang at the round pen rail in the distance, and don't talk for a while.
The cicadas. The far sound of a brother's bike starting up at the clubhouse. Cal making a small noise inside the house that Marlena answers without saying a word.
"Dakota?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm not going to lose you."
"I know."
"I want you to hear me say it."
"I hear you, Spur."
"He's going to come at us between now and Friday. I want you to know the man you went to bed with last night is going to put him in the dirt before he gets near you."
She looks at me. "You scared, Spur?"
I think about lying to her. Think about it for a full second. "Yeah."
"Of him?"
"Of losing you. Not of him."
She closes her eyes again and leans into me harder. "Stay with me tonight," she says.
"Wasn't planning on leaving."
The afternoon light on the back porch goes orange the way it does in the spring, and I sit there with her with my arm around her shoulders, my hand on her arm, and her head against my collarbone.
Her hair smells like the shampoo from my cabin.
Her body is warm against my side.
It’s the first moment of peace I’ve had in quite a while.
But for the first ten minutes of the rest of my life, I sit on a porch with a woman whose head is on my shoulder, and I let myself have it.