CHAPTER 10
Brotherhood
°°°
The invitation, when it came, was so casual it barely registered as one.
Tucker mentioned, in the middle of a sentence about something else entirely, that the club did a cookout most Sundays when the weather held, and that Eli might get a kick out of seeing the bikes up close if Mara ever wanted to bring him by.
She wanted to. She also spent most of the drive over rehearsing excuses to leave early, in case the whole thing turned out to be exactly the kind of place her rule had been built to keep her and Eli away from.
It wasn't. The clubhouse lot smelled like charcoal and cut grass, somebody's radio playing something with too much bass for the folding table it sat on, a dozen conversations running at once under a pole barn that had clearly hosted a hundred Sundays exactly like this one.
Eli found the row of parked motorcycles before he found any actual people, and stood in front of them with the reverent stillness of a kid in a museum.
“That one's mine.” Cole appeared at his shoulder, nodding at the black one at the end of the row, chrome catching the afternoon sun. “Want to sit on it?”
Eli's whole body said yes before his mouth caught up. Cole lifted him onto the seat with the same easy competence he brought to everything physical, one hand level at Eli's back, and let him sit there working the handlebars back and forth and asking questions faster than anyone could answer them.
“He's going to want one of these by the time he's twelve,” said a woman's voice at Mara's elbow, warm and amused. “Fair warning.”
Renata was older than Mara by maybe fifteen years, silver threaded generously through dark hair she wore in a braid over one shoulder, and she had the kind of easy authority that came from decades of feeding people who showed up hungry and scared and calling it Sunday lunch instead of triage.
“Boone's wife. You're the nurse everybody's been talking about.”
“Apparently.”
“Don't look so worried. Around here, everybody talks about everybody.
It's not always as ominous as it sounds.” Renata pressed a paper plate into her hands before she could protest. “Eat something. You look like you run on caffeine and not much else, which, around this club, makes you one of us already.”
It was, Mara would think later, the easiest hour she'd spent with strangers in longer than she could remember.
Renata talked with the patient confidence of a woman who'd never once needed anyone's approval to take up space, told stories about members Mara had never met with the casual affection of someone who'd watched most of them grow up, and made room for Mara at the table without making a production of making room, which was its own kind of welcome.
“That one” — Renata nodded toward a heavyset man arguing good-naturedly with Tucker over whose turn it was at the grill — “that's Whistler.
Been with the club longer than Boone has, if you ask him, though Boone tells it different.
Watch, he'll try to feed you before you've even said hello. It's a whole personality with him.”
Sure enough, Whistler abandoned the grill argument the second he clocked a new face, ambled over with a paper plate already piled higher than any reasonable serving size, and set it in front of Mara without asking.
“You're too skinny for a cookout. Eat. Also I hear you're the one who sat with the Rivera girl. Good on you.”
“I just did my job.”
“Sure. Lot of people do their job and it doesn't end with a scared kid actually getting helped instead of shuffled along.” Whistler shrugged, like the compliment cost him nothing and he wasn't especially attached to whether she accepted it, and wandered back toward the grill argument, already mid-sentence with Tucker again before he'd fully turned around.
Eli, meanwhile, had graduated from sitting on Cole's bike to a full inspection of the clubhouse garage, trailing behind Tucker with a running commentary of questions about every tool on the wall, and came back at one point with grease on both hands and an expression of pure, uncomplicated joy that Mara hadn't seen on him in longer than she wanted to admit.
“Tucker showed me how an engine works. Sort of. He said I could come back and he'd show me more.”
“Did he.”
“He said I have to wash my hands first though, twice, because motor oil doesn't come out of anything.”
She let him talk through the whole tour twice, half-listening and half-watching the easy way this whole rough-edged world had folded him in without making a project out of it, and thought, not for the first time that afternoon, that she hadn't expected any of this to feel this much like exactly what she'd been missing without knowing she was missing it.
Boone found her by the drinks cooler an hour later, a big, quiet man with the kind of stillness that made a room organize itself around him without anyone quite deciding to.
He didn't waste time on small talk. “You're good for him.
I've watched that man carry every hard thing he owns without setting a single piece of it down in front of anybody.
A month or so with you and your boy, and he's setting things down I didn't think he had left in him.”
“I didn't do anything. He just started showing up.”
“That's not nothing, around here.” Boone studied her for a beat, not unkindly, more like a man taking an inventory he intended to remember.
“Just know that whatever's happening between you two, it's not happening in a vacuum.
Everything he does gets noticed. Everything you two become gets noticed.
I'd rather you know that now than get surprised by it later.”
She didn't fully understand what he meant by that, not yet, but she tucked it away carefully all the same, with the growing suspicion that she was going to need it sooner than she wanted to.
“Cole doesn't usually bring people around,” Renata said at one point, not quite looking up from the potato salad she was portioning out with military precision.
“In eight years I don't think I've seen him let anybody close enough to matter. You and that boy are the exception, and around here, we notice exceptions.”
“What happened to him? Before the club, I mean.”
Renata's hands stilled for just a second, a small hitch that told Mara she'd stepped somewhere she probably wasn't supposed to yet.
“That's his to tell, honey, not mine. All I'll say is whatever it was, it left a mark deep enough that most people who love him have learned not to go digging for it uninvited.
He'll tell you himself, when he's ready. If he's ready.”
“Somebody mentioned a brother, once. In passing.”
“Then somebody said more than they should have.” Renata's voice stayed kind, but the door on the subject closed all the same, gently and completely. “Give him time, Mara. He's worth it. But it's got to come from him.”
Mara let it go, because pushing felt like exactly the wrong currency to spend on a first real afternoon with these people, but the question sat with her the rest of the day, low and persistent, and by the time the cookout wound down into the lazy, sated quiet of a Sunday that had done exactly what a Sunday was supposed to do, she'd decided she was going to ask him herself, directly, the next chance she got.
The chance didn't come that day. She looked for him near sunset, ready to catch him somewhere quiet before she and Eli headed home, and found only Tucker, packing up folding chairs with the brisk efficiency of a man closing down a job site.
“He get called out?”
“About an hour ago. Didn't say much, just that it was Curtis Street business.” Tucker's face gave away more than his words did — a flicker of something careful, quickly smoothed over. “He'll turn up. He always does.”
She drove home with Eli asleep in the back seat and the question still unanswered, and told herself, without much conviction, that there'd be another Sunday.