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Though tidy was a bit of a stretch with two kids, especially Jack who loved to explore and trek mud through the house after aforementioned exploring.
I settled for clean in the early days, accepting that tidy was a pipe dream. Now that they were a little older and slightly more well behaved—freakishly more since their father died—they actually listened when I told them not to draw on walls with lipstick or trek mud in from the backyard.
Routines and keeping busy were essential for me to stay sane. To prevent a repeat of the twenty-four hours I’d spent at a shitty motel drinking vodka, being a bad mother.
As expected, neither Amy or Brock had mentioned the fact that I’d dropped my kids off and disappeared for a day, coming back sunburned and likely looking like hell. Of course they hadn’t. That’s what happened with true friends. They let you have your complete break from reality, didn’t hold it against you, didn’t ask questions and didn’t look at you any different after.
I felt different now. Not better, but different. Did people ever really feel better after a complete breakdown? After hitting bottom? No. But there had been a release of pressure. I’d let go of something. The film covering my vision that had allowed me to pretend that I was somehow going to be able to handle life without any kind of dramatic event, that film was gone. I had needed something. And a twenty-four-hour bender at a crappy motel wasn’t nearly as dramatic as I could’ve gone.
Turns out that after hitting rock bottom, there was a lot of climbing to do. And I’d been climbing since I’d returned, peeling my fucking fingernails off trying to get up out of this well of grief.
Two kids who needed school drop-offs and pickups, rides to games, playdates, help with homework, distracting trips to the beach, who needed to be fed, cleaned and clothed—yeah that helped a lot. I found myself barely having a moment to actually think about what the fuck I was going to do with my life.
Like continuing to feed and clothe the kids, for example. Ranger had made good money when the club was breaking the law, earning big from gun running and murder for hire. Enough for us to own this house with a mortgage so small we’d paid it off by the time Jack entered elementary school. Enough for me to be a stay-at-home mom, puttering away at ideas and stories that, of course, wouldn’t ever see the light of day.
Sure, we hadn’t had enough for me to buy designer handbags like Amy and Gwen, but that was fine with me. I considered luxury to be having a home that I loved, one that my children could grow up in, and the college funds that had been accumulating throughout the years. To me, luxury was the fact that we’d never worried about bills, had two cars in addition to Ranger’s Harley, and we could even take a few vacations a year, with and without the kids.
There were some lean years, of course, but those were time I’d budgeted for. Being an Old Lady for as long as I had been, I’d known that we’d need a little buffer. Working as an outlaw in a motorcycle club wasn’t exactly steady, reliable money.
So through the lean years, the buffer depleted. But once the garage started earning good money and the club started to work on more legitimate ventures, the buffer got large and healthy again.
We’d taken the kids camping and to Disneyland, though, Ranger fucking hated it. He did it for his little girl, who was obsessed with princesses, and he’d made sure to treat her like one every day.
We’d had a trip to Hawaii planned for later this week. Of course, we weren’t going now since there was no we.
Ranger’s funeral expenses had been covered by the club. They had funds allocated for those kinds of things. Of course they did. Not that they’d had to dip into them for a while. And then there was the fact that as a widow, I got a small cut of whatever they made. For life.
They looked out for the families of their fallen members.
I wasn’t about to turn it down—not that anyone would let me—not if it helped put my kids through college or be able to backpack through Europe if they didn’t want to go to college. Not if I could use it for all the expenses that came with having a growing girl and boy who wouldn’t have a father. No. I wasn’t about to turn down anything. My pride was cheap.
But even with all that, covering our finances would be a stretch. Technically, I could make things work the way they were, but only if I wanted to constantly worry about money and have my kids go without things like holidays and school trips. Since they were already going to have to be without their father for the rest of their lives, I wasn’t about to deny them anything else.
