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Only Mo could call him Edgar without causing a wound, because only she knew when to say it without hurting. Only Mo knew when hearing the name his mother had given him reminded him that he’d had one once.
Mo didn’t have children of her own; she’d tried a bunch of times, had been pregnant a bunch of times, but she’d lost them all. So she’d stretched her arms out and encircled the whole of the Bulls, making them her family, her brothers and sisters, her sons and daughters, her grandchildren.
He didn’t know when he’d started calling her Mama, and he thought he might be the only one who did. It had slipped out once, a long time ago, in a particularly bad moment, and he’d flinched, afraid he’d overstepped, but she’d accepted it like she’d needed it, too. So he called her Mama most of the time.
She didn’t know about Marcella and Ajax, and he was a little worried about telling her. Mo loved unconditionally, but that didn’t mean she loved without judgment. When she thought somebody was being an idiot or an asshole, she said it straight out. When she thought she knew what somebody should do, or how they should act, or what they’d missed, she didn’t mince words. When she was pissed, she could give a look with her icy blue eyes that made Eight feel about three inches tall.
But her hugs always came when they were needed, and she held on until he could stand up straight again on his own.
He pulled onto the blacktopped driveway of their long, ranch-style house and parked his bike behind Mo’s Santa Fe. She used to drive a much bigger SUV, for a while she’d driven an Escalade, but she was seventy now, and a big truck like that was a lot for her to handle.
As he walked up the drive, he surveyed the expansive lawn. Though Delaney had been retired for almost twenty years now, and he and Mo almost never came into Tulsa to the clubhouse, they were still one-hundred percent club. They were family. Matriarch and patriarch. Mo still hosted Thanksgiving and Christmas. Not the big club parties, but the family gatherings. Everybody went over the river and through the woods to Grammo’s house.
It wasn’t just holidays, either. Like Beck had before him, Eight sent the prospects or a couple of trusted hangarounds out here a couple times a month through the spring and summer to take care of the grass and weed Mo’s flower beds, and they came out to make sure the place was ready for winter, and whenever their was snow or ice to clear. The Bulls took care of them.
And D and Mo came in for grandkids’ birthday parties, or weddings, christenings, whatever. She was still a go-to babysitter for the few kids in the club family still young enough to need minding.
He’d seen them both just a few weeks back, on the anniversary of Beck’s death. They’d come out to the cemetery with everybody else.
But as Eight stepped onto the long, low front porch, he realized he hadn’t come out, himself, just for a visit, in more than a year. Not since he’d come late in the night to tell them that they’d beaten the Perros and lost three patches, chief among them Becker, in the effort.
He’d sat in their living room with them, two old people in their nightclothes, and broken their hearts yet again.
And that was the last time he’d come on his own.
Now he was here, again, in need. He really was an asshole.
He pushed the doorbell and heard it chime on the other side of the door. Then, of course, he heard the sharp raspy yap of Toro, their ancient cotton ball of a dog, and the scrabble of claws on the hardwood floor.
“Shut the fuck up, ya rancid old mop,” Eight heard D say, without any rancor. The door swung open and the old man, about eighty now, stood there, holding the little dog he’d just called a rancid mop at his shoulder like a baby.
D had never been an especially big dude. Just average height, several inches shorter than Eight, and wiry strong rather than muscular. Over the years, he seemed to have shrunk some, and his shoulders had taken on a hunch like the burdens he’d carried his whole life had finally bent him over. He’d always had fairly long hair, but it had thinned and gone wispy white, so he’d cut most of it off. Even small and shrunken, though, so much smaller than Eight, the man had a presence. One look still said he was not someone with whom to fuck.
Eight still felt a flicker of the intimidation he’d felt keenly when D had the gavel.
“Hey, D.” He held out his hand.
D grasped it in one that had gone stiff and bony with arthritis. “Eight! Mo said you were comin’ over. Well, get in here, son.”
Eight stepped in. As D closed the door behind him he asked, “I heard about Jake. Any change there?”
“He’s doin’ pretty good. Plan is, he’ll get sprung from the hospital sometime this week.”
“Good. That’s good.” He paused, looking like he had more to say, but then he shook his head. “Well, Mo’s in the kitchen. I’m in the middle of somethin’, so I’ll check in later.”
With that, D walked off, toward his office.
He’d been like that more and more since he’d retired. Eight got the sense that talking about the club hurt him now. But the man hadn’t been kicked. He’d walked away of his own free will and in defiance of the unified voice of the club begging him to stay.
Eight was still pissed about that, if he thought about it too long. Beck had been a great president, ultimately a better president, but it still felt like an abandonment, no matter how good D’s reasons might have been.
But Eight had other things leaning on his head today, so he kicked that old thought to the side and went to the kitchen.
Just as she’d done to the clubhouse while she’d been queen, Mo had redecorated this house several times over the years. But one thing had never changed: the kitchen was the heart of this house. Maybe that wasn’t so unusual; the only other house he’d ever spent much time in that he considered a home was the Becker house, and Sage’s kitchen was the heart there, too. Maybe that was how it was supposed to be.
But it seemed like Mo decorated around her kitchen, like whatever she decided to do in here formed the scheme for everything else. She’d last redone everything about ten years or so ago, not long after he’d crossed the right way out the gate at McAllister. The cabinets were a dark red she called ‘barn red,’ the countertops a sandy-colored granite, the appliances stainless, except for the big double fridge, which had fronts on it like the cabinets.
He didn’t really like it. Too country for his taste. Not that he had that much taste.
