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She tried to work out at least three times a week, but really, belting her lungs out and dancing her legs off on stage three to five nights a week was the bulk of her fitness regimen.
“I will. Sleep tight.”
“You, too.”
After she saw her sister out, Marcella locked the door and drew the chain. Then she picked up Yvonne’s few dishes—an empty glass and a bowl with a few un-popped kernels of Orville Redenbacher’s rolling around the bottom—and took them to the dishwasher.
Before she went to her own room, she stopped at her son’s and quietly pushed the door open.
Ajax lay on top of the covers, sprawled diagonally on his bed, in his typical sleeping outfit of gym shorts and a t-shirt. A volume ofFullmetal Alchemistlay face down and open on his pillow, taking up most of the real estate there.
He had his window wide open, and a strong breeze sent an autumn chill through the room, so Marcella tiptoed in and snagged the crocheted throw her mom had made for him, in a Captain America shield pattern. She spread it over her son’s body and bent down to kiss his head.
His blond locs were starting to smell not great. Maybe it hadn’t been her smartest parental decision ever to allow a ten-year-old boy with indifferent hygiene habits to get that particular hairstyle. But he’d really wanted them, and he’d sworn up and down he’d take care of them. Also, she liked his curiosity about his heritage, all facets of it, and hadn’t wanted to quash it.
But they’d need to have a talk about the promise he wasn’t keeping with regards to dreadlock care.
Hearing a soft, woody rustle at her side, she turned and saw Spot, Ajax’s leopard gecko, standing in his aquarium house, back feet on one of his branches and front feet on the glass. Greeting her. That lizard was at least half dog. He was practically wagging his tail and panting.
“Hey, shorty,” she whispered. Lifting the screen lid, she put her hand in the cage and stroked Spot’s little head. He leaned into the fingertip touch and seemed to smile. Seventy-five percent dog.
She closed the lid and watched for a minute as Spot rustled around, hunting for crickets. Then she tiptoed back to the door.
Before she closed it, Marcella looked back and considered her boy. No, she’d never regret her short, strange time with Eight, because those few weeks had given her the greatest treasure of her life. That boy right there had changed her fundamentally. He’d put right a lot that had been wrong in her.
Being his mom had given her focus and purpose and a joy that ran steady always, like an underground river. No matter what went on on the surface, she always had Ajax, and as long as that was true, as long as she was the mom he deserved, all the rest of her life made sense.
Maybe that was what Eight Ball was feeling now, a need for sense in his life. He’d said he was trying ‘to square things’; maybe that was what he’d meant.
But Ajax wasn’t a lab rat, and she couldn’t risk the damage Eight might do to her son if he tried and failed at fatherhood. The time for trying had passed.
She wasn’t wrong to block him from this sudden interest. If he jumped in and then bailed, after Ajax got to know him, he’d upset the balance of her son’s life. All this good, this life that worked, could capsize.
She wasn’t wrong.
CHAPTER THREE
Eight sat at the head of the Bulls’ table and considered the men taking their seats around it. A year ago, the club had been the biggest it had ever been, with sixteen full patches squeezed around the same table Brian Delaney had first set in this room in 1975. Now, forty-four years after that beginning, Eight was the third man to hold the gavel, and, after losing three patches, including their president, in the Perro fight last year, the club was down to thirteen patches. Not a single one of them was a founding member.
Delaney had retired long ago. Rad, one of the club’s first prospects and their SAA for decades, had retired a few years back, after his third heart attack. Now his two sons both wore the Bull. All the rest of the founding members had passed.
The Bulls had buried a lot of brothers over the years.
The vexation of his current frame of mind notwithstanding, Eight was not naturally an introspective guy. He’d learned a very long time ago that trying to understand bad shit, about the world, about oneself, about anything, accomplished nothing but keeping the bad shit alive and painful. The world was well and truly fucked, and people were, on the whole, terrible. No point trying to understand something you couldn’t change. Better to shove the past to the back and keep plodding forward until a bullet, a wipeout, a heart attack, cancer, or just old fucking age finally put you out of your misery.
Still, he sat here in church, at the head of the table, and wondered, as he had every time for a year, what the fuck the Bulls would be now. That fight last year had been like a tornado, pulling the club apart at the seams. It wasn’t just losing Becker, though that was a devastating blow. Maybe more than when Delaney had retired; Eight had been inside back then, and for years after, so he had no first-person knowledge of how the club had managed the transition from D’s leadership to Beck’s. But D had retired, was still kicking to this day, so for sure losing Beck was worse.
What Eight did know, after sitting at Beck’s table for eleven years, and sitting at his right hand for the last five of those, was he’d been a damn fine leader. He’d been different from D as president, because he’d been different from D as a man. D had founded the Bulls, he’d been the original owner of the station and the clubhouse, and he’d considered it his club. He’d been a forceful leader, guiding the club in the direction he wanted, sometimes even making calls away from the table, not giving the patches a vote—and sometimes giving the patches a vote that seemed cooked especially to get the answer he wanted.
Some of those cooked votes had done real damage. The punishment D had forced on Apollo that way would be club legend forever.
Becker had never thought of the club as his, so he’d put everything on the table. He’d wanted consensus if he could get it, but he wanted everybody to be heard, at least, before he put a question to a vote. Under Beck’s leadership, when the Bulls made a call, every patch felt like they’d been part of it, even if it hadn’t gone their way.
That went for the good calls as well as the bad ones. Everybody felt responsible for the club’s moves, nobody felt like they could push blame, or credit, off their own shoulders. And the clubhouse had been more peaceful than ever before. Even while the Perro bullshit raged, and the world outside the clubhouse seemed to be nonstop danger, the club was tight.
The worst controversy in all those years had been Eight himself. When Simon went down hard on that arson charge, Becker had tapped Eight to take his place as VP. Most of the club had been surprised, to say the least.
Eight had been fucking shocked himself when Beck told him what he wanted to do. He’d spent every day of his Bulls life to that point as the club asshole, knowing everybody thought so and nobody expected anything more from him.
