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“Perfect timing! We’re just getting ready to sit down for food.” As she released him, she added, “Hey—can I get a hand? I need to bring in some stuff we left in the truck, and Gun is out back with D and some other guys, pretending they know about sick fruit trees.”
“Sure.” As he followed her back down the driveway to their Durango, Dex, in the interest of the Christmas spirit, attempted to make small talk. “Gun doesn’t know about fruit trees? Don’t you have an orchard on your place?” Gun and Leah and Simon and Deb had houses on the same property—Gun and Deb’s family land. It was a running farm, and he was pretty sure they had an orchard as well as annual crops. Deb had a big fresh produce business.
“Debknows about fruit trees, but Deb is in the kitchen. Gunner lives near fruit trees but only cares about the pies and jams that happen later. Simon’s out there, too, trying to act like he knows because Deb does. Basically, there’s a lot of talking and not a lot of sense.
Because he was pretty sure she was trying to be funny, Dex chuckled. Funny was not something he personally ever tried to be, and he probably missed at least half the shit other people thought was humorous. If he’d been born with a funny bone, it had petrified.
Probably around age nine.
They’d arrived at the back of the truck, and Leah pressed the button on her fob that lifted the tailgate. Two big bags of presents and a wooden picnic basket sat at the edge of the hatch. Behind them was a lot of sports gear—a bag full of baseball bats, a tub of baseballs, a gym bag with the name of a soccer club, a pair of tall, black, muddy boots, and a black velvet riding cap.
“The kids are really into sports, huh?”
“Aidan is.” She tested the two bags and handed him the heavier one. “He’s got his heart set on playing in the Majors. Larissa just loves anything about horses. I don’t think she considers it a sport.”
“Aidan’s in high school, right?” Larissa was younger, but Dex wasn’t sure how much. Maybe three years?
“Yep.” With the picnic basket and the other bag of gifts hooked over one arm, she fobbed the tailgate closed. “Sophomore. He doesn’t want to go to college. He wants to go straight to pro ball. Gun and I disagree.” She shrugged. “We’ll work it out.”
“I wish I’d gone to college. Even junior college.”
“You went straight into the Army, right? Like Gun?”
Gunner and Dex were the only patches at the table right now who’d served. They’d both been in combat in the Middle East, but not in the same wars. Gun’s war had been over in three months. Dex’s war had been going on nearly twenty years.
“Marines, but yeah.”
“Then you’ve got the GI Bill. You could still go, Dex.”
He shrugged that idea off. What would he do with a college degree now, when he wasn’t that far from forty? He was a veteran, a mechanic, and a Brazen Bull, and that was what he’d always be.
To Leah, he said, “I’m good as I am.” He opened the front door.
She smiled as she stepped into the Delaneys’ house. “I know you are.”
~oOo~
The meal was chaotic and delicious, as always. The table was really several tables under several matching tablecloths and stretched from the front of the house to the back, living room through dining room. Every year, he found his seat and looked at the massive amount of food—two turkeys, a ham, oceanic bowls of potatoes and squash and different dressings and gravies and yams and vegetables and breads and cranberry sauces, just about every holiday food one could imagine, and that wasn’t counting the dessert table—and he was sure they’d never be able to eat so much, but every year there was hardly anything left by the time people starting moaning and rolling out of their chairs.
The gift-giving was chaotic and loud as hell. The Bulls did it in three stages: a thing for the kids—they had their own tree in the family room—where each kid brought a wrapped gift and then they each took turns wearing a blindfold and going through the presents to pick one. For all the grownups’ efforts to keep things organized, it was a lot of screaming, and often some crying, and Dex stood as far back as was politely feasible and observed the clamor. The gifts were all small, gender- and age-neutral things, like Yo-Yos and Slinkies, little stuffed animals, shit like that.
The second stage was gifts for Mo and D. The children, and some of the patches, now, considered them their grandparents, and a lot of the patches and their old ladies had a parent-child kind of relationship with them, so the presents there were pretty nice. The old folks sat side by side on the living room sofa and held court while they were handed gifts and returned hugs and kisses.
Then, after the little kids had crashed out and the older kids had been settled in the basement rec room to watch Christmas cartoons, the adults did their ‘Secret Santa’ thing. By then, a significant amount of alcohol had been consumed, and it got pretty rowdy.
Dex wasn’t sure who had started that up; it predated him by a fair margin. He thought it was really dumb and meaningless, but everybody else seemed to love it. The gifts were gag gifts and usually X-rated. One thing he did like about it: the Santa stayed Secret. You drew a name at Thanksgiving, bought a present for that person, twenty-five bucks or less, wrapped it, put only the recipient’s name on the tag, and stuck it under the main tree. So there was no awkward thing where you had to explain the gift or get a thank you and have to deal with that. Just buy the thing, wrap it, and shove it under the tree.
Sage had always been in charge of handing out the Secret Santa gifts, but since Becker, her old man, had been killed, she’d stepped back.
Two Christmases ago, just a matter of weeks after Becker, Terry, and DC had been killed, the Bulls hadn’t even bothered to get together. They’d all had whatever holiday they could make on their own. Last Christmas, with a year of healing, they’d gotten together and had the usual holiday, and Sage had done her thing.
But now, Eight, who’d taken the gavel in Beck’s stead, was married, so his wife, Marcella, was their new queen. It was Marcella crouching at the tree, picking up presents and calling out names.
“Let’s see—oh, Santa got really sneaky with this one. The tag is typed! Dex, this is yours.”
Dex pushed off the wall he’d been leaning on and wended his way through his brothers and their ladies to take a small, neatly wrapped package from her.
“It’s little!” Gargo exclaimed. “What could it be?”
