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The family meetingended without a resolution to the Zach thing or any further clarity about why Lyra’s love life was suddenly something for the whole family to decide.
Didn’t matter; she’d figured out the subtext on her own: Pop was concerned about how the Bulls would deal with Reed being gay, but he couldn’t say that, or even really deal with it, so he’d found something else to focus on.
Pop wasn’t passive aggressive or otherwise wriggly generally, in fact, he often insisted he hated what he called ‘sideways talk,’ when people didn’t say precisely what they meant. However, Reed’s sexual orientation was a struggle for him. He loved both kids unconditionally, and he wanted to be supportive, but .... Probably he didn’t even realize he’d replaced Reed with Lyra in his concern about relationship ‘drama.’ His subconscious had tanked that one for him.
So Lyra figured she’d just ignore the whole thing and do what she wanted. Even assuming she and Zach ever started actually seeing each other, she couldn’t imagine why the Bulls would care. It wasn’t like she was somebody they had to worry about being around, or hearing about, their illegal activities. If it all went down the way Pop and Reed wanted it to, and they became Bulls, she’d be another patch’s daughter, which should make her pretty safe all around.
What really confused her was Reed. She couldn’t fathom why he’d be interested in joining an MC if they’d have a problem with who he was.
So, later that afternoon, while they were working in the back yard, she asked him.
The day before, she and Michelle had gone to their favorite place, a funky kind of home and garden store near the Fort Mojave reservation. Everybody called it ‘Gringo Gomez,’ which was the owner’s name—or his nickname, maybe. The store itself didn’t really have a name, as far as she knew. And calling it a home and garden store seriously undersold its awesomeness.
Housed in an abandoned service station, the whole thing was happy chaos. The lot was packed with all kinds of cute and wacky garden stuff, from brightly glazed, hand-thrown pots by Indigenous artisans, to birdbaths mosaiced with tiles made of repurposed china, to fifteen-foot-tall rusted metal sculptures of giraffes. The interior was full of far too many metal shelving units, all of them crammed with weird new, used, and who-the-hell-knew kinds of ‘home décor.’ And the sales desk was like a desert jungle, almost entirely surrounded by succulents and other plants that loved to bake in the Nevada dirt.
Going through that place was like wandering through a mad wizard’s attic. Lyra and Michelle totally loved it.
Yesterday, she’d been on the hunt for some backyard beautification, and she’d found some really beautiful adobe pots, some in the Mojave style, with simple patterns in natural colors of terra cotta, cream, and blackish brown, and others in a Mexican style, glazed with bright colors and busy patterns. She’d also collected a bunch of cool new succulents and a few new pieces for the funky fairy garden she had going.
Gardening in the desert required a robust imagination and a keen eye. Pretty much no one did lawns here, because the amount of watering it would take to keep grass green in this climate would be, first, really terrible for the environment; second, insanely expensive and time-consuming; and, third, illegal. People did rocks, like the variegated pea gravel that filled the Haddons’ front and back yards, or they just let the desert dirt have the space. A few people did fake grass, but that looked utterly bizarre and tacky in Lyra’s humble opinion.
Plantings were acacia trees, agave and yucca bushes, the occasional manzanita, stuff like that. Some greenery, but not a lot of color. If you wanted color, you had to get creative. Lyra’s mom, and now Lyra, focused on art to bring the color in. A dozen painted metal and glazed tile hangings on the wood fence. A crop of sunflowers painted on the fence itself. Pretty whirligigs hanging from the eaves of the house. Brightly painted Adirondack chairs around the copper fire pit. Bright pads on the patio furniture. The bright-yellow tarp over Brutus’s bright blue doghouse. And big containers for plantings, a mix of terra cotta and glazed pots, filled with the funkiest succulents she could find—and if you knew where to go and what to look for, you could find succulents in tons of different colors. Muted colors, but different. Pinks and reds and purples and blues and yellows. Succulents that looked like roses and succulents that looked like weapons, and everything in between.
Big clay pots were heavy, though, so Lyra had left the new ones in her Cube until Reed had time to help her, which was this afternoon.
After he brought the pots to the yard, he hung around to help her lug the potting soil and fill the pots. With Pop gone, Lyra had her opening. While they were sitting together on the patio, filling pots with soil, she used it.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“The family meeting—that was about you more than me and Zach, wasn’t it?”
His trowel paused on its way back to the potting soil bag. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, Pop’s worried about how the Bulls will feel about you.”
She wasn’t sure if that was an offensive way of phrasing a delicate notion, but she knew Reed would take it as she’d intended. They’d always understood each other and had rarely had the kind of sibling conflicts that seemed normal in most families. Reed was a basically perfect big brother.
“Maybe, yeah.” He went back to soil-scooping.
Dissatisfied with the lack of substance in his reply, she pushed. “Do they even know you’re gay?”
“Is it their business who I fuck?”
“I don’t think so. But they might. Bikers don’t exactly have a rep of being the most open-minded people in the world. They’re like Pop.”
“And Pop doesn’t have a problem with me.”
Lyra stopped and gave her brother a look.
He smirked. “He doesn’t have a problem with me. He’s trying not to have a problem with who I fuck. Which is enough for me. For now.”
“But the Bulls don’t know.”
“Again, it’s not their business.”
“Again, they might think it is. Are they going to be okay with ...”
