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Then he spluttered.
Then he went through the phases of grief.
Over. His. Bike.
If the situation hadn’t worried me, I’d have found it hilarious.
Then, because I figured it was a wifely thing to do to offset his grief, I cleared my throat to remind him that I was in the room and offered, “I really can fly by myself, Digger. You can ride it up. It’s me my father wants to see.”
His scowl was immediate. “MaryCat, now isn’t the moment for being brave.”
“What is it the moment for?” I asked, trying to keep my amusement from my words.
His inhalation was noisy. “Me. Sucking it up.” I thought Rex heard that and commented on it because Digger’s scowl clouded over, dropping a few shades to the depths of Vantablack. “As if you’d want to put your bike on a plane, Prez. It’s a fucking tragedy is what it is.” He paused then glowered at the wall. “No, it doesn’t help, Rex. It doesn’t help at all.”
When he hung up, meekly, I inquired, “What did he say?”
He grunted. “That if the plane went down, the hog and I would both die at the same time.” I had to snort. He squinted at me. “I didn’t hear amusement coming out of you just now, did I?”
I rolled my lips inward. “Nope!”
“I think I did.”
Something had his eyes lighting up. Something…
God, I couldn’t put a word to it.
It was both teasing and dark.
One second, I was hovering in front of the dinner table in our suite, and the next, I was shrieking as he surged to his feet and started chasing me.
For a moment, the scantest second, fear filtered through me.
It grabbed me in a chokehold.
The teasing in his expression was forgotten, and only that darkness lingered in my memory banks.
A lifetime of being a toy in the games my mother and father played together, an adulthood of being the victim of my father’s torment…
Then, my brain caught up.
The time we spent traveling shifted to the forefront of my mind.
Diggersavedpeople.
He didn’t break them.
No matter how dirty he considered those hands of his as being.
He chased down muggers and spoke kindly with an ex-administrative assistant at his school.
He broke into motel rooms when he thought a woman was being attacked then, after he saved her son from death by Cheeto, he paid for the goddamn repairs to the busted door. Something I’d learned the following morning, when the motel owner, grumbling all the while, had been begrudgingly repairing what Digger had broken.
And, more importantly than that, he traveled across the country to save a girl who’d showed up at his ‘doorstep’ one random day, who was the sister of a buddy of his, and had married her.
All of that swirled around my head, swooping in like a storm front to whisk away my dumb fears with the speed of a hurricane.
So I let loose a second shriek that faded into a hoot and ran across the room, aware that I barely evaded the brush of his fingers as they swept over the hem of my shirt.
