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“Oh, wow,” Nikki said. “I would not have thought that, the two of you together. Oh, good for you. Well, maybe you should go out there for a while. Take your girl out fishing or something. Get your mind right so you can make a decision. Does she like fishing?”
“Almost definitely not.”
“Well, maybe you could change her mind about that,” Nikki said. “You changed her mind about you.”
“Thanks, Nikki,” Griz said. “Devil.”
“What?”
“That’s his name. The little bald guy who was with me. Devil.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll introduce you,” Griz said. “Not now, though. It’s not a good time for the club.”
“Sure, sure,” Nikki said. “Look, you take all the time you need in here, okay? It’s not visiting hours but, screw that. You need to see your dad. Just don’t tell anyone it was me, okay?”
“I promise,” Griz said.
With that, Nikki left, after giving him a little wave goodbye. Griz sat in the quiet and the stillness for a little while, listening to the soft beeping of the machines, watching his father take slow breaths, and then finally, he spoke.
“I don’t know if you can hear me, Dad,” he said. “But I need to talk to you.”
He felt a little silly at first, like he was talking to the air.You should talk to him. It helps them,Nikki had said. So he kept going.
“When they shot you, I was so angry,” he said. “I wanted to burn down the world just so everyone would know what it felt like inside of me.”
Now the words were coming on their own accord.
“And I rushed out to get revenge and all that did was get my brother shot. Now I have no idea what I should do.”
He watched his dad’s chest slowly rise and fall, listened to the beeping of the machines.
“You were always there for me,” he said. “You never let me down. You always had all the answers. You always knew what to do. I don’t know anything. The whole club, they’re all looking to me because I’m your son, but I don’t think I have any of what you have. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
He thought of what Nikki had just said to him.Our parents, they had no idea what the hell they were doing. They were just trying to get by, every day, trying their best and fucking it all up half the time.
Could that be true? It didn’t seem possible. His dad had always been right, always known exactly the right thing to do. He was always certain about his actions.
Or was he?
He suddenly thought back to the first time his dad included him in working on his motorcycle. It was nothing special, routine maintenance type stuff, but Griz was still a kid at that point and couldn’t seem to turn a wrench to save his life.
No matter how many times he tried, he couldn’t get his clumsy fingers to get to a nut deep in the machinery. His knuckles kept rapping painfully on the metal every time he failed, adding pain to the frustration.
“It’s not working, Dad,” he’d said, throwing the wrench down in exasperation. “I keep messing it up.”
“So keep messing it up,” his dad had said. “Until you don’t any more. Mistakes are how we figure out the right thing to do.”
Was it just that his dad had made all his mistakes under the radar, while Griz was too young to remember them? Had his dad really been uncertain about the right moves to make this whole time?
Maybe that was why they’d spent so much time at the cabin as kids. Because his dad had no idea what to do for some problem that had come up, and he needed to think it over.
The more Griz thought about the cabin, the more he found his thoughts straying to Becca and their time there together. Her holding on to him on the ride over there from the motel. Their sitting together, so close. Her touch.
Is that your girl? Nikki had asked.
He hadn’t been sure at first, but after tonight, it seemed much more certain.
