Diaz had missed the point. There was something to be said for diversity, yes. But if you wanted real trust, Bart thought, maybe what you wanted was somebody who came from the same place, who understood the same history.
There was an old truism that nobody was from California, that everybody had come from somewhere else. Well, in Signal Bend, everybody was from there, so you always knew where everybody was coming from.
Bart met Connor’s eyes. “It’s different there, Con. I don’t think I can explain it so you’d understand.”
“My dad always said you’d left a boot in Missouri. I didn’t think that was true. Guess I was wrong.”
“You weren’t. I was here. I was in. I love you, love this charter. But everything is different now. I need you to understand.”
Connor sighed. “I knew when you wouldn’t take the gavel and gave up the VP flash that you’d be in here eventually. Thought it’d be sooner, frankly. Vote’s gotta go to the table, but I’ll back it. If you want out, there’s no point in fighting you. You already squared it with Badge, I guess.”
“I did, yeah. He’ll be in touch.”
Slapping his hands onto his thighs, Connor stood. At that signal, Bart stood, too.
“You know, brother, we’ve been together since before the Perros blew up. We have history. You talk about not trusting the democracy, not trusting us to remember what happened and not let it happen again, but you’re taking a voice that remembers away. If a vote comes up, now I got one less who knows the real cost of those big, thick envelopes.”
“My voice didn’t make a difference before, Con.”
“It did, though. Even when it lost, it made a difference.”
Bart didn’t have anything he could say to that, so he said nothing at all.
~oOo~
Marta was in the kitchen. Bart came in and leaned on the other side of the island, watching as she smoothed yellow frosting over a yellow cake. He didn’t have to ask who that was for.
“Deck wants lemon dream cake, huh?”
Marta smiled with sweet pride. “Oh, yes. He asked, and I said if he put all his trucks and blocks away in the right buckets without help, I would. He did very good.”
Bart watched her as she used the spreading knife to make pointy curls all across the top of the cake. He wondered how many cakes she’d baked for his family. Hundreds, certainly. She’d been with Riley for years before he’d met her. He couldn’t imagine what his family would do without her.
“Marta, I want you to come with us.”
She froze, the knife hovering over the cake, and looked up at him. “No, Mr. Bart. Missouri is too far.”
He smiled and tried to make it persuasive. “You thought Madrone was too far, once upon a time.”
“Missouri is much more far. I know no one there. My family is here.”
“You know us. And bring your family. I’ll move you all and make sure everybody gets set up.” She had a husband and a grown son with Down Syndrome. Bart and Riley had helped them buy a house in Fontana when they’d moved into this house so that she could, and would, keep her job.
“Mr. Bart, no.” She turned and took the knife to the sink to rinse it. With her back to him, she said. “My home is here.”
He heard emotion in her voice, and he knew he should drop the subject. Instead, he doubled down. “The kids need you. They love you.”
She flinched. “I love them. If you stay, then I stay with them. But not if you go.”
“Marta…”
She came over to the island and put her hand over his. “You should go from this place. Take your niños where they won’t know things anymore like they know now. It’s right. But I not go with you.”
“It’ll break their hearts to leave you. Mine, too.”
Marta walked around the island with her arms out, and Bart let her hug him. Then she sniffed and leaned back to look up at him with gleaming wet eyes. She patted his chest. “You can no break a broken heart, Mr. Bart.”
He didn’t think that was true at all, but he nodded and hugged her again.
~oOo~
“We can sit in here and talk, Vincent.” Bart led the agent, a skinny guy in khakis and a lime green polo shirt, into his office and closed the door. They sat in armchairs near his desk, and Vincent poked around on a tablet for a few minutes. Then he looked up and leaned back, making himself comfortable.
“Well, the first thing I think we need to do is bring a painting crew in here and—”
“No. No changes.”
Vincent’s eyes widened for a beat, then he frowned. “The décor is…specific, and I’m sorry to say that buyers aren’t very imaginative. And at this price point, they really do want move-in ready. Your buyers won’t be looking for a fixer.”
“This house isn’t a fixer.”
“Oh, it’s in excellent shape. But there’s a boy’s room upstairs with navy blue walls. That’s not a color most people are comfortable with. And hand-painted flowers in the girl’s room? Somebody’s going to have to work to undo that. Just to name a couple of things.”
“You’re talking about my son Ian’s room, and my daughter Lexi’s room. Ian picked that color himself. And Lexi and her mother painted those flowers. If they get painted over, it won’t be while my name is on the deed.”
Vincent sighed like he was speaking to an obstreperous child and had just pulled up the very last of his patience. And Bart responded to that with a look meant to remind the little asswipe whose house he was sitting in.
Asswipe remembered. He swallowed and started again, with a more deferential tone.
“I know that this house is important to you, and I know you’ve suffered a terrible loss. Again, my condolences. But when you sell a house, the people who are buying it want it to be important to them. Imagine a family with all boys. They come through the house with the boys, they love it, they’re running around picking which room will be whose, but one of the rooms has sky blue walls with a giant flower garden painted everywhere. Now one of those boys doesn’t have a room right away.”
Bart leaned forward and stared hard into Vincent’s eyes. “There are eight bedrooms in this house. One of them has flowers on the walls. Unless the Waltons are looking to move from Depression-Era Virginia and 1970s television, I think there are plenty of bedrooms for your mythical family of boys. You are not painting over my daughter’s bedroom walls while I own them.”
Vincent had the balls left to withstand Bart’s angry glare for a few seconds longer, and then he looked down at his tablet and poked the screen some more. “Okay, then. No changes. Let’s go over some figures.”
~oOo~
When they’d first seen this house, Bart had been astonished at the size of the master suite: an enormous bedroom, a bathroom built for a party, and a walk-in closet the size of a small bedroom, with built-in shelves and drawers and racks.
He’d balked, while he and Riley stood in the middle of the room that had then been empty, telling her that he couldn’t imagine sleeping in a room big enough to play basketball in. He’d made a crack about feeling like they’d be fucking in an arena, their bare asses up on a Jumbotron.
She’d laughed and patted his back in a way both soothing and condescending.
One of the first things she’d done after they moved in, after she had Lexi’s room sorted—the room that was now Declan’s—was to have a wall opened up in their bedroom and a next-door bedroom converted into her closet. That giant closet he’d first goggled at was his.
He’d have said that he’d never have enough clothes for it, but somehow, married to the clotheshorse that was Riley, she’d managed to mostly fill his, too. He also had his largest gun safe in there, of course, but still, he had racks and drawers full of clothes. Most of them jeans and t-shirts, flannels and boots, but lots of them. He also owned three different tuxedos and six suits, with all the necessary accouterments. And had worn them all, more than once, with Riley on his arm.
Her closet, though, was a wonder to behold.
A wall full of shoes—hundreds of pairs. Drawers of dainty underthings and accessories. A free-standing chest full of jewelry. Racks of dresses, skirts, pants, jeans, tops. A makeup counter with a mirror surrounded by special lights. In the middle of it all, a grouping of two plush, puffy chairs in pink velvet and a chaise in white leather. Seating for three. In her closet.
Bart sat sideways on the chaise now and wondered what to do with it all. The movers would arrive in two days to pack this life up and haul it halfway across the country. He had to decide how much of Riley went with them.
On the wall across from his perch, between two sets of built-in drawers, hung a column of three black-and-white portrait photographs, matted in black and framed in white with elegant simplicity. The highest picture was newborn Lexi, naked, sleeping in Bart’s outstretched arms, lying on her back along his forearms—both unscarred back then, his old tattoo visible in the image—with her tiny feet in his hands. Bart was disembodied, only his arms in the photograph.
The second portrait was Lexi at not quite three years old, her hair gossamer and white-blonde, bending over her newborn brother Ian and kissing the top of his sleeping head.
The lowest photo was Lexi, dressed in a plain, dark top and leggings, barefoot, sitting with Ian, in dark sweats and a white t-shirt, between her outstretched legs, and newborn Deck in Ian’s arms, swaddled snugly in white. Lexi and Ian both looked down on their new brother with wonder.
Riley wasn’t in any of the portraits. She was there, in their children, but only as that metaphor. In here, her private little nook, the one place in the house where she’d insisted that people enter by invitation only, she had made herself absent from her family, but she had brought them in with her.
Bart sat and studied those portraits. They had pictures of the kids, of them, of their family, all over the house—candid shots, casual posed photos, professional portraits of both photographic and painted varieties. She was everywhere, in their house and in the world; her whole life, Riley had been photographed endlessly. No one would ever forget her face.
But in this room, surrounded by her things, staring at her favorite images of the children they’d made together, sitting here trying to decide what to keep and what to part with, Bart understood with aching clarity that she would fade. Their children would forget, by bits and pieces, what it was like to be mothered by her. The world would largely forget that they’d adored her.
And he, too, would someday lose the keenness of his love and his loss. Just as her scent faded from her pillows, his vivid memory—of the way her skin felt in his hands, the way her body felt when he was inside her, the silk of her tongue against his—would fade. He would forget the sensations of loving her.
That was what healing was.
But they would never forget her face, her voice, her laugh. That was captured in hundreds of hours of film. And even in the images of their family that she wasn’t in, she was there.
“Daddy, may I come in?”
Bart blinked himself back to the present, and turned and smiled at his daughter. “Hey, baby princess. Sure. What’s up?”
She limped in and sat on a poufy pink chair. “It always made me happy when Mom let me play in here. She let me try on anything I wanted.”
Bart watched his daughter as she looked around the room. She was only ten, but she seemed so much older.
“I’m trying to decide what I should keep, so I can tell the movers what to pack. We’ll keep anything you want. All of it, if you want.” He wanted to keep all of it. The thought of giving anything of Riley’s away made his insides ache.
Lexi stood and went to the wall of drawers. She opened one and pulled out a blue scarf. She wrapped it around her neck and turned to the tall, wide mirror, and Bart clenched his fists, driving them into his thighs to stave off the pain in that sight.
“If we gave them away, that would help a lot of people.” She turned to her father. “Like when Mom gave clothes and things to Aunt Sid’s shelter. That helped people.”
“Yeah, Lex. It did.” Sid volunteered at The Foothills Women’s Center, and they had a big rummage sale and a charity auction every year. Riley always put together a donation, and she always volunteered at the events, too. The more practical clothes, the Center kept for its own clients, and they auctioned off the finery to help fund their programs.
“We should do that. It would make Mom happy.”
“You don’t want anything to keep for yourself?” If she said no, it would break his heart.
Lexi looked around, her eyes lighting here and there over her mother’s beautiful things. Riley had worn jeans and t-shirts most of all, but she’d loved clothes and loved to shop, and when she’d dressed, she really had.
“Would it be okay if I was in here by myself for a little while?”
“Sure. There’s some boxes just outside the door, if you want to pick some things to keep. I’ll be in Deck’s room if you need me.”
Lexi nodded absently and ran the silk of her mother’s scarf through her fingers. Bart stood and left her alone in her mother’s most private space.
~oOo~
“Unanimous. Bart’s transfer to the Missouri charter is approved.”
A dense quiet met Connor’s proclamation. Bart looked around the table and saw that none of his brothers could meet his gaze. Most looked down at the table. Sherlock was turned away.
Sitting in an unfamiliar spot down and across the table, where Muse had sat for years, Bart put his head down, too, for a second, and tried to think of something to say.
“I love you all,” he decided on. “I just need a fresh start with my kids. There’s too much…just too much in Madrone.”
In Bart’s old seat, Trick nodded. “We understand, brother. Just sorry to see you go. We’ll feel the loss, and there’s been plenty of it lately. But you do what’s right for your kids. We get it.”
As heads bobbed slowly around the table, Bart felt some small ease. He stood then and shrugged his kutte from his shoulders. He laid it down on the gouged oak table, with the back up, and shoved his hand into his pocket, drawing out the knife he’d carried for years. Popping the sharp blade, he pushed it under the bottom rocker and sliced through the threads that bound S. California to his Night Horde MC kutte.
When the rocker was free, he closed his knife and put it away. He slid his kutte back on, then picked up the stained, frayed patch, carried it around the table, and held it out to Connor, his former President.
Before he took the rocker from him, Connor stood. Then he opened his arms, and Bart met him in a strong embrace.
Two weeks after he’d told Connor he wanted a transfer, he was no longer a SoCal patch.
Although he knew it was the right choice, although he felt the rightness deep in his gut, he was leaving a family. He was leaving a home. The home he’d made with Riley. The home in which they’d loved their children together. The only family they’d shared. As Connor squeezed his shoulders with fierce emotion, Bart knew that Marta had been wrong.
A broken heart could break yet more.
THREE
On their last full day in Madrone, Bart paid the movers their fifty-percent advance and picked Deck up. With Deck in his arms and Lexi and Ian standing at his sides, they all stood in the driveway and watched the massive hauler roll down the hill that was their secluded street. The carrier taking his bikes had left earlier in the day.
Lexi had taken a small packing box of things from her mother’s closet. Bart had packed up all her jewelry; all of that would stay with them. Her books and knickknacks, the things that had been special to her, he’d kept it all. But the rest of her clothes, he’d packed up himself and rented a U-Haul to carry to the Women’s Center.
He’d sold her aging but still perfect little blue Ferrari California. Buying it had been the first major indulgence of her career. She’d loved that car. Watching the new buyer drive it away had taken another chip from his fragmented heart.
Another bit had broken off a few days be
fore, when they’d all said goodbye to Marta.
All that was left of their California life was what would fit in the Tahoe. Bart and the kids were ‘camping’ that night in the living room, then leaving first thing in the morning, stopping at the Grand Canyon. His kids had never seen it, so they were beginning their move with a short vacation. Two nights at a hotel on the South Rim.
He’d realized how little his kids had seen of the world. One family trip to Signal Bend several years ago, before Declan. Two trips to Hawaii. Skiing in Tahoe once. Riley’s work and Bart’s had rarely jelled, and they’d both spent a lot of their working lives on the road in one way or another.
Calm & Storm (The Night Horde SoCal Book 6) Page 31
