Cecily’s mom laughed. “Everybody, Mo. We had to book it three weeks in advance!”
“It’s sacrilege. I was in a weakened frame of mind, and you all took advantage. It’s laying out cold cuts for Christmas dinner!”
“Aunt Mo, take a look.” Cecily swept her arms out, encompassing the whole kitchen. “There are seven women in this room, and we’ve all been cooking and cleaning and decorating for two days. There are about a million batches of cookies and candies. Six pies. A thirty-pound turkey thawing in the garage fridge. A pantry full of vegetables and yams and potatoes. Stuff to make cornbread dressing and four loaves of fresh bread in the morning. How many people will be here tomorrow?”
Mo answered without hesitation. “Including children, thirty-four.”
The whole room broke out in laughter. “One honey-baked ham will not make this meal any less than the labor of love it is,” Cecily’s mom said, wrapping her arms around her best friend. “We took one thing off your list so you could spend the evening with your man on his first night home. Take a break and be grateful, Maureen.”
“Traditions can change, Mo,” Deb said with a smile. “When families do.”
Her observation came with a melancholy weight; Deb had lost everything, including her father, on the same day that Cecily’s father had been killed. She’d had to build up something new. After a moment of bittersweet silence among them all, Willa went to the sink and washed her hands. “Let’s go, Jen. Leah, can you keep track of the kids?”
“On it!” Leah pushed a baking sheet into the top oven and set the timer.
With a rolled bit of sandie dough in the palm of her hand, Cecily paused and watched Jenny and Willa walk out of the kitchen. Leah grabbed the container of undecorated cookies. She went to the wide farmhouse table at the other end of the room and started setting up stations, each one with a paper plate, a bowl of frosting, and a shaker of sprinkles, for the kids to decorate the cookies. Deb stood at the end of the island, wearing her baby boy on her chest, dropping chocolate-chip dough onto trays.
Her mom and Mo stood in the middle of it all, arm-in-arm and head to head.
Cecily had been born into the Bulls family. All her holidays had been spent with her ‘Aunt’ Mo and ‘Uncle’ Brian, with the ‘Uncles’ of the club, and then, as she’d gotten older and the club had grown, men who were closer to her age and more like cousins. Those holidays, like most of her childhood, had been happy. Mo had always thrown her all into the holidays.
Yet they hadn’t really been like this. In the years that she’d been in college, and then the years she’d hated the Bulls and done all she could to stay away, the club had become something bigger than a club. They’d always insisted they were a family first, and she’d believed that. She’d felt it, grown up in its heart.
But this—these women, their children, this vibrant nest of love and warmth and fellowship they’d made—was so much more. This was truly a family.
She’d first felt it keenly at Slick’s funeral. Seeing so many Bulls taking care of their women, their children, seeing the women offering their men comfort—her mom and dad had had that, more often than not. Uncle Brian and Aunt Mo definitely had it. Aunt Mad and Uncle Ox broke her heart with the weight of their undying love. And yet she had not before felt the bond of family go so deeply through her, wind so tightly around her.
Cecily turned back to Deb, who smiled and crooned softly to her nursing baby boy while she made chocolate-chip cookies. Deb had lost her father on the same day that Cecily had lost hers. She’d always known it; she’d been at Sam’s funeral. Why had she not, until this very moment, understood what that meant?
Deb had lost more than her father. Her family home had been completely destroyed. Every possession. Every keepsake. Every token of love and affection shared among the members of her family, for all their lives. Club violence had taken it all from her, and she’d been innocent, her father had been innocent.
And yet Deb didn’t blame the club. Cecily didn’t think she ever had. She’d moved closer to them, built a new life in the heart of them. Made a new family. Found new love.
Cecily’s father hadn’t been innocent. He’d been a Bull, a leader among them. He’d founded the club with Uncle Brian. He’d been party to the war, a general in it. He had brought on his own death.
Her knees went weak, and she grabbed the counter.
“You okay, cookie?” Her mother was right there, setting her hand on the small of her back. “It’s pretty hot in here. You need to sit down.”
Cecily shook her head. She didn’t know what she needed, or what she was thinking. Her head was full of echo and whine, and the room spun like a centrifuge.
“Cissy?” Now her mother sounded worried.
“It’s him. I’m mad at him. It’s Daddy. It’s Daddy. He did this! It’s his fault!”
“Oh, baby. Come on.”
She felt her mother’s arms, felt her leading her away, heard her say to somebody, “I got her, its okay,” felt the blast of cold air as her mother pushed her out the back door, into the wintery yard, felt her mother’s arms come around her, felt her hand push her head down to her shoulder. “It’s okay, cookie. It’s okay.”
Cecily couldn’t cry. Or breathe. Or think. Everything was noise and spinning. Her mother didn’t try to make her do anything. She simply held her.
Finally, sheer weariness quieted her head. “It’s his fault. He left. I feel like I hate him. That’s what’s been tearing me up. It’s his fault, and I was turning my hate everywhere else.”
Her mother pushed her back and looked into her eyes, cupping her face in her hands. “You don’t hate him, Cissy. You love him like you always did. And that’s okay. If only perfect people were loved, no one would be loved at all. He did his best. He failed sometimes. He made a lot of mistakes. He did terrible things, too, all the Bulls have, but he tried to be as good as he could be. And he loved you so much. He would have stayed forever if he could have.”
“All this time, I thought it was the club I blamed. And you. I blamed you.”
“I know. But the club is the club. The men we love make it what it is, and we—if we love the men, we have to accept the club they made. By accepting it, we’re part of it, too. We are all one.” She picked up Cecily’s hand and pushed back the sleeve of her ugly Christmas sweater—another Mo tradition, baking in ugly Christmas sweaters.
On the top of her wrist, exactly opposite the tattoo for her father on the underside, was Caleb’s flame—a hollow heart surrounded by flames, in a riot of reds, yellows, oranges, and browns. Inside the heart were two names: Caleb, and his Osage name, written in the tribal language, which meant ‘He Who Stands Alone.’ His grandfather had conferred that name on him in a ceremony when he was sixteen years old.
“This means you’ve chosen, Cecily. Before, as Dane’s daughter, the club was thrust on you. But this, this means you accept this life. The man and the life are one and the same. That’s the Bulls.”
~oOo~
Clara’s fiancé’s name was Trip Barnes. Trip. His name was Trip. Actually, it was even worse than that—his name was Charles Keller Barnes III, and his nickname was Trip. Because he was a Third. His family was some kind of old money nobility in Mississippi.
“Old money in Mississippi means plantations and people-owning, doesn’t it?” Master Charles Keller Barnes III was in Clara’s old room with the door closed, calling home, so Cecily meant to use this opportunity to do her elder-sister duty and lay down some shit.
“Fuck off, Ciss,” Clara bit out. “He’s a liberal.”
“Ah, well, fiddle-dee-dee. Whatever will his Pappy say?”
“Mom!”
Their mother sighed and wrapped green ribbon around a wrapped box. “Cecily, don’t be a bitch to your sister. Trip seems perfectly nice. Somebody give me a finger.”
Unable to pass up that hand-delivered opportunity, Cecily put up her middle finger, then placed it on the ribbon. To her sister, she said, “Sorry. He does seem n
ice. It’s just—talk about two worlds colliding. Do his people know where you come from? Does he? Should we quick call all the guys and tell them to wear sweaters instead of leather tomorrow?”
“He knows. He also knows that where I come from is not who I am.”
If anybody in the Bulls family could say that sentence and be accurate, it was Cecily’s baby sister. Blonde and blue-eyed, with a face like a Renoir painting, Clara had always been perky and sweet. She’d been a cheerleader and prom queen and her senior class Vice President. She was into fashion and boys and all the right girly things. She’d gone to college for fashion merchandising and had changed to advertising halfway through. After a prestige internship that summer, she was well-placed for a job at a Madison Avenue agency when she graduated the upcoming May.
Clara would live in New York City with her Southern gentleman and have a ‘classic six’ on the Upper East Side. They’d have two perfect children, a boy and a girl. The boy would no doubt be The Fourth—what would they call him, ‘Quad’? And a Golden Retriever named Goldie.
Cecily had been a girly-girl, too, until hormones had kicked in. In high school, she’d been as she was now: grunge with a dash of goth. She’d been the kid skipping PE to smoke behind the cafeteria, the one stealing vodka from her parents’ liquor cabinet. Her extracurriculars had been the underground student ‘zine and lurking in the back of play rehearsals heckling the actors.
So, yeah. Oskar ‘Dane’ Nielsen, founding member of the Brazen Bulls MC, and his old lady had had two daughters. One of them was a biker chick. The other was going to marry a man named Trip who wore Bass Weejuns. With tassels.
Where Clara came from was not who she was. Indeed.
Cecily got it, but their mother reacted to Clara’s statement by adding a violent flourish to the tie of the pretty bow, and just about took the tip of Cecily’s finger off.
“You come from love, Clara Marie. That’s where you come from.”
Clara sighed and rolled her eyes. “I know, Mom. I didn’t mean anything. Except you know this”—she waved vaguely around the living room of the house they’d grown up in—“isn’t normal.”
“Going to family with presents and having Christmas with people who love you isn’t normal? Decorations and eggnog and carols isn’t normal?”
“There’s a tailpipe on top of the entertainment center, Mom.”
“It was your father’s. It had just been delivered before…” Their mother shoved the rolls of wrapping paper aside. “You come from love. The family you’re embarrassed about, we love you. We miss you. Why can’t you accept that?”
“It’s not the tailpipe, Mom, and it’s not embarrassment. Don’t you get it? It’s that Uncle Brian just came home today from the hospital because somebody shot him. It’s that Cissy’s boyfriend was shot. It’s the way Daddy died. It’s bullets and death everywhere because our father was a criminal. The family you want me to accept is all criminals.”
Their mother only stared down at the table before her and said nothing.
“Why’d you come home at all then, Clare?” Cecily asked.
“Because I love you, and I do miss you. I wanted you to see that I’m happy, and I’m safe. And…and…” She stopped, seemed to screw up her courage, and started again, “I didn’t want to say this until the end of the visit, but…I want to say goodbye. This is the last time I’ll come here.”
Their mother looked up at that, and Cecily wanted to slap her sister for putting that kind of pain in their mother’s eyes. “You’re cutting ties?”
At least Clara had the grace to look pained herself. “I have to, Mama. I don’t want any more of this. I need a clean break.”
Yep, violence was definitely in order. Cecily stormed around the table and slapped her sister across the face. “And you waited until the check had cleared on your last semester’s tuition to do it. You came home for fucking Christmas to do this, you stupid, selfish cunt!” She slapped her again.
“Cecily, enough!” Their mother went to Clara and tried to draw her into an embrace, but the traitorous little bitch pushed her away.
Clutching her face, Clara shouted, “This is what it’s like! This is toxic, this family! There’s so much violence and death that nobody knows how to be a normal human being!”
“If what you’re doing right now is how normal human beings behave, then give me violence and death! You bitch!” Cecily stomped after her, totally ready to beat Clara bloody, but Trip came around the corner just then, looking shocked, and Clara ran to him and threw her arms around his neck, now weeping wildly.
“What’s going on?”
Cecily didn’t bother to take the rage from her voice. “Take your little bimbo and get the fuck out of this house, Master Barnes.”
“I—Clara?”
Cecily’s ex-sister nodded against his chest. “I want to go. Can we please go?”
“Yeah, sweetheart, we’ll go.” He looked past Cecily to their mother. “I don’t know what happened. If I owe you an apology…”
“You don’t, son. Take her and go, please. She doesn’t want to be here. Take care of her, okay?”
Understanding dawned on his blandly handsome face. He’d known this was Clara’s last visit home. Cecily wondered how much he’d had to do with that choice.
“I will,” he said, and drew her from the room.
They hadn’t even moved their luggage from the front hall, so they just went right back out the way they’d come in an hour before. Cecily and her mother stood at the front door and watched their rental car pull down the gravel drive, through the wooded lane, and away.
“I thought we gave you a good life,” her mother said, with defeat and sorrow dragging her words through mud. “I thought we were a good family.”
Cecily wrapped her arms around her mother. “You did, Mama. We were. We are. I’m sorry I forgot that for a while, but I won’t forget it again.”
She’d remembered because she’d come back to Tulsa, and the family had refused to let her pull away. Mo, and her mother, and all the club women had kept her in reach. Maverick and Caleb had pulled her close and soothed her hurts.
Clara had stayed away, beyond the pull of the Bulls’ fierce, fearsome love, and finally moved out of reach.
Standing at the front door, staring at the empty place where Trip’s rental car had been, Cecily replayed that scene with her sister, the way she’d leapt to their mother’s defense, and to the club’s, without a thought. And she understood with full, technicolor clarity that she was, that she had always been and would always be, part of this family.
A Bull had killed her father. But the Bulls had saved her. Made her whole.
If Clara wasn’t whole here, then she was right to leave. But Cecily was home.
~oOo~
“Oh my God, I am never eating again.” Cecily dropped onto Caleb’s lap, and he accepted her weight with a grunt.
The Bulls had spent the day together, exchanging presents, cooing over baby Athena and baby Sammy, playing with all the other kids, eating, drinking, laughing, talking. Uncle Brian had taken root on his side of the recliner couch in their vast family room, and people had come and gone from his company as if in shifts, making sure he was part of everything.
It was a family, a good one. Not normal, but not toxic, either. If Clara couldn’t see that, couldn’t feel it, then she belonged with her Southern gentleman with the ridiculous name.
Caleb patted her thigh. “You know, I got shot a couple months ago. I’m not supposed to be doing any heavy lifting yet.”
She grinned and yanked on his hair. “Dick.”
He grinned back. “Chub. How many helpings of mashed potatoes did you eat?”
“Only three. They’re my favorite food.”
“God, I love you. All your wild ways, and that’s your favorite food? Mashed potatoes. Old people food.”
“Mo’s mashed potatoes are magic!” Gunner said from the sofa nearby.
“Indeed they are,” came Uncle Brian’s
low voice. He’d had a huge day for an old man who’d spent nearly two months in the hospital, and his exhaustion was obvious in his voice, and in the way he lay back on the sofa with his eyes closed.
Caleb caught Mo’s eyes, and Cecily grinned to see him go a little bit pale. “They’re delicious, Mo.”
“Thank you. Yes, they are.” She came all the way into the room. “Before it’s time to start cleaning up and people start wandering off, I want to call everyone in. I have something to share with the whole family.”
“Kids too?” Jenny asked.
“The kids won’t understand, but it’s okay if they stay.”
Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7) Page 30
