Of all that, John Steinbeck was his very favorite. Ernest Hemingway, in Becker’s opinion, was head and shoulders up his own ass, but Steinbeck knew what life was. What he wrote was real.
Beside him on the bed, taking up well more than their share, Sage and Lemmy slept together, Sage curled in a little ball, and the pup nested inside. He smiled and brushed his hand over her hair where it fanned across her pillow.
Once they’d gotten back to the house, their house, she’d shaken off the guilty weight she’d been carrying. They’d showered together, washing off the filth and desolation from that sad little shack. They’d made a meal, a late lunch or early supper, and then they’d spent the evening watching television.
She was okay. All the turmoil of this shitty, shitty summer was now behind her, behind them, and she was okay. Still, though, as he watched her sleep, looking so young and so sweet, so innocent, Becker’s heart hurt—with her pain and with ancient echoes of his own.
In his first years of grade school, he’d been a pretty good student. He’d enjoyed everything about school and had been average or better in learning all the skills young kids learned. Then, in the middle of fourth grade, his father had keeled over dead in the barn—the same barn the Bulls now used to torture their enemies.
From that point on, he’d been what might best be called an ‘indifferent’ student. An indifferent boy in every way. Neither smart nor stupid, neither strong nor weak, neither skinny nor fat, neither poor nor rich, in the relative scheme of his poor rural area. He’d had no friends and few people he’d willingly speak to.
He’d kept his head down, his shoulders up tight, and his mouth closed. He’d sat in the back corner of every classroom he could—not the corner where the troublemakers held court, but the other side of the room, where he could be forgotten. He’d rarely spoken up unless he’d had no choice; he’d rarely done any work that couldn’t be done on the bus to and from school. All his report cards had been full of the same grade, over and over, sometimes with a plus or minus, but otherwise an unbroken line of Cs, and the repeated canned comments that he was ‘quiet’ and ‘would do well with more effort.’
All he’d wanted was not to be noticed, neither at school nor at home. Getting noticed at school meant getting noticed at home, and by the time he was in fifth grade, getting noticed at home meant a beating for him and his mom both.
His mother had gone from frantic desperation at the loss of her first husband to frantic cheerfulness for her second before Becker had gotten all the way through the sharpest pain of his grief. He’d worn the same suit to his father’s funeral that he wore to his mother’s next wedding; he hadn’t had the time to outgrow it.
He loved his mother; he’d loved her until the day she’d died. But he sure as fuck understood Sage’s relief in her own loss. Being raised by a woman so invested in her own helplessness fucked hard with a kid’s head. Women like that had a real knack for picking the worst possible men to ‘take care of them,’ and Becker knew why. He’d seen it from the other end, as a man himself.
Guys like Denny, and Clyde, and Kent, they hunted women like Patsy and his mom, weak-willed women terrified of their own selves. Guys like that gave off a vibe of being ‘take-charge,’ and ‘can-do,’ being strong and resolute, but really they were just as weak as the women—or almost as weak. Just strong enough to dominate women like that, but so weak they needed women on their knees before them to feel like men at all.
Violence kept women, and their children, trapped in the cycles of abuse that those men spun, and only violence could break the cycles. Becker hadn’t seen them end any other way. With a Westinghouse iron, or a sawed-off Mossberg, by a terrified teenager saving his mom or a plucky young woman saving a puppy, with a knee to the throat or a barrel in the mouth, violence was the only thing that made it stop.
He’d heard the psychobabble in prison, when they’d made him see a shrink, and knew all the reasons it was supposedly wrong to think the way he did, but what he knew was simple: a man who could feel like a man only when a woman or child, or pet, was cowering at his feet would not stop making them cower until somebody made him stop breathing. Period. And some women and children didn’t know how to know it wasn’t the way things should be.
What Clyde had done at the end, and what Becker had done in response, and the price he’d paid for it, had given his mother a good hard psychic shake, and she’d never brought another man into his father’s house again. He’d made it stop.
But the truth was, she’d never really changed. The woman who’d been alone for all his years in prison and managed to keep herself together had hung needily on him from the day of his release until the end of her life. Even without an abusive man in her life, the cycle had managed to continue until she died.
So yeah, it was a huge fucking relief when the cycle broke, however it broke. Even if it took your mother with it.
And yeah, it felt wrong and shameful, whether you were twenty years old or past forty, to feel the burden of your own mother’s life lift off your chest and let you breathe free for once.
Lemmy groaned and extricated himself from Sage’s hold. She sighed and rolled over, facing Becker now, but she didn’t wake.
As the pup stood in the middle of the bed and stretched, Becker got up and pulled on his underwear. “C’mon boy. Let’s do some business.”
As soon as Becker opened the back door, Lemmy trotted out and went to pee on the base of the peach tree. It had taken about three days to train this puppy to go outside. He had also already learned all the basic commands. Becker wondered if he hadn’t escaped from some shadowy lab where they tried to make animals geniuses, like in Flowers for Algernon, because the pup was scary smart.
He hoped human babies were this easy.
For the way he’d grown up, and for the life he’d led since, Becker had intended never to be a father. So much of his life was Not Suitable For Children. But when Sage had told him she wanted him to go without a condom, he’d hesitated for all of about thirty seconds. Since that night, the night of her mother’s death, they hadn’t gone back to them.
They were now actively trying to get pregnant. He was actively trying to knock up his twenty-year-old woman.
And he wanted it. They’d been together all summer, she’d been fully living with him for the last half of it, and coming home to a house full of bustle and love, with a woman and a dog waiting for him and happy to have him home, with music on the stereo and a good meal on the way, eating together and then relaxing in the yard or on the sofa—nothing in his life had ever been so good. Not even when his father was alive; he’d been a quiet, somber man, much older than his mother, and there hadn’t been much music or laughter in that house, though there hadn’t been abuse and pain, either.
Becker had built an outlaw life to live on his own, but now what he wanted was the whole picket-fence package. What kind of father would he be? He couldn’t begin to guess. But he knew how not to be, and his brothers provided some models for the right way.
Finished voiding his bladder, Lemmy started snuffling around the yard, looking for trouble to get into. Becker called him in. As usual after his middle-of-the-night pee break, the pup was fully rested and not interested in snuggling, so Becker left him gnawing on a cow ear and went back to the bedroom.
Sage had shifted in her sleep again, drawing his pillow over to shield her eyes from the lamp he’d been reading by. She’d stretched out, too, and the covers had slipped down, so most of her naked body was exposed. Small of frame but shapely. Lithe and slim.
He stood at the foot of the bed and feasted on the sight. Nobody looked like his Sage. From the tops of her feet to her temple, her body was a pale canvas of black ink—lacy patterns and scrolls, stylized shapes like leaves or petals, sweeping strokes and clusters of dots. She wasn’t entirely covered; most of her back was bare, and no one part of her was fully inked. Each piece was distinct but part of a whole as well. Even his flame, on her neck behind her ear, worked with the th
eme of her art. That little spray of tiny bell flowers, over her temple and sweeping into her hairline, was the only piece not obviously like the others, and it, too, fit the theme of her.
So damn beautiful.
Becker had some good ink. His guy at Iron Spike had been tattooing for twenty years and was a true artist. He’d done good covers of the crappy prison tats on his forearms, and his elaborate, full-back club piece, too. Still, Becker felt like a tattoo novice next to Sage.
His ink said something about him, told his story. At first glance, Sage’s seemed more decorative, but really it was no less an expression of identity than his own. All that intricate beauty embedded in her skin marked her as different from the norm and as someone who could stand enduring pain. She’d taken an ugly upbringing, an ugly life, and made herself a piece of art within it, while at the same time, with the same act, she’d crafted her body into its own armor. That said everything about her.
Becker stripped off his boxers, turned out the light, and got into bed with his one-of-a-kind old lady. When he pulled her into his arms, she came easily to him, sighing softly, and coiled herself around him.
She’d be okay. She was okay. And when they had a kid, if they had a kid, they would raise him or her to be a survivor. Like them.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sage sat cross-legged on one of Becker’s worktables and watched as he screwed a big chrome thingy in place. She’d first seen the inside of this workshop in April, the day he’d jumped the fence to save her mom ... she shoved that thought out of the way. She’d first seen this shop in April, and the thing he’d been working on then had looked more like the pieces of a puzzle of a bike than an actual bike.
Now, in the middle of September, it was almost finished, and obviously a bike—but an old one, nothing like the big black beast he rode every day or even the rickety chopper he sometimes worked on.
This old machine was a 1950 Indian Chief. After sitting here several times for hours at a time watching him work, she should have known all the details about the bike; he liked to talk to her about what he was doing while he worked. But after ‘1950 Indian Chief’ most of what he said became Charlie-Brown-grownup trumpeting. All the talk about what he was doing, why he was doing it, and what he was doing it with was only interesting because he had a good voice and she liked to hear it. The actual words didn’t matter, not when he was rattling on about straight pipes and flatheads and distributors.
He didn’t seem to care if she was really taking it in, either. He simply liked to talk while she listened, and the sound of his voice made her happy. Win-win.
It didn’t hurt that he usually worked without a shirt on, either. Today, sadly, the temperature had been autumn-cool and the skies overcast, so he was wearing a faded black t-shirt, but he still looked damn fine.
Life lately had landed pretty solidly in the ‘win’ column, which was a damn strange thing to say less than a month after her mom blew her own head off with a sawed-off shotgun. But it was true. The guilt she felt didn’t make it any less true. Becker loved her. He took care of her, and she’d found a way to take care of him, too—a way she enjoyed for reasons more than his enjoyment. For the first time in her life, she had a home she wanted to be in, and she liked to take care of it.
Maybe she was pregnant, too. She’d never wanted kids before, had been in the ‘there are enough mouths to feed in this shitty world’ camp, until that night when she’d decided she needed everything of Becker she could get. Maybe not the smartest time ever to decide to go for a full-life revision, but he’d been in, too. Since then, she’d had lots of time to think about it, and they’d talked it out like actual rational adults, and they’d come down on the side of making a kid.
Which she might currently be doing. Her period was possibly a day late—but only possibly, because it had never been that good at hitting its mark. Some women could time their cycles to the minute, it seemed like—when it would start, when it would end, how heavy it would be and when, precisely how many pads or tampons they’d need.
Not Sage. She was regular enough, had one every month, but only had a general sense when to expect it, a range of three days or so, and it lasted three to five days as well. Sometimes it was heavy enough—and holy shit painful enough—that Wes Craven could have directed it, and other times it was no big deal.
She’d just finished her last one right before her mom died. So not bleeding yet the day after she thought it might possibly start was hardly a clear sign that she had a tenant in there. Nor were her sore boobs.
She felt a little dizzy, though, and that wasn’t a typical period sign. But they’d slept in and skipped breakfast, so ... anyway. She was trying not to think about it too much yet.
Becker clearly wasn’t keeping track. Though they talked about the ‘if’ a lot, he hadn’t asked at all about the ‘when.’ Sage wondered if he even had any idea when it was time to test. Maybe she’d bring it up today. They could get a test or two on the way home from Athena’s birthday party.
He finished screwing the shiny part onto the bike and stood up. Wiping his hands on a shop towel, he surveyed his efforts. Sage set her wonderings aside and gave the bike a real look, too.
“Is it done?”
With a chuckle almost condescending enough to deserve a punch, Becker came to her and rested back against the worktop she sat on. “Won’t get far without the wheels, shortcake. Or a seat.”
“Oh. Duh. I was focused on the shiny parts.”
He leaned her way and kissed the side of her head. “It’s just about done. When the wheels come in and I get those tires over there on them. Then I’ll put on the seat that came yesterday, and polish it all up. Then it’ll be done.”
She pushed out her bottom lip. “That seat only fits one. No room for me.”
“It’s a fifty-year-old bike, hon. You wouldn’t like the ride anyway—nowhere near as smooth as the Softail. Speaking of which ...”—he moved to stand before her and hook his hands around her knees—“Looks like the sun’s breaking through, and we can take the bike today after all. We should get washed up.”
Apollo and Jacinda’s daughter, Athena, had turned one a couple days ago, and they were having a party at their house this afternoon. “Can we take the bike? Will the present fit in a saddlebag?”
“You have a present?”
“Well, yeah. We’re going to a baby’s birthday party. I think that’s kind of the point. Don’t you usually bring presents to these things?” She couldn’t remember if he’d had a gift for Sammy’s party a while back; she’d been pretty distracted that day, after trying to move her things out of her mom’s ... nope, not thinking about that.
“Uh, no. Usually I hand over some cash.”
Men. She rolled her eyes. “Oh, I’m sure the kids really appreciate that.”
His grin was sly. “Maybe not, but their parents do.” Grasping her around the waist, he lifted her off the counter, spun on his heel, and set her on the floor. “C’mon, shortcake, let’s get in the shower. We got time to make it a good one.”
Sage had felt vaguely dizzy all morning, but that short little spin, just a one-eighty, made her belly flip all the way over. She lurched forward and puked before she could do anything about it, on the workshop floor right beside Becker. Last night’s spaghetti was the last thing she’d eaten, but enough of that was left to splash back, all over his boots and the bottom of his jeans.
For a second or two, nobody moved; they both stood there, Sage leaning over her puddle of puke, Becker standing over her. Then Lemmy woke up from his nap, stretched, and sauntered over to sample the unexpected treat. The sight of which made Sage retch more.
Becker pushed him away with the toe of his defiled boot and got hold of her again. “Hey, hey. You sick? Or—” He cut off and lifted her chin. “Are you ...?”
She was too busy trying to process the humiliation of puking on him to have had any other thought, but now she knew what he was thinking. “Maybe?”
“Well, shit. L
et’s get you to bed.”
He tried to pick her up again, but she pushed him off and stepped away, to the slop sink. “I don’t need to go to bed. I just—gross, Lem.” The pup had made his way back to the puddle and ... ugh.
Becker picked Lemmy up and set him in the yard, then came back and closed the door. Immediately, the air filled with canine cries of desolate abandonment.
Sage soaked a big wad of paper towels from the tap, but Becker was there, taking them from her. “I got it. Sit down, hon.”
“I don’t even know if I am,” she protested—but she felt tired and dizzy, so she did what he wanted and sat on the stool nearby.
“When I’m done here and get you in bed, I’ll go to the drugstore and get one of those tests, and then we’ll know.”
A man who gave one-year-olds money for their birthday could not be trusted to select a pregnancy test kit. “I’m going, too. I don’t need to go to bed. This isn’t Victorian England, and pregnancy isn’t a disease.”
“Says the stubborn little shit who just chucked all over my boots.” He stood and threw the paper towels in the trash, then went to the sink and washed up.
Lemmy gave up his complaints and probably went to dig up the tulip and daffodil bulbs Sage had planted the day before. In the sudden quiet, Becker came over and cupped her face in his hand. The strong smell of his Goop soap somehow settled her stomach and cleared her head. “If you’re pregnant, you better let me take care of you right, Sage.”
“What does that mean? I don’t want to sit around all day like an invalid. I won’t. Besides, you’re gone a lot, so you can’t do everything for me, anyway.”
“I don’t want that. I just want to keep you safe and healthy.”
She smiled and grabbed fistfuls of his t-shirt. “Aren’t you already doing that?”
Lead (The Brazen Bulls MC, #8) Page 28