“Am I even going to be able to have a party for my birthday?” Anna asked with a bit more attitude that she was due.
“You made your bed, Anna. I am not doing this to you. You did this to you. No, you’re going to miss out on the party you were hoping for, because the decisions you made for yourself had consequences for people.”
That caused her to perk up. “Evan?” She asked.
I turned to look at her, “I don’t know what happened with him,” I admitted. Her face screwed up into a ball of confusion.
“What do you mean you don’t know what happened to him? How could you not know?”
“Your father wouldn’t tell me. He only said things were handled on that end, that it was club business, and I’d made it perfectly clear how I felt about the club. Then he hung up. Haven’t heard from him since.” I must not have been able to hide the hurt that had caused me because Anna rose to her feet from the kitchen chair she’d perched herself on and came over to throw her arms around me.
“I’m so sorry, momma. I thought he would choose you over the club. I really did.”
I shook my head. “I never asked him to do that,” I reminded her.
“You shouldn’t have had to though.”
“Anna, it’s not that simple. We’re talking about people who he has known his entire life. They are family. Some of those men have known him since he was in diapers, and others he held when they were born. I would never ask him to walk away from them because they are a part of him he could never untie himself from. I needed to walk away for a while, and that was different. I may have known some of those people my whole life too, but…”
“You also held them responsible for Toby,” she finished for me.
“Not just Toby, but yes, the worst things that have ever happened in my life have been because of the club. I’ve had a hard time moving past that.”
“But you’ve been ready to do it though. Why don’t you just tell him?”
“Because I think he wasn’t ready to be let go of me all that time, but now he is. For the first time since we separated, he didn’t ask if he could come home.” I didn’t mean to drop that on my daughter, of all people. Frankly, I didn’t really have anyone else to talk to about it. The women I knew were either from the club or from work. I wouldn’t tell the women from work a single thing. Half of them had been panting after my man for years. I fully believe if I mentioned our separation there they would be knocking on the clubhouse door the next day. The women from the club, well, they’d kept their distance. Even Tiger Lily had stayed away, and that hurt. I knew she had been there during my crazy club-blaming breakdown at the cemetery, but surely, she had to know she would have done the same, felt the same had it been one of her boys? Right?
“Momma!” She sighed and squeezed me tighter. I swiped hard at the traitorous tear that slipped free and then I dropped the sausage into the skillet so I could cook us up some breakfast, and shake off the hurt that threatened to swamp me again. Since the funeral, Ever and Deck had been the only people to come by and check on me. Aside from CJ when he would come back to see if I was okay and if he could come home yet.
For the past few weeks I’d made it a point that Anna and I sit down to at least two meals a day together. We both had to eat them. Personally, because I had been compared to the walking dead, and Anna had to do so because I didn’t want her heartache to do to her what mine had done to me. The bonus was that we had grown closer in doing so. At least, once she got over being so dang angry with me. The first week was hell. The subsequent four had been gradually better.
“Ugh,” Anna hissed in my ear and then let me go as if I were on fire and she didn’t want to go up in flames too. Then I noticed the color drain from her face, and finally her quick flight to the sink where she emptied her stomach. I glanced from my daughter who had been fine moments ago to the pan of cooking meat and immediately pulled it from the burner and dropped a lid down on the pan. Then I opened a window and took a deep breath of fresh air because I knew what that reaction meant. I’d had it when I was pregnant with her.
“I think maybe you need to try to hold anything else in until you get upstairs, far away from the kitchen. I’ll bring you something to settle your stomach in just a bit,” I told her.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she whispered with wide panicked eyes on me.
“It’ll be okay,” I told her. “Go on, get upstairs. The further from the smell, the better you’ll feel.”
She looked at me strangely then but did as I asked. I cleaned up the mess I’d made in the kitchen and then left the house and jumped in my car. It took me twenty minutes to go to the store, get what was needed, and come back. When I re-entered the house it was to find my baby girl lying in her bed curled into the fetal position. “Feeling any better?” I asked her as I placed my bags down at the end of her bed.
“Not really, but I don’t have anything left in my stomach to throw up.”
I nodded sagely and then turned away from her to dig in the bag. I grabbed her a Ginger Ale and a small pack of saltine crackers and handed them to her. “This will help with that.”
She was shaking her head violently. “I don’t want to put anything in my mouth, it will just come back up.”
“Trust me,” I told her. “It will help settle your stomach.” She gave me a wary look, but sat up and popped the top on the bubbly drink and took a sip. Then she set it aside on her nightstand and wrestled with the crackers to get them opened. I laughed at her when she tugged too hard and a few went flying all over her bed.
“Really? You’re laughing at me?”
“Honey, right now, it’s the only thing I can do because things are about to change so much all over again.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She managed to get the question out around a mouthful of cracker. I turned back to the bag and then hesitated.
“Have you gone pee yet this morning?”
“Momma, why are you being so weird?”
“Just answer the question,” I told her.
“No, I crawled in bed after I threw up.” I turned and reached back in the bag and then handed her the box I pulled out of it. “What’s this?” She asked the question just before she glanced down at it.
“I think you need to go pee on that,” I told her. Tears pooled in eyes so wide I’d never seen them like that before. I watched as she was trying to figure something out. No doubt, she was trying to remember when her last period was. I was thinking back on it too and I couldn’t remember buying her any supplies for the past two months. We were usually pretty well stocked considering there was me, Anna, sometimes Ever, and Tiger Lily here too. We were always prepared in case someone had their monthly visitor.
“Momma?” My name came out as a tiny little question. “He hasn’t even come to see me, to see if I was okay,” she mumbled.
That was true, and I had a feeling that once Double-D went back to the club and laid everything out for the man that he wouldn’t have done so. He probably felt beyond betrayed by her, and anything he thought he might have been feeling for my daughter – at least I hoped he had feelings for – was probably lost with that betrayal coming to light. I felt for my baby girl then. I didn’t know how this was going to go over. First, we needed confirmation though. Then, I would be by her side no matter what happened.
“Will you stay with me?” Anna asked suddenly.
“You want me in there while you pee on the stick?” I asked not sure I wanted to watch my own daughter pee. I’d seen enough of that when she was little.
“Yeah, you could just turn around while I do it. I can’t. I don’t… Oh God! Momma, I can’t be pregnant!” I could hear the panic in her voice and I slid up the bed beside her spooning her and pulling her close to the heat of my body. She was shivering, and I knew it wasn’t because she was cold. I ran a hand over her silky dark brown waves and then kissed her head.
“I promise you, everything will be okay. I will be here with you, no matter what. Do you under
stand that? No matter what! You will have me by your side. You will not be alone.” She turned in my arms then, tears sliding free and running rivers down her pinked cheeks. Then she wrapped her arms around me too and held on for dear life.
“You are the best mom in the world, you know that, right?”
“Of course I do!” I teased, trying to lighten the situation. “You know what that means though?”
“What?”
“That means you learned from the best, so if that test says what I think it will, everything will be just fine.”
She gave me a small smile. It wasn’t much, but it was something. “I think he hates me though. You’re right, I never really lied to him, but…”
“You didn’t exactly tell the truth either. Omissions are still lies,” I confirmed.
“I know that now,” she admitted. Then she huffed out the biggest sigh I’d ever seen come from such a tiny body. “I knew that then too, I just… I wanted… I needed to be someone else. I needed to escape.”
“I know, baby. I know.” And I did know. I needed to escape my life too; only it wasn’t so easy when you were older. There was no hiding from the things in your life that still needed doing. Work, kids, eating, sleeping. I know. I tried hiding. Turns out all it got me was looking like the undead, and not the attractive vampire kind either. No, I looked like an episode of that popular TV show where the corpses are still trying to call around when most of the meat on their bones is missing, dragging broken legs behind them, and jaw unhinged apparently. At least, that was the image conjured the night I’d been compared to a zombie. Yeah, okay, so I had dwelled on that a little too long. Whatever.
“Come on, Anna, let’s get you in there so we can figure out if our family is growing.” Then I stopped myself. “Oh, um, I mean shit!”
“What?”
I looked my daughter in the eye then. “You have choices, you know. You’re young. I won’t make that decision for you, but considering the circumstance, if you don’t want to raise a baby…” I just left it hanging in the air.
“Momma, I am young, but you just told me you’d be there for me. I have support. I’ll have extra love for a baby if there is one. Even if the father doesn’t want anything to do with it or me, it’ll be okay. We’ll be okay. I couldn’t give up my baby for adoption after carrying it, I don’t think. I remember hearing all the stories you told about Toby and me when you were pregnant with us. You loved us before you ever saw us,” she stated.
“That’s true,” I agreed, because it was very true.
“And I couldn’t. I mean, you told me there were consequences to my actions. A baby is a consequence and I need to take responsibility for that. It might be different if I was on my own and couldn’t take care of it, but you said I have you,” she said the last a little unsure of herself.
“You will always have me. No doubt, you’ll have Ever there for you as well.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she mentioned quickly.
“Why?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Evan is Deck’s best friend,” I explained.
I tried to hold back the cringe, but knew I hadn’t succeeded when she gave me that ‘I told you so’ look. “Well, that will complicate things for Deck and his friend, I’m sure, but your sister would never turn you or your baby away.”
“You sound so sure of that.”
“I am sure of that. After everything she’s been through, she would never ostracize her family.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
I climbed off the bed then. “Come on, let’s go see to this so we can be sure so we don’t plan for something that may not actually be happening.”
It took three days to get Anna in to see the doc to confirm that the home tests she had taken were accurate. They were indeed. She was measuring in at about nine weeks and we actually got to hear the baby’s heartbeat too. Once we left the doctor’s office I took her to her favorite little shop to grab a frozen yogurt.
“That was amazing,” she beamed at me across the table after staring into her bowl of mush for a bit. My girl enjoyed mixing several flavors then slathering them with the different candy options before stirring them into what amounted a frozen yogurt shake-like mess filled with candy. It was her one major indulgence in life, so I let her have it, especially considering how hard today had been and was shaping up to be.
I smiled back. “That was something else, for sure,” I told her. “I remember the first time I ever heard that sound.”
“With Toby?”
“Yeah, with Toby,” and while saying his name still hurt, it also made me smile to remember the first time I heard his heart beating from inside me. “It was so fast. I remember panicking, because I knew that a baby’s heart rate was faster than what ours is, but I never knew it was like that. At least I never heard one before so I thought something was wrong.” I admitted and she laughed at me. “The doctor had to calm me down, and that was the first moment I knew that it didn’t matter if he turned out to be a boy or a girl or what. I loved that little being that was growing inside of me already.” My daughter reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
“Now, I know exactly what you mean by that,” she told me. I didn’t think my heart could hold everything it was feeling just then. Part of me was ecstatic about my grandchild, crazy worried about my daughter becoming a mother so young, and then there was the talk of Toby that brought both joy and sorrow. The worst though, was the anticipation, because I knew where our conversation was about to go. I knew this, because I was about to steer it there. She couldn’t avoid this forever. Just ripping it off like a Band-Aid and getting it over with seemed to be the best bet.
“Anna,” I muttered before looking up to meet her blue eyes from the other side of the table. Her smile slipped. She knew too.
“I’m so scared,” she admitted.
“I know, baby girl, but the longer you wait the more it’s going to eat at you. Better to get it over with so you can deal with the fallout – whatever it may be – rather than sit and stew in the worry of what might be.”
“Will you be there with me?” She asked.
“Of course, I will. Any time you need me, I’ll be there.”
She glanced down at what was left of her mush and sighed deeply. “I guess we better go get this over with.”
“Are you going to take the ultrasound pictures in with you?”
“Yes, but do you know if he’s even still there? At the club, I mean?”
“I do,” I informed her. She gave me a quizzical look.
“I thought daddy wasn’t talking to you about it?”
“He wasn’t so I asked Ever if Deck’s friend had been made a brother yet, and she told me he had. She was also a little suspicious, so the quicker we get this out in the open, the better, I think.”
Her eyes grew wide. “They made him a full-patch brother?”
“I’m just as surprised as you are, but yes, apparently they did.”
By the time we went home, got cleaned up, and Anna hopped into a cuter outfit, then talked through her jitters some more it was already almost 8 pm. I hated going to the club so late, but I really couldn’t get Anna off her butt any sooner. “Anna, that’s it. No more procrastinating. I know you’re scared, but hell, you’ve waited so long the man probably won’t be around at this point.”
“What? Why not? Where would he be if not at the clubhouse?”
“Seriously, Anna? He’s not a prospect anymore which means his time is own, and plus he’s probably working for the club now which means either he’s working the garage they bought or one of the clubs.” It was clear by her reaction that she hadn’t thought about where the man would be working once his prospecting period was over with. “Come on,” I told her as I took hold of her hand and pulled her to me. After a quick hug, I moved us out the door and to my Honda HRV.
It only took a few minutes for us to get to the clubhouse and then we both found ourselves taking deep, gulping breaths. “Are you
ready for this?” I asked.
“No. Are you ready for this?” She returned, knowing this was the first time since before Toby’s death that I’d even been on club property, let alone standing outside of the clubhouse. There wasn’t a gate to keep people out or anything, but the property sat off on it’s own and was well marked as belonging to the Aces High MC. Locals knew not to fuck around here and outsiders were easily scared off by the biker images painted on the building, not to mention all the bikes usually lined up outside. There were only a few here tonight, but of those few I recognized Double-D’s bike immediately. Crap.
Hand in hand my daughter and I walked up to the door and then stood there for a moment too. Once we both took a fortifying breath we opened the door only to be greeted by a prospect neither of us had ever seen before. “No.” He stated as he used his large body to block our entry.
“Yes!” I threw back at him. “We’re here to see my husband and her father,” I informed the man. He just glared at us, obviously not knowing who we were.
“Yeah? Whose that supposed to be?”
“Double-D,” I informed him. He smirked at me.
“He ain’t got no old lady, so I doubt that.” What? Those words slammed into me so hard I thought I would double over with the pain they caused. Anna saw my reaction and reached up and smacked the shit out of the man.
“Who the hell do you think you are speaking to her like that?” She screamed.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” a deep voice called out from just behind us. I turned to see Crow there. “What’s going on, honey?” He asked me.
“We came to see Double-D, and this jerk wouldn’t let us in,” I explained. “Said D doesn’t have an old lady,” I went on, choking on those words.
“Fucking hell,” Crow spit out. “Boy, you probably just cost yourself a goddamn patch!” The man’s surprise could not have been more evident. He took a small step back from the doorway.
“I’ve been here five months. Never heard him speak about a woman. I didn’t know,” the man sputtered out.
“Get the fuck out of their way, and take note of who they are. That there is Lucy, Double-D’s old lady and wife, and that is Annalise, his baby girl. You ever see them, they get let through immediately.”
A Love So Hard (Aces High MC - Charleston Book 2) Page 32