HORIZON MC

by Clara Kendrick

“What is all this?” Katie asked, propping her fists on her hips. “What’s going on?”

  I grinned at her, and extended my hand. “Have a seat.”

  “Hell no.” She looked askance at the booth. “You’ve got it rigged with something. A whoopee cushion. You rubbed your balls all over it. Something. I don’t know.”

  “You’re so paranoid,” I teased her. “Come on. We have good news.”

  “Plus we’re all practically sitting on top of one another to be able to fit you in here,” Ace said. “Sit down. It’s fine.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Are you implying that my ass is too wide to fit in the booth?”

  Sloan groaned. “Not a very graceful handling of the situation, brother.”

  “Not what I meant!” Ace exclaimed. “Just that we’re going to maybe need a bigger booth.”

  “That didn’t make it better!” she shouted.

  “Someone take that shovel from Ace before he digs the hole too deep,” Chuck remarked. “Jesus, man.”

  “How’s this,” Ace said. “Sit in my lap.”

  “Oh, you son of a–”

  “I like it when you sit in my lap.” He leered briefly at her. “But then you’ll know that there’s nothing wrong with the seat because I’m the seat.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty wrong with you,” Katie muttered, but she perched precariously on Ace’s thighs. He looked somewhere between relieved and happy, snaking his arms around her waist as she slapped at his hands.

  “Let’s call this meeting to order,” I said, knocking my beer bottle against the table.

  “What… Is this a Horizon MC meeting?” She gaped at me.

  “The prospect has not been invited to speak,” Brody pointed out.

  Katie opened her mouth to retort, but Ace pinched her hip. She yelped and gave him a baleful look, but didn’t say anything else.

  “This meeting has been called specially to vote on a matter of some importance,” I continued. “The addition of this chapter’s first female member, Kathryn Kelley.”

  Her mouth fell open again, and I wished I’d had the foresight to hide Haley nearby to snap some photos of just how shocked Katie was. It was priceless.

  “Is there anyone here who would speak in favor of voting in this prospective member?” I asked.

  Ace’s hand flew up, and I nodded at him. “Katie – our prospective member – is maybe a better biker than I am. She’s poetry in motion on her motorcycle. Easy on the eyes, too.” She laughed behind her hand as Chuck’s hand flew up. I nodded.

  “The prospective member has always had the club’s best interests in mind,” he pointed out. “She’s vouched for us in certain legal matters.”

  “And turned a blind eye when things got hairy,” Brody threw in, no doubt remembering busting his knuckles on Nadine’s brother’s face during Thanksgiving. “But more than that, she’s stuck around when she could’ve moved on. Part of that might be due to an unfortunate fraternization with existing member Ace Black, but the other part has benefited Rio Seco and the region as a whole through her public service.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Is there anyone here who would speak against this prospective member?”

  Not one person raised their hand, so I did. The sigh around the table was fully collective, and Katie watched me warily, her lower lip sticking out a little.

  “I would just like to say, for the record–”

  “Come on, James.”

  “Ace Black, you are out of order,” I said, trying not to laugh at him. “As I was saying, for the record, it should not have taken this long to add the prospective member to our ranks. She is obviously a valuable asset and will add many positive attributes to this club.”

  Katie’s eyes were shining, goddamn her, and this was supposed to be much more fun than meaningful and moving, but there we were.

  I coughed and continued. “So, if there are no other objections, let’s move to a vote. All those in favor of adding prospective member Kathryn Kelley to the club ranks, say ‘aye.’”

  Everyone made a game of trying to shout louder than the person sitting next to them. Katie was loudest of all.

  “Prospective member, you did not have a vote in this,” I said sternly, ruining the delivery with a grin. “But now you do. Welcome to Horizon MC.”

  Katie launched herself out of Ace’s lap and into mine, hugging me tightly. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  “A little overdue, but would you hate me if I told you it was kind of fun dragging it out?”

  “I could never hate you. This is the happiest day of my life.”

  “All’s well that ends well, right?”

  “I’m going to gridlock every vote I can,” she said sweetly, squeezing me tight.

  “I kind of suspected that.” I cleared my throat as Katie slid back into the booth next to Ace. “Motion to give the club president – me – broad veto powers on decisions reached by voting.”

  “Denied,” Ace said, shaking his head at me.

  “If there’s no more business, then,” I said briskly, “I move to adjourn. Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” Ace said, visibly relieved. “We should go on a ride to celebrate.”

  “We’ll schedule it.”

  “Not right now?”

  “I have some business to attend to,” I explained, standing.

  “Not club business, I hope,” Brody said.

  “Or anything illegal,” Chuck joked, pointing exaggeratedly at Katie. “Consider our new member before you return to your evil ways.”

  “You’re a comedian,” she said sweetly.

  I shrugged. There was no reason to hide it. “I’m going to go meet with a lawyer to unravel some legal tangles, then see what I can do to convince my father that he didn’t lose a son.”

  The booth was silent, everyone staring at me.

  “Was that an overshare?” I asked.

  “Thank you for sharing with us,” Sloan said immediately. “Be safe on the road. And with the lawyer.”

  “And you can always talk to us about what’s going on in your life – all of us,” Ace emphasized.

  “Thanks,” I said, and it stunned me again to realize that somehow, in some happy accident, I had ended up here in Rio Seco with the best friends a man could ever have. “See you all later.”

  I followed my nose to the kitchen. It smelled amazing, as Amy had just loaded something into the fryer.

  “What’s cooking?” I asked her.

  “Deep frying some vegetables,” she said.

  “What a waste of fried food.”

  She grinned. “You could deep fry a shoe and it would taste delicious.”

  “So does that mean you work here now?”

  “It means I dabble in here from time to time.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll take anything as long as it keeps me from doing actual work.”

  “You’d love to work in the kitchen,” Amy said. “Cheyenne fosters creativity. I feel like breading and frying some vegetables? I do it.”

  “As long as I get a taste of whatever you’re doing,” Cheyenne said, jotting something down.

  “Ready to go?” I asked her.

  She looked up from a notepad. “To your dad’s?”

  “Yeah.” I looked closer. “What are you doing?”

  “Just some recipe ideas,” she said, tapping a pencil against the paper. “I know we decided we just wanted regular bar food, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be back here cooking frozen burgers and lowering frozen chicken fingers into the fryer.”

  “Are you going to be to the food, what Brody is to the beer?”

  “Brody likes quality products. So do I.”

  “I am just going to start hemorrhaging money at this place, aren’t I?”

  “If you cook and pour it, they will come,” she intoned. “The right food and beer, anyway. Quit your bellyaching. You’re just putting off going to your dad’s.”

  “Maybe I am. That, and the lawyer.”

  “The lawy
er’s going to be fine.”

  “What I did was illegal, Cheyenne.”

  “Sure, if you’d had intent. But there was no real way for you to know what you were doing. Any doctor can attest to that.”

  “But before…”

  “Before, you were planning something, sure. But at the last minute, you swerved away from that path. You tried to do the right thing. It just went wrong.”

  “If you say so.”

  “James.” She put her arms around my waist, hugging me tightly, but it was still strange to hear that name come from her lips. “I didn’t say so. You did. You have memory of that.”

  “I just…” I stroked her hair, trying to buy myself the time to figure out what to say. “How can I know they’re real memories? What if it was just some delusion I created to make myself feel better?”

  “You have to learn to trust your own mind. When you said your memories were back, it was because they were. You know what’s real. And right before that explosion, you tried to save your cousin.”

  “I wish I felt as sure about it as you sound.”

  “It’ll just take time.” She looked around at the clock on the wall and grimaced. “Time we don’t have. We’re going to be late if we don’t hurry up.”

  It was just an excuse to take the roads fast and furious, Cheyenne’s arms around me acting as an anchor, reminding me why I was doing all this in the first place. If I had lost the chance to do right in the past, good intentions torn away by circumstance before I could make things better, then I had to do it now. I couldn’t go on living a lie. If there were consequences I needed to face, now was the time.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Cheyenne assured me as we walked inside the lawyer’s office, right on time.

  “I just want to get this over with.”

  “And it’s fine to feel like that.”

  I snorted at her. “Have you been reading self-help books?”

  “More like help other people books, but yes.” She smiled at me. “Just trying to be supportive. Is it working?”

  “I love you.”

  “Ah.” She let me kiss her a couple of times before leaning back. “It’s working, but you still have to sit down with that lawyer.”

  “I thought I might be able to distract you and miss the appointment.”

  “It almost worked.”

  The meeting went well. I explained everything, showed every document I had, medical and military, to the lawyer, gave him lists of people who could vouch for me during the time I truly thought I was my cousin, and simply sat back and waited.

  “That’s a hell of a story, you know,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “You thinking about writing a book?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “It’d be a bestseller, I think.” He loosened his tie. “I mean, I was riveted.”

  “I hope so. You’re supposed to be helping me figure all of this out.”

  “I mean beyond me paying attention,” the lawyer said, laughing. “It’s an interesting story, is all I’m saying.”

  “I get it.”

  “So what are you aiming to do?”

  I shrugged. “Straighten things out. Change my name back to James. Pay any restitutions I might need to for my uncle’s life insurance policy payout. Figure out if anybody is going to sue me and prepare for that.”

  “Mr. Ryder, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I intended to.”

  “I am sure every person in this wide world has intended to do something nefarious at some point in their lives – well, if not intended, then at least thought of it. The bottom line is that you didn’t. At the end, you tried to save your cousin. The intent was no longer there. And when you woke up and didn’t have any memories from before the explosion, it was doctors and nurses who told you that you were Jack Ryder. You accepted it because you didn’t know any better.”

  “They told me I was my cousin because I had prepared for that. I got the same tattoo he did.”

  “There should’ve been some other way to verify your identity. A DNA sample. Fingerprints, even. They shouldn’t have assumed. Would’ve saved you a lot of heartache.”

  “Maybe.”

  The lawyer leaned over the desk, clasping his hands. “Well, the good news is that while Jack Ryder was his father’s beneficiary, you are your cousin’s beneficiary.”

  I blinked rapidly. “Wait, what?”

  “When you believed you were Jack Ryder, you received the payout,” the lawyer told me. “But when you realized Jack Ryder was dead, the payout for James Ryder was still correct – in a roundabout way.”

  I sat back, dumbfounded. “I can’t believe my cousin would’ve done that.”

  “Done what?”

  “Named me as his beneficiary. After everything I did…everything I was planning to do.”

  “Your cousin seemed to recognize the good in you.” The lawyer reached across the desk and patted my shoulder. “Maybe it’s time you started to do that, too.”

  I walked out of the office more confused than when I went in.

  “What’s wrong?” Cheyenne asked, frowning at whatever expression she saw on my face.

  “Nothing is.”

  “You can tell me, James. Just talk to me.”

  “I’m saying that’s what wrong – that nothing is. Everything is straightened out. Jack ended up naming me as his beneficiary, so the payout was correct.”

  “That’s great news,” she said, looping her arm through mine. “Why don’t you look happy about it?”

  “I expected to go to jail,” I explained. “For fraud, or identity theft.”

  “You had no way of knowing that what you were doing was wrong.”

  “I expected to at least have to give the money back.”

  “It was your money. Even if it went on some twists and turns.”

  “Why did he name me his beneficiary?”

  “Because he loved you.”

  I shook my head harshly, feeling like one big exposed nerve ending. “He shouldn’t have trusted me.”

  “But he did.”

  “He was an idiot.”

  “James, can I tell you something?”

  “You can tell me anything.”

  “Family was important to Jack. You were important to him. That’s why he loved you. Why you were his beneficiary.”

  “But it’s all wrong. I wanted to kill him. To take his identity. He was a fool if he trusted me.”

  “You can’t think like that anymore. What you wanted to do in the past and what actually happened are two different things. You have to let it go.”

  “I…” God, even my words were failing me now. I didn’t know what to say to that. Was that something I could do? Let go of the bad parts of the past, even if I had only just now gotten all my memories back? It was too easy to glom on to the horrors, to guard everything like a dragon over rotting treasure. It was mine. I had lost it, but then I’d gotten it back, and it was mine.

  “James?”

  “Sorry. Yeah?”

  “Can you try to let it go?”

  I sighed and kissed the top of Cheyenne’s head. “Yeah. I can try.”

  She peered up at me. “Have you ever stopped and wondered why you’ve been doing so many good things for Rio Seco?”

  “What?”

  “With Horizon MC and all the fundraisers it organizes. James – the James I knew, anyway, before you and Jack shipped out with the Army Rangers – would’ve never put forth the effort to do charity work. It wasn’t that he – well, you – was a bad person. You just didn’t care that much.”

  “Cheyenne, you can’t keep separating the James before the explosion and me now. I’m the same person.”

  “You feel different. I think you changed. People can do that, you know. Change.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Her arms tightened around me. “Of course I’m sure. I think that somewhere, deep down, you knew that you really wanted to do good. That you wante
d to make things right, for some reason. Why else would you care about all of your pet projects so much? I’m telling you, James, that you’ve changed. For the better, even.”

  The ride to my father’s house was surprisingly swift, but it probably spoke a lot to the dread I was feeling at telling him the truth about things. That I was his son. His son who had never died in a terrible ambush and explosion. He needed to know. It wasn’t something I was about to hide from him. But at the same time, I was deeply afraid that maybe he had gotten used to not having a son. We’d never gotten along. Maybe it was something of a relief for him that he didn’t have to be disappointed by me anymore.

  It was a stupid thing to be afraid of. I knew my father was broken up by everything that had happened. But it was in the realm of possibilities that he wouldn’t exactly be happy that I was back from the dead, so to speak. In death, I was a war hero. In life, things were much more complicated than that. Uglier.

  I parked the motorcycle on the curb, in front of the house, pointing it to the exit of the subdivision in case we needed to make a quick getaway.

  “You’re going to be fine,” Cheyenne said. “This is the final hard thing you have to do.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have saved it for last,” I mused.

  “You got a good chance to practice on the Horizon guys and me beforehand,” she reminded me. “Now you know what to say.”

  But I didn’t. Not really. The relationship I had with my father was so much more complicated than the relationship I had with my friends. Even the relationship I had with Cheyenne made more sense to me. It was simpler, in some ways. Things with my father, though, had never been straightforward.

  “Just knock on the door,” Cheyenne whispered in my ear, and I realized I had been standing at the front door for God only knew how long.

  The look on my father’s face was the same as it always was – hope, dashed quickly as he remembered that his son was dead but his nephew was alive. How was he going to take me telling him that he had been right all this time, that he thought I looked like his son because I was?

  “Is this a good time?” I asked, even with the knowledge that I’d called him before to ask to swing by. I just wanted an excuse to put this off. “Because I can always come back, if it’s not.”

  “All I have is time,” he said, gruff as always. “I guess now is as good a time as any.”