“So that’s what pissed you off?”
“It still does. When a coal miner pays a bigger amount in tax than the largest oil company in the world, there’s something really fucking wrong. Exposing these faults on the off-chance that someone gets pissed and protests—that’s what drives me.” For the first time she looked at him, and she gave him a weak smile. “Or it used to be.”
“But you don’t want to write about that anymore?”
“No. I don’t think I do.”
“Find something else that pisses you off.”
“That’s really not the problem. I need to channel and focus my rage. It’s all over the place again.”
He laughed and puller closer. “All over the place?”
“Yeah.” She smiled. “I’ll figure it out.”
“Still in a good mood?”
“Yes,” she laughed. “You tend to get me in a good mood.”
“Good, ‘cause I have something else to ask you. Mel is worried about my weight.”
“Your weight?”
“She thinks I’m losing too much weight, and she was horrified when I told her I’m eating Lean Cuisine.”
“So?”
“She wants you to come to a dinner.”
Kathleen froze up next to him. “I’m not good at dinners.”
“This isn’t like any other dinner you’ve been to. Trust me. Just a bunch of people eating together.”
“So no formalwear?”
Mace turned over to his side and held her cheek. “Do you see me doing formalwear dinners?”
“No,” she smiled. “I don’t. When?”
“Tomorrow?”
“That’s cutting it close for her.”
“It’s Mel. She does a full dinner for anyone who happens to be in the neighborhood every day. She won’t mind. She’ll fucking love it.”
“Okay. Pick me up from work tomorrow and take me to dinner.”
o0o
Mace had told Mel he was bringing Kathleen for dinner when he got his work orders in the morning. In retrospect, he should’ve waited until just before Mel went home, because before lunch everyone in the entire club knew about it. He was sure most of them would show up for family dinner that night, and he was getting nervous. Something Sisco picked up on.
“Maybe you could ease her into it,” Sisco suggested while they were working on a bike together.
“How the fuck do I ease her into it in a couple of hours?”
“You could pick me up on the way.”
Mace stared at Sisco. “How is that easing her into it?”
“I don’t know,” Sisco admitted.
“Can’t get any worse,” Mace muttered. “Would’ve been fucking awesome if she drank. Could’ve gotten her slightly buzzed before taking her there.”
“She doesn’t drink?”
“No.”
“This could be a good time for her to start.”
“No shit.”
By the time he picked up Kathleen from her house, he was nervous as fuck. The only thing anyone had been talking about during the day was that she’d be at the dinner, and the entire fucking club had decided to go. Mel had started to plan how they would all fit around the table, and Mace had realized there would be about the same number of people as they had been for Christmas.
His last hope had been that Kathleen would be held up at the paper. For a brief second he wondered if he could blow up an old barn or something, but that wasn’t the kind of news the G.O. usually covered anyway, so it probably wouldn’t work.
She was already waiting for him outside when he pulled up, and she gave him a look when she got into the car.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “What’s going on?”
“It kind of spread that you were coming, so they’re all going to be there.”
“All of them?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He started the van. “We’re picking up Sisco.”
“The guy you introduced to your mom?”
“I didn’t introduce him.”
“Whatever you say,” she chuckled, and Mace grabbed her and gave her a kiss. When he let go, she smiled. “I might need more of those later.”
“I’m a provider,” he whispered.
When they got to Sisco’s house, he wasn’t outside, and Mace turned off the car with a sigh.
“I’ll go get him,” he said.
“I can come. I kind of want to see what a biker’s house looks like. Just to prepare.”
“I could’ve taken you to my place,” he muttered, but at the same time he would preferred not to. It was a shithole, and he avoided it as much as possible. He could’ve made an effort to make it nice, but it didn’t feel like it was worth the trouble. Until he met Kathleen, he was either at the clubhouse or crashed at Sisco’s place.
Sisco opened the door with his usual shit-eating grin. “Hey, I’m Sisco.”
“Kathleen,” she answered.
“Come on in,” Sisco said, completely ignoring Mace’s glares.
And Kathleen ignored them, too, and just walked right in. So he followed her and put an arm around her waist.
“You okay?” he asked.
“From what I can tell, I’m better than you.” Then she halted in her steps and stared at the painting hanging on the wall in Sisco’s living room. “Is that…?”
Before Mace knew what was happening, Kathleen had hurried inside and she was standing in front of it.
“Is this real?” she asked Sisco while pointing at the painting.
“Uhm, what? Whatta you mean ‘real?’”
“It looks like a Trudy Evans paining.” She leaned closer.
Mace almost swallowed his tongue, and Sisco’s eyes clearly told him to shut the fuck up. He should’ve known she knew who Trudy was, Kathleen knew a lot about art, and he suspected some of it came from her upper class family. She’d described some of the art her family owned, and to Mace owning art was… uncommon.
“You know of her?” Sisco asked instead of telling Kathleen that Trudy had been his wife.
“Yeah.” She was still staring at the painting with a big smile on her face. “I have one of her paintings as a poster. One of the Georgia O’Keeffe-inspired ones. I put it up in my room at my parents’ house. It’s still there.”
“Really?” Sisco laughed, and Mace wondered who the fuck Georgia O’Keeffe was and why it was funny that she had the poster on the wall at her parents’ house. “Bet they love that.”
“They’re never in there. But I like the idea of pussy painted by a feminist on a wall in my parents’ house.”
“Pussy?” Mace asked, but now he could see the humor in it. “She painted pussies?”
“No,” Kathleen answered. “Or kind of. It depends on how you look at it. She used a lot of colors, and it looks just like random patterns, but if you look closer, you can see things in them.” She looked at the paining on the wall again. “This looks like an early painting. I’ve seen some of these prints, but never this one. Is that… an ass?”
“Yeah,” Sisco said. “We should get going.”
Kathleen nodded, but she didn’t seem to be able to tear herself from the painting. “I’ve seen some with glitter on them, though. It’s… I just love her colors.” She took a deep breath and then started towards the door. “Must say, I didn’t expect a Trudy Evans painting at a biker’s house.”
“I’m full of surprises,” Sisco answered.
“Her ass?” Mace whispered to Sisco when they walked outside. “Was she rolling around naked on the fucking canvas?”
“Yeah. I fucked her on it.”
“How the fuck was she able see it was one of Trudy’s?”
“She had a blue period. A lot of it was in that shade of blue with glitter and shit thrown on them. Then there’s the signature,” Sisco smiled. “I assume she can read.”
Mace hoped she wouldn’t keep talking about Trudy. So far it had gone pretty well, but Sisco didn’t lik
e talking about her, and he never told anyone that she’d been his wife. Now and then she was mentioned, simply since she was considered one of the great grunge artists. There had even been a journalist or two who had contacted Sisco for an interview, but he never agreed.
In the car, Sisco managed to get the conversation steered away from Trudy quickly, and while Mace was about to throw up out of nervousness, Kathleen and Sisco were chatting away. She didn’t seem nervous at all, and he wondered if that was because she didn’t care or didn’t understand what she’d be walking into. Or if he was making it a much bigger thing in his head than it actually was.
When they pulled up outside Brick’s place, Sisco was out of the car in seconds, and Mace took a few moments to breathe.
“Are you okay?” Kathleen asked, and he could hear the laughter in her voice. “This is a big thing for you?”
“Yeah… and… There’s a lot of people, and they’ll ask you loads of questions and shit like that.”
She leaned forward and gave his cheek a kiss. “Is there a chance they’ll shoot me?”
“What? No!”
“Then there’s nothing to worry about.”
He turned his head and stared at her. “No. If that’s your frame of reference, you’ll be fine.”
“Uncomfortable dinners are my specialty. We had them seven days a week when I was a kid. I can handle this.”
“Okay,” he said and pulled her closer. “It’s a big deal for me. Not because I don’t think you’ll do great, but because…”
“They’re your family. I get it. I’ll behave.”
Mace nodded and got out of the car. He took her hand as they walked up to the house, and once they stepped over the threshold, all hell broke lose. Not in a bad way, but everyone was waiting for them, and before he knew what had happened, he had a beer in his hand and watched Kathleen disappear into the kitchen led by Mel and Eliza.
“And she was never to be seen again,” Sisco mumbled next to him.
The next time he saw her was about an hour later at the table, and he sat down next to her.
“You okay?” he whispered.
“They performed some ritual. Smeared pig’s blood all over me and made me dance in a circle while singing My Humps by Black Eyed Peas,” she whispered back. When he turned to look at her, she gave him a kiss. “I’m fine. They were nice.”
She looked okay, and he was relieved. It had never been that he didn’t think she could ‘behave.’ It was much more that he wasn’t sure the others would give her a chance. She was quite different than the other women, but on the other hand, so had Anna, Mitch’s old lady, been, and she fit in just fine. When he thought about it, they were all pretty different.
Eliza took the other seat next to Kathleen, and Mace smiled a little at that. Two crazy feminists next to each other should make it an interesting dinner, and it didn’t take long.
With a meaningful look at her father, Eliza asked Kathleen with a slightly too-loud voice, “So you’re a feminist?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I have a brain,” Kathleen answered while reaching for the vegetables. The entire table went silent, and as far as Mace knew, it was the first time that had ever happened. Kathleen looked around and noticed that they were all staring at her, and she cleared her throat. “I can make it a longer and more diplomatic speech of you want me to.”
“Could you?” Eliza asked eagerly. “Girls in my school say it’s silly, and that they don’t feel like they’re being treated differently because they’re girls.”
“Yes, well the world is bigger than Greenville High, and in other parts of the world women are randomly set on fire—literally. And also, they’re wrong. They are treated differently.”
Eliza smile was impossibly wide, and Brick gave Mace an amused look. He would hear about this later—a lot.
“I think Dad is right about them all being too preoccupied with being response-addicted,” Eliza said and took the bowl of vegetables from Kathleen, while completely ignoring that the entire table was still silent and looking at the two of them.
“Response-addicted?” Kathleen asked and looked at Brick.
“The social media shit,” Brick huffed. “They’re uploading pictures of pretty much fucking everything but their feces on different sites because they’re addicted to getting response to everything they do. It’s like things haven’t happened unless at least twenty people have commented on it.”
“Response-addicted,” Kathleen smiled. “I like it.”
The conversations around the table picked up again after that, and the rest of the dinner was much more relaxed, at least for Mace. As soon as he was sure Kathleen was doing okay, he got lost in his own conversations.
Once dinner was over, Mel dragged Kathleen away again, and he went out on the deck for a smoke with the other guys.
“My girl talking to your woman means I’m gonna be fed feminist crap for days,” Brick said when Mace sat down.
“Like you don’t get feminist crap all the fucking time anyway,” Mitch said. “She’s been like that since she was ten.”
“Shut it. I got a shot at blaming it on Mace for a while.”
“How is it my fault?”
“What your woman does is on you,” Brick answered with a serious nod. “That’s the rule.”
Mace could live with that, and Kathleen didn’t seem to care what other people thought about her or her opinions. That was one her traits that he liked the best. She let out and air that what you see is what you get with her, but it wasn’t the whole truth. There was a lot more about her than the first impression, and he was just starting to see the full picture, and it intrigued him. So far, they’d mostly been at her place, and seeing her with others gave yet another side of her. But her hiding parts of herself wasn’t because she was ashamed of them, she was just very private.
“I guess I’m off the hook for more dinners,” Kathleen said once they’d dropped off Sisco.
“Why would you be off the hook?”
“I just assumed that telling your president’s daughter that I’m a feminist because I have a brain might have annoyed him. I didn’t do it on purpose, by the way. It just slipped out.”
“I doubt he gives a shit,” he laughed. “Eliza’s been a feminist since she considered herself old enough to form an opinion, and even if he’d never admit it, he likes it. And he likes honest people, so he likes you.”
“So I’m gonna have to do more dinners?”
He turned and looked at her. “No, but they’d like it if you came again. I’m never gonna force you to do anything.”
“So they’re not obligatory?”
“No,” Mace answered. “We like them, but April isn’t much for the club stuff, and no one blames her for it.”
“April?”
“She wasn’t there, but she’s Bear’s old lady.”
“You all have really fucking annoying and similar nicknames. It’s confusing, and it would be confusing even if I didn’t hate nicknames.”
“I know.” He reached out and took her hand. “I might go there for food, since I don’t see you cooking for me in the future.”
“Smart man,” she said and kissed his knuckles. “The food was good, and I won’t be offended if you prefer eating there.”
“You better not be,” he laughed. “I’m a grown man, one of those TV dinners isn’t enough.”
“You can have two,” she said, and when he gave her an eye she laughed. “Or just eat at Mel’s.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
What Did I Do?
o0o
“I’M LOOKING FOR KATHLEEN Keegan.”
Kathleen looked up and saw a tall, well-dressed brunette. When the woman turned around, she realized it was Joyce, Mace’s brother’s wife. Blair pointed in Kathleen’s direction, and she decided it was best to get Joyce the hell out of there. She wasn’t sure why she was there, but the woman already looked uncomfortable, and G.O. didn’t provide a comfortable or priva
te environment.
She grabbed her jacket and bag and walked over to meet up with Joyce at the door.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m Joyce Mullen, we met—”
“At the restaurant, I remember. You’re Mace’s sister-in-law.”
“Could we…?”
“Have a coffee?” Kathleen suggested, because whatever the reason was for Joyce’s visit, it didn’t seem likely she’d be able to say it at G.O. And even if she would, Kathleen didn’t want to have a private conversation in front of the others. She had worked really hard to keep her professional and private life separated, and she had more than a slight feeling that Joyce’s visit was very private.
“Yes, please,” Joyce smiled and gave the other staff members a nod before she opened the door to leave.
Mace had lost the bet about his brother contacting her within a week, and they hadn’t talked much about his family besides his parents. He hadn’t mentioned his brother at all, and she hadn’t asked him any questions. It had been hard to miss the crazy tension between the two of them and Joyce while they’d met at the restaurant three weeks earlier, and it wasn’t just normal family hatred the way Kathleen was used to.
During the short walk to the café, Joyce asked the normal, polite questions about how Kathleen was settling in, and what she thought about Greenville, but as soon as they sat down, Joyce’s nervousness became more evident. Kathleen began to regret the meeting because she was getting the distinct feeling it was more private than she was comfortable with. And if it was about Mace’s private life, she wanted to hear it from him and not anyone else.
“What has he told you?” Joyce asked while fiddling with the coffee cup in front of her. Before Kathleen had a chance to answer, she continued, “It must sound so sordid to you. Did he tell you we were friends in high school?”
“No.”
“We were, and I fell in love with his brother.”
Kathleen sighed. The comments about ‘sordid’ and having been friends made it click for her, and this was not a conversation she was prepared to have with someone she didn’t even know.
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