by Olivia Rigal
“Do you believe in heaven, David?” she asks me, putting one of her hands on mine.
I entwine our fingers and consider lying to her to make her feel better, but I decide against it. “I’m not big on faith. But you can find comfort in the fact that she’s no longer in pain.” Despite the fact that I mean it, my words sound hollow, even to me.
We remain there immobile for a couple of minutes. I want to give Mimi some of my strength to make it through today. I want to be with her tomorrow too and the day after that as well.
One of the men at the door steps in to get my attention.
Still holding Mimi’s hand, I crouch next to her and whisper, “I think it’s time to go.”
She shakes her head and seems unable to get up.
Toussaint stirs. There’s a strong resolve on his face. He gets down from his chair and stands by the head of the bed. Tears pour down his face as he kisses his mother’s cheek. “Adieu, Manman.” He walks around the bed, and I make space for him as he comes to Mimi’s side. Toussaint pries Mimi’s hand away from his mother and puts it to his chest. “Ale, Mimi.”
I pick her handbag up from the floor, and the three of us walk out of the room while the men come in to take away the corpse. I hug Mimi and Toussaint, keeping their faces against my chest while I watch Josette’s body being put in a body bag. She’s so light that they lift her onto the gurney with no effort. Only when they wheel her away do I let go of them.
“I’ll take you home now,” I say.
Mimi’s car keys are dangling from the side of her bag on a lanyard. We walk to her car in slow motion.
“No,” Mimi says, “I need to go to the funeral home.”
“You want the one next to the hospital?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “My church.”
I get behind the wheel, and I’m surprised I don’t have to adjust the seat much. I love that she’s tall.
We arrive just before the noon service to a full church. Toussaint and I stay in the back while Mimi walks toward the altar to talk to someone. I’ve never felt so pale in my entire life. My dirty blond hair, brown eyes, and a healthy tan probably don’t stand out as much as I feel they do. I get a few curious glances, but no one seems hostile. Toussaint takes my hand. I don’t know if he senses my discomfort or if he needs my support, but I gladly hold his hand. He gives me a sad smile and squeezes my fingers a little. I smile back.
Mimi returns shortly and motions us to follow her out as the service starts. “The funeral will be at five tomorrow.” She looks more composed.
“Here?” I ask.
She shakes her head and moves toward her car. Toussaint and I just stand there, looking at her walk away.
Realizing we’re not following, she turns around. “What are you doing? Come on, hurry. There are things to be done, and we have to drive back to the hospital.” I raise an eyebrow, and she says, “I suppose your bike is still there, no? You really don’t want to leave it in their parking lot all day.”
She probably has a point, but I feel hurt, as if she’s dismissing me. She lets me drive them to the hospital. Toussaint is silent in the backseat, lost in his thoughts.
When we arrive, I turn around and tell him, “Good-bye buddy.” He slides between the two front seats to hug me, and I hug him back while saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Mimi’s already gotten out of the car and come around to stand by the driver’s side. She’s standing right in front of me, and I badly want to hug her, but this isn’t the right time.
Or maybe it is. There’s a flame in her eyes when she looks at me. She catches my face in her hands, and the gesture is so tender, it melts my heart.
“Thank you,” she says.
I put my hands on her back and pull her to me. Her breasts crash against my chest, and I’m about to put my lips on her forehead in a chaste kiss when she tilts up her head. When our lips meet again, I pull her in a little closer but let her decide where she wants the kiss to go. The tip of her tongue wets my lips. That’s all the permission I need. My hand catches her waist, and I drink her in. Her hips hit mine. She cannot doubt for one second how aroused I am.
She threads her fingers into my hair, and I feel like a dirty bastard. She’s in pain, and all I want to do is worship her body. Maybe it would be good for her. I could make her forget everything, become the center of her universe. I could make her so hot and needy that she’d surrender herself to me. I could make her scream my name so loud—then I remember Toussaint in the backseat.
I peel myself away from her, and the regret in my tone is unmistakable when I whisper, “Toussaint.”
She shakes her head as if waking from a dream and nods. “You’re right. I should know better. I’m a mother now.”
“You’re going to make a great mother.” I would never say it, but I’m convinced that Josette’s passing is probably the first lucky break the kid has caught so far. “If you need anything—”
“I need time alone with Toussaint, with my son,” she says, getting into the car. “Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow then.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Monday at five, the crew of the Bush Fire is present in the little church. The strippers are in their Sunday best. Sally arrives on the back of Slider’s bike. She’s wearing black pants and a very modest black T-shirt. No cleavage, no makeup, and she doesn’t look a day over twenty.
Suzy, on the other hand, is a lot older than I anticipated. She’s in her forties maybe. Not that that’s old per se, but for a stripper, it is. Kim comes to the funeral with Vic. She’s dressed in white, and I remember that white is the color of mourning in China.
Two Knights are in attendance. They remain outside of the church, standing on guard duty at the door. I recognize Dmitry, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the other.
We all remain standing in the back pews, and none of us participates in the service. I wonder if any of us are closet regular church-goers. I was an altar boy until my father died. I’ve avoided all religious buildings since his funeral. I even find excuses not to attend weddings.
I’m not sure if the rituals have changed during the past couple decades or if it’s because the priest speaks in a foreign language, but the entire ceremony is alien to me. I have no idea what to do and when.
The coffin is moved out of the church by four men from the funeral home. The coffin itself must weigh twice as much as Josette did. Mimi follows. Toussaint holds her hand and scans the scarce audience, pew by pew. Is he sad about how few people attended? The church was full for my father’s funeral. At the time, I’d thought I couldn’t care less, but in hindsight, I wonder if that’s true. How would I have felt if only a dozen people had cared enough about him to show up and stand by his family?
Toussaint’s face lights up when he sees me, and when he passes my pew, he grabs my hand. I enter the short procession with the little boy wedged between Mimi and me. From the corner of my eye, I see Sally catch Slider’s hand, and they fall in behind us. We follow the pallbearers into a tiny cemetery. As we go, I see that Kim, Vic, Suzy, and even Paul, the club’s Haitian maintenance guy, have stepped in behind us. That’s when I feel for Slider. I’ve only been on the undercover job for a few weeks, and I already like this weird bunch. They’re a family. Slider’s been with the Knights for more a long time. How does he keep his loyalties straight?
The rest of the ceremony is short, and when it’s all done, I walk Mimi back to her car. I hug Toussaint, and he holds me very tightly.
“I promise you’re gonna be all right, buddy,” I tell him. I’m not sure he believes me, but I know I’m right. The pain doesn’t ever go away, but its weight lightens with age.
When he lets me go, I blink hard. Holding the damn kid almost made me cry. He vanishes in the backseat of the car, and I turn to Mimi.
“Do you want company?” I ask her.
She doesn’t answer but touches my face and shakes her head. “Thank you, David. Thank you for being here with us today.” She opens her car doo
r. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You’re coming back to work tomorrow?”
“Yes. Tell Slider he should stop searching for a replacement. I’m a sure thing even after the end of summer.”
“But what about college?” I ask.
“That’s one of the things I’ll have to figure out.”
I catch her hand and kiss her palm before letting her go. After her car drives away, Slider comes toward me.
“Mimi asked me to tell you she’s staying on,” I tell Slider.
“Yeah, I figure she’s gonna need to make some serious dough now that she’s got a kid to raise.” Slider watches Sally come toward us after hugging Suzy, who waves at me.
Sally’s a hugger, so of course she hugs me. I think that makes Slider cringe a little. He can deny it all he wants, but if he doesn’t care about her, I’m the Pope.
“Do you think it would have made a difference if we had found her earlier?” Sally asks.
Slider rolls his eyes as if her question was absurd. “Josette was hell-bent on destroying herself. This wasn’t her first overdose. Saving her this time would just have postponed the unavoidable.”
“You’re right.” Sally shrugs. “I know this is going to sound horrible, but I wish she had waited another two weeks. We’re smack in the middle of finals, and I have no idea how Mimi will manage with the kid and all.”
“Do you know when her next exam is?” I ask.
“I’m not sure. We only have two classes in common. I know she already got an extension for a term paper she was supposed to turn in last week. Our other final together is next Wednesday.”
“And you, brat,” says Slider, slapping Sally’s butt. “You’ve got one tomorrow, so I’m gonna drop you off at home so you can prepare before tonight’s show.”
“Anything special about tonight?” I ask Slider before he turns around.
“No, business as usual. I think they’re out of town this week. We gotta figure this shit out before they get their asses back here.”
I watch them walk away. Sally tries to catch Slider’s hand as she did while walking out of the church, but he hides it in his pocket. She turns to stick out her tongue at him. I see his shoulders shake. Laughter?
I kickstart my engine and wonder why relationships are so complicated: Sally and Slider, Lisa and Brian.
Crap, I gotta call Lisa and find a way to see Brian for a bit.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I hate this stupid rain,” Brian says as he runs under the pier.
“Yeah, it sucks.”
We look at each other the way people do when they haven’t seen a loved one for a long time to ascertain that everything is fine. It hasn’t been that long, just a few weeks, but Brian and I have never been separated for more than a week.
Even in the summers when his father used to take him to live with him, I would hang out with him at the Iron Tornadoes club house. That was our secret—we never even told Lisa. As a kid, she would have told Uncle Tony, and later, when she had learned to hold her tongue, neither Brian nor I wanted to let her loose in that crowd. Had she known then, she would have argued about the double standard and all that women’s lib stuff.
“I saw you at All Saints the other day,” Brian says. “Are you feeling nostalgic about Father Francis?”
“Nah, the old bastard has retired anyway. They have a new principal now, someone with more modern ideas about education.”
We sit in the sand with our backs to the large wooden post, and Brian hands me a beer can. I open it and savor the freshness. I’ve been waiting for him for a while, and it’s hot and muggy. A normal Floridian spring day.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he says.
“I was picking up a kid.”
“Anything I should know about?”
“Maybe, maybe not. I’m not sure. He’s ten, and his mother just died of an overdose. His aunt is in the process of adopting him, but she’s in college, and she’s got finals this week, so you know…”
“No, I don’t,” Brian says. “Which one do you care about: the kid or the auntie?”
“I like them both,” I answer without having to think about it.
“Figures.” Brian’s wearing an insolent smirk. He’s been waiting for me to fall the way he’s fallen for my sister, and I thought it would never happen.
“He’s a nice kid. He never knew his dad, and now he’s lost his mother too,” I explain.
“Oh, so a darker version of your childhood?”
I laugh ’cause Brian’s reflection is funny. “Darker for sure. The kid’s from Haiti.”
Brian smiles.
“But there’s another similarity,” I say. “You remember how weird it was for me to look at Tony? Well, Toussaint must be living the same shit ’cause he’s being adopted by his mother’s twin.”
“What about her?”
“Nice girl,” I say and shrug.
“Girl?”
“Girl, woman, don’t get technical on me. She’s twenty-five.”
“So her sister was a mom at fifteen?” Brian notes. “High-school sweetheart love baby?”
“Don’t think so. I don’t know the specifics, but the other night, she said something that led me to believe her sister never knew who the father was.”
“This doesn’t sound good. I hope at least it was consensual. There’s this one girl I met from another chapter. She got pregnant after falling to rival gang rape and never even wanted to look at the kid.”
“What happened to the baby?” I ask.
“It turned out for the best. The old lady of the president of a West Coast chapter couldn’t have a kid, so they adopted it. The girl says that one of the things that helped her get over her nightmares was the kick of knowing the son of a Knight was being raised as an Iron Tornado.”
“Bittersweet revenge, I guess.”
“So you got yourself a package deal?” he says.
“Nah, it’s just a temporary situation until she finishes her term and figures out something for the coming year.”
“Not doing her?”
“For fuck’s sake, Brian, she’s in mourning!”
Brian raises his hands in surrender. “Just asking.”
The man is obsessed. While we were in the army, he screwed his way through anything fluffy that moved and looked pretty. That’s one thing we share—we favor fleshy over skinny.
The difference is that I have to care for a woman before I have sex with her; he doesn’t. He’s simply “taking care of business.” So when I told him I was skeptical about him thinking Lisa was the only one for him, and he’d simply said, “I do what I can until I get my dick and my heart in the same place.”
My growing affection for Mimi makes it hard for me to understand how he operates. Since I’ve met her, none of the strippers do anything for me no matter how hot their numbers get. What gets to me is watching Mimi’s sweetness with Toussaint. I loved the way she tucked Toussaint in on Sunday night when she came back from the library. I’d taken the kid to the beach in the morning when the sun was out, and when it rained, we went to a movie and an early dinner before coming back home to do his homework. I never knew being a father figure could be so sweet.
I shrug and ask, “What’s up with the MC?”
“Cracker has his moments,” Brian says. “He’s lucid enough to realize he’ll need to retire soon, and he’s trying to play Everest against me.”
“That’s stupid. Unless your brother’s about to quit the force… Is he?”
“I wish I knew,” Brian says. “I’d love to have him on board. He’s a great people reader, and that’s something we could use at the sex club. I could have used him for our last PI job too.”
“The runaway kids?”
“Yep. They had been brainwashed by that pervert into believing anything he said. It was scary. I think Everest would have had some idea about how to handle those kids so they wouldn’t have serious trust issues for the rest of their lives. We were clueless. We kne
w to bring them back home but not what to tell them.”
“Raising kids seems like a difficult business to be in,” I say.
We chat for a while about other members of the MC I know. They’re like distant cousins I used to visit every so often. Some are idiots—but every family needs an idiot cousin or two to make the rest feel good about themselves—some are downright vicious, and some are regular good people. MC families are just like all other families; they just get stuck with a bad rep.
Soon it’s time for me to go pick up Toussaint from his track practice. Last week I got there a bit early to watch him run, and I was happy to see him coming around and acting social with his schoolmates.
Today I get there just in time. I leave the engine running, and Toussaint hops on the back of my bike, trying to act cool as if he’s been riding all his life. While I wait for Toussaint to strap on Lisa’s helmet, which is just the right size for him, the coach frowns and squints in our direction. The man’s vision ain’t what it used to be, but he can still spot that I’m not the right color to be the boy’s dad. He makes a time-out sign and approaches us.
“Hey, Coach, long time no see,” I say.
He stares at my face, and I can hear his mental Rolodex flipping in his head.
Quickly enough he says, “Mayfield.” Looking around, he asks, “Where’s your shadow?”
“Not far, sir, but I’ll tell him you remembered.” I’m amazed he remembers Brian and me.
“As if I could forget the two good-for-nothings who forced me to shave my beard,” he growls.
“You did what?” Toussaint asks, a new respect for me showing in his eyes.
“Don’t you dare put such stupid ideas into that young boy’s head!” Coach threatens, but his smile says that in hindsight, he thinks our prank was pretty funny.
The poor man had been napping in the shade on one of the bleachers after fixing some shaky benches when Brian and I walked by. We couldn’t resist using the leftover quick cement to attach his beard to the bench. Then we sat in the distance, waiting for him to wake up. The only reason we had gotten caught was that Brian was laughing much too hard when Coach finally found a way to pull the plank from its base and walk to the locker room with an enormous piece of wood hanging from his beard.