If you don’t love me anymore, I understand. But if you do love me, please come back to me. Let me show you that I’ll be here. I think I understand now what you need—and if I don’t, I’ll listen when you tell me. I’ll learn.
I’ll wait for you until you’re ready to trust me. I’ll be here waiting, as long as it takes. Even if it’s forever. You’ve been waiting for me for years. Now I’m telling you that I will wait for you.
And as for babies and pregnancies—it breaks my heart when you’re hurting. But I want what you want. I will follow you wherever you want to go, and I will be at your side in happiness and sadness. You tell me what you need, and I will do everything in my power to help you get it. Not give it to you, but help you get it. Side by side. You and me.
I love you, Mo.
Mo chuisle.
Forever.
I love you.
I love you.
Brian
Brian wrote the letter four times over, until he had it neat and saying exactly what he wanted it to say. He folded the paper and tucked it into the leather-bound journal he’d bought. He slid the journal into a manila envelope and addressed it to his wife. Then he drove home to Shayton and left the package in the Quinns’ mailbox.
He didn’t knock.
He went back home.
He waited.
~oOo~
Despite his aching leg, Brian worked a full shift on Monday. By the end of the day, he was limping so badly Hoff had started calling him Quasimodo, but Brian refused his offer to cut out early. When it was time to go home, he was exhausted and sore, and he’d spent the whole day second-guessing the gesture he’d made to Mo, and worried that he hadn’t heard from her yet, so his mood was dark and stormy.
But then he turned the corner onto his street, and saw Mo’s old Bel Air in the driveway, and his whole outlook changed. Even his leg stopped hurting.
She was sitting on the front stoop. Waiting.
He parked behind her and got out—and then remembered his leg. But he didn’t care.
She stood and came down the steps, and he all but ran to her, pulling up right in front of her. Damn, the summer had been hard on her. She was pale, and too thin. Her expression was sad, and afraid. And so very fucking tired. His poor girl.
She lifted her arms, and Brian didn’t hesitate to accept their invitation. He pulled her close and held her as tightly as he could.
“Are you home?” he finally asked, when he found the courage.
She nodded.
“Ah, Irish. My Irish. I love you so much. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”
Her arms tightened, and her shoulders shook as she began to cry.
“I’m here,” he crooned at her ear, forcing his voice through the knot of emotion twisting his throat. “I’m here, Mo. I’m here.”
She held on tight, and she cried.
Brian lifted her up and carried her into the house.
Their home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
1975
At the sound of the tent zipper, Mo rolled over and snuggled deeper into the sleeping bag and blankets.
“Hey, you’re awake,” Brian said.
“I don’t want to be. It’s freezing, and everything’s spinning.”
He laughed and slipped into the bag with her. “Poor baby.”
“Ach, you’re all cold now, too.”
“Then warm me up.” He pulled her close, and she tucked in closer, hooking her leg between his.
“Mmmm,” he sighed. “We should camp more often.”
“More often? This is only the second time we’ve camped at all.”
“I know, and it’s a damn shame. I spent almost a year riding the country when I was a kid, takin’ nothin’ with me but what I could fit in a knapsack and strap to my chopper—"
“I know, I know,” she cut him off. After six years together, she had that story memorized. “You were a true Kerouac, riding the roads, seeing the country. Me, I prefer a mattress and a hot shower. And not peeing in the bushes.” Which was where Brian had just come from.
“You don’t have to pee in the bushes. You could go up to the house.”
They were camped in what amounted to the yard on Dane’s family farm. He and Joanna had married the afternoon before, in a pretty, simple ceremony in the same yard. Then they’d partied the rest of the day and well into the night. Mo had drunk more than she ever had, and she was feeling it now.
The house was Dane’s father’s house, and it was full of extended family members. But empty of Dane and Joanna—they’d left before the end of the party, riding off on Dane’s Indian toward Las Vegas.
Dane’s father intimidated her a bit. He didn’t like all these shaggy-haired, hard-drinking people around his property. And Mo would rather hold it than creep through a house full of strangers to the bathroom.
At least for now, when the urge for the bathroom was only vague.
She hooked her arm around Brian’s bare chest and nestled as close as she could get, and the world stopped spinning.
Almost year had passed since the worst trouble in their marriage, hopefully the worst trouble ever, and the time since had been quiet and calm. Happy. Healing. Both Brian and she were better focused on what they had now, together, and not what they’d lost or endured.
Brian had changed after last summer. Not in any way she could clearly describe, or even fully understand. He was still the man she loved, and who loved her. But his presence beside her felt more fixed, more full. While she’d been hiding, he’d undergone something important. She knew some of what he’d done in her absence, painful parts of it, but didn’t think she knew it all. In any case, he’d changed.
She had changed, too. If pressed, she likely wouldn’t be able to explain her mind last summer, even after these months of musing. There were big chunks of those weeks, those months, she barely remembered. It was like part of her had come unplugged and gone dark.
But she remembered the journal, and Brian’s letter, and the feeling, as she read his loving words, of being seen in the dark, by the person she’d most needed to find her. And she remembered the first entry she’d made in that pretty etched-leather book. The entry that had taken her home.
She’d kept a journal since, and almost never missed a day. As before, when she’d been a scared young girl who couldn’t find the way up, journaling had helped her as a disheartened young woman find her way back.
They hadn’t tried for another baby yet, because Mo understood she needed to be stronger before they did. She needed to find the way to balance hope with acceptance. When she was sure she could survive another loss without crumbling, then she’d be ready to open herself to her dream again.
Brian followed her lead. He was there for her in the ways she needed. He listened. He heard. He understood. And he was there.
When Mo was ready, he would be there. In happiness or in sadness. With her.
In the meantime, she was on the Pill, and they were pursuing Brian’s dream, over which they had much more control.
For now, she wanted not to think of dreams or disappointments. She wanted only to be alive in this moment.
She brushed her hand over his chest, down his belly, lower. He was hard, and when she wrapped her hand around him, her touch loosed an earthy rumble from his chest.
He rolled and put her on her back beneath him. She spread her legs and opened wide to bring him in.
~oOo~
“Have you started looking at houses yet?” Faye asked as she slathered baby oil over her skin.
Faye browned in the sun like a roast turkey. Mo, on the other hand, burned so bright red she glowed like an emergency flare after as little as half an hour, so she sat under a big umbrella and a floppy hat. Ginger Joanna burned the same, and was currently sharing the same poolside umbrella and wearing sunglasses big and dark enough she could have taken on a welding project where she sat. Paul, Jamie, Kristy, and Jeffy splashed and played in the clear, sun-sparkled water.
Mo and J
oanna were enjoying a midweek, mid-July day at the motel pool with the Kemper family. Lenny was running the motel office. Brian was working, too. They’d both join them later for swimming and a cookout. Dane would come along in the later afternoon as well; he’d dropped Joanna at the motel and gone off to look at a bike for sale farther west.
The middle of the week was the only time the Kempers could enjoy the pool as a family space. The Blue Gable Motel had turned out to be a moderate success, a solid new career for Lenny and a fair life for his family. In the summer, it did almost all of its weekday business with road-tripping families and over-the-road truckers, so during the week, almost everybody checked in in the dark and checked out before breakfast, leaving the family in relative peace through the day.
At the weekend, though, people came and lingered, and the pool and picnic area crowded with guests. And Brian, Mo, Dane, and Joanna usually rode out on the weekends. So the family had taken to playing together on Wednesdays.
“I keep looking through the papers and calling with great places,” Joanna answered for Mo, leaning over so she could see Faye. “But I don’t think she’s followed up on a single one yet.”
“Every place you call about is too expensive,” Mo protested. “And I don’t know yet if we’re even moving.”
Brian had come home from his last tour in Vietnam with an actual vision for the future. It was only a two-year plan, but it was a big one nonetheless: he wanted to own a home and his own business. Mo knew he’d always had that dream, from long before he’d ever expressed it. He’d simply found the words and the will.
The two-year mark had passed in February, and they were still living in their wee three-room house with the pretty cherry tree in the back yard, and Brian was working at Hoff’s. He was the manager there now; Hoff had mostly retired and left Brian to run things.
He was gaining management experience. He’d taken some business classes and pestered Hoff for insights into business ownership. He’d learned and was ready to move forward, but he hadn’t found the property he wanted. Until, perhaps, now.
Faye lay back in her lounge and closed her eyes. “Listening to Brian talk about it, he’s all but bought that place.”
Almost two weeks ago, he’d come home from a ride with Dane and set a sheaf of papers before her. A Sinclair station—a big one, with four service bays. It was run down, as was the neighborhood it was in, but the price was in their budget. He wanted to use what he called his ‘farm money’—his share of the proceeds from the family farm that had been sold after his father’s death, while he was still a teenager. He was thirty-five years old, and had been holding on to most of that money for twenty years, letting it sit and earn interest, waiting for the right reason to use it.
But the station was in Tulsa. More than two hours from her family. Since Mo was twelve and she’d been ripped out by the roots and transplanted here, she’d never lived more than a mile from them.
Oklahoma City, here where the Kempers now lived, wasn’t much closer to Tulsa. She’d be more than a hundred miles from all her nieces and nephews who filled the empty space in her heart.
Joanna and Dane lived just outside Tulsa; they’d be much closer. And John Patterson lived in Broken Arrow now. They wouldn’t be entirely alone. But still, the last time she’d made a move so big, she’d been a girl alone on a plane across the ocean, with paperwork safety-pinned to her jumper, next to a pin of plastic wings.
She’d also have to quit her job and find another, here in July, with the term starting in about five weeks.
Honestly, it had not ever occurred to her that Brian achieving his dream would mean the upending of her whole life. She’d assumed he’d find a station somewhere in the triangle of Shayton, Norman, and the City, and they’d buy a house in Shayton, or closer to her school in Newcastle, and they’d go on living the life they’d built, with a few improvements.
Brian had told her he’d follow her lead, in this as in another major life decision. If she said she didn’t want to move to Tulsa, he would pass on this opportunity.
But what if no other presented itself? What if this was his chance?
Was she willing to let the chance that at least one of them could have their dream fulfilled slip by because she was afraid?
No, she was not. Brian said he would follow her lead, but she wouldn’t lead him toward disappointment.
She sighed and turned to Joanna. “What if we stay with you this weekend, and we can do some house-hunting?”
Her friend’s smile opened wide. “Perfect! Hey, Faye—we’ve got plenty of room. Could you get away, too, and join us?”
“A July weekend? No, sorry. We’re already mostly booked. But thanks for the offer.” Faye waved a shiny golden hand toward Mo. “Anyway, Mo doesn’t need so many cooks picking her kitchen.”
~oOo~
Kristy squealed as Brian swooped her into his arms and yelled “CANNONBALL!” He ran at the pool and jumped in, tucking himself around her as they splashed down.
“Me, Unca Bri! Me now!” Jeffy shouted, dog-paddling in his floaties toward the deep end.
“Jeffy, no! What’s the rule?” Lenny called from the grill.
“I got ‘im!” Dane said and scooped the preschooler up.
“Cannaball! I wanna cannaball!” Jeffy protested as Dane led him to the shallow end, where he was supposed to stay.
“Tell you what, Jeffster.” Brian grabbed a beach ball. “Let’s play ball! Hey, Kristy—get over here! Me and you against Jeffy and Uncle Dane! Paul, Jamers, get in on this! Pool battle!”
Mo stood behind Faye at the kitchen window and watched the men and children play.
“Have you thought more about adoption?” Faye asked.
“Don’t, Faye. Not today.” Mo was perfectly aware what a wonderful father her husband would be. It broke her heart that she couldn’t see him dote like this on their own children. Their own children.
It was selfish, perhaps. It was masochistic, likely. Everyone around her thought so. Even Brian was puzzled. But she couldn’t help it. Every time she tried to seriously consider adopting, to recognize all the positives of that choice, all it would bring to her and Brian, all it would bring to the child, her heart simply shattered. She wanted what Faye and Lenny had. What Maggie and Roger had. She wanted to look on her own child and see Brian looking back at her. She wanted her own family. The way family was meant to be.
Her sister-in-law nodded. “Alright, I’m sorry.” She turned, and the subject vanished with her bright smile. “Hey, Joanna—will you mix up some Kool-Aid for the kids?”
“Sure. You want me to mix up a batch with some rum, too, for the grownups?”
Faye and Mo both turned and gaped at her. “Kool-Aid and rum? Are you mad?” Mo asked.
“Trust me. Get the ice crusher out and the Malibu. I’m about to change your world.”
Faye remained evidently skeptical, but she shrugged. “Just do me a favor and make the world-changing stuff a different color from the regular stuff, so we don’t get it confused. The last thing I need is a bunch of hungover babies in the morning. Lenny’s hard enough work as it is after he’s tied one on.”
“Okay. Then the cherry is for us. The kids can have lime.”
~oOo~
Brian blew out a sharp breath and picked up the pen. Before he put the point to the paper, he blew out another sharp breath. “Christ,” he muttered. The pen hovered over the paper, and Mo saw a faint tremor.
She set her hand on his leg and squeezed. When he turned and met her eyes, she gave him the nod he needed, and he put pen to paper and signed his name. And then he signed his name about a thousand times more.
“Congratulations, Mr. Delaney,” the agent said when all the myriad forms and contracts were completed and signed. He held out a set of keys on a plastic fob advertising the realty agency. “You’re officially the new owner of South Tulsa Service.”
Brian took the keys and stared at them. “No—Brian Delaney Auto Service. That’s its name now.”<
br />
That ‘farm money’ had been earning interest for twenty years, and had been a sizeable sum at the start. Brian was able to pay cash for the station in a weary, blue-collar neighborhood in South Tulsa. It needed some improvements, and some freshening up, and he’d taken a small, short-term bank loan for that work, which he and his friends were taking on themselves to every extent possible. They planned to have the station open by the end of August. One month from now.
Brian had bought the building, but all his friends—Dane, Collie, John, and Dane’s cousin, Stu—had volunteered to help him get it going. Collie and John were even planning to work there as Brian’s first employees.
Mo hadn’t found a new teaching position yet—schools had mostly finished their hiring for the upcoming year by the time she’d started looking—but she was on a few substitute lists, and she’d find a classroom of her own again soon enough. Mr. Ivanovic had written her a stunningly wonderful reference letter.
The agent stood, offered his hand, and paused there with his outstretched arm hovering over the table and its assorted papers. Mo nudged Brian, who looked up from his star-struck consideration of the keys and realized a handshake was in order. He stood and shook hands. “Thanks for your help.”
“You’re welcome. I wish you good luck.” The agent gathered up the papers, set one copy of them all aside, and put the other copy in a bright red folder. Seeing Brian staring at the keys again, the agent handed the folder to Mo. “Seems like you should keep charge of this.”
Mo smiled. “Seems so.”
She led her dazzled old man from the agency office into the late-July heat.
Now all they had to do was find a place to live.
Wait: The Brazen Bulls Beginning Page 35