Wait: The Brazen Bulls Beginning

by Susan Fanetti

  Joanna reached across the table and hooked her hand around Mo’s arm. “I love you, Mo.”

  “I love you, too. When are you due?”

  “December.”

  Mo looked up, shocked. “December! But then you’re four months along!” She wasn’t showing at all, not that Mo could tell—though she had been wearing skirts more often than usual, even for casual. At most, she looked like she’d put on a few pounds.

  “About. I’m seventeen weeks. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure how to tell you. And I wasn’t sure I was keeping it. I’m still not totally sure I’m keeping it. I can’t seem to make up my mind what to do. I haven’t even told Dane.”

  Seventeen weeks. That was almost as pregnant as Mo had ever gotten to be. Suddenly, a powerful urge to hit her friend came over her, and she mastered it by slamming her fist on the table.

  “Mo …”

  “If you haven’t done something yet, then you’ve already made your choice.”

  “There’s still a few weeks left where I can decide.”

  Mo had rejoiced when the Roe v. Wade decision was announced. Catholic or not, she was a feminist and supported a woman’s right to choose. But right now, at this table, she was nearly shaking with rage. She’d held her poor wee babe at seventeen weeks. Scooped from the toilet. She knew exactly how much, and how little, was a true child at that point.

  “Mo, please …”

  “You want to be a mother.”

  “I do, but …”

  “Why would you not have this baby, if you can have this baby?”

  “Can I have a baby with a man who cheats on me? How do I know he’ll stay with us? How do I know I won’t finally get to the point I can’t take it anymore and not want him to stay with us? Yes, I want this baby, but I can’t be a single mom, Mo. I don’t want to ruin a human being. I don’t know how I’d do this alone.” The last words fell to pieces as they were spoken. Joanna was crying.

  Mo laced their fingers together. “You won’t be. You’ll never be alone.”

  Now Joanna began to sob. Mo offered up her napkin, and Joanna pressed it to her face and wept freely.

  “What do you want, Jojo?”

  “I want him to stop! I want him to love me! I want him to stay! I want him to want this baby!”

  “Then you need to tell him, love. You need to talk to Dane.”

  ~oOo~

  Brian was out in front, washing the Ironhead he’d bought new after he’d wiped out on the highway in Missouri and wrecked his chopper, when Mo got home. He looked up with a broad grin as she pulled onto the driveway and stopped short before him.

  Still in the midst of a mental riot, she hit the brakes hard, and they squealed enough to make him jump back.

  She threw open the door and slammed it shut, and by then his welcoming grin was gone.

  “Hey, sweetheart. What’s wrong?”

  He came to her, all warm concern and protectiveness, and Mo slammed her open hands against his chest.

  “You fucking know, don’t you? You fucking see it and do nothing!”

  “What? Mo, what the hell are you so tuned-up about?”

  “Dane fucks around! And you know it!”

  The answer filled his face at once. Of course he knew. Dane was his closest friend. They worked together, spent most of their free time together, drank together. They were family. They were practically fused at the hip.

  “Irish …”

  “Don’t Irish me! Do you fuck around?”

  “NO! Fuck no! And fuck you for thinkin’ so!”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Shock hit him so hard he took a step back. “Mo. Don’t. That wasn’t the same thing at all.”

  She believed that. She truly did. So she took a breath and backed away from a topic that belonged in the cold ground. “Then why do you let him?”

  “Let him? He’s a goddamn grown man. I’m not his father. I’m not his preacher. And I’m not his fuckin’ wife. I’m his friend. It’s none of my damn business.”

  “Aren’t you Joanna’s friend, too?”

  That knocked his wind out, and he didn’t answer right away. Mo had blown out her own wind in that first burst of fury, and she calmed to gasping frustration. Which was good, because they’d been shouting at each other on the driveway, putting on a show in a neighborhood where such things didn’t really happen.

  “Of course I’m her friend. But it’s different, Mo. It’s the same for you, right? Jo’s your friend first. That’s why you’re so upset. Dane’s my friend first. That’s why I keep my mouth shut. But that’s not to say he doesn’t know my opinion on the matter.”

  “Why does he do it?”

  Brian only shook his head. “That’s between Dane and Jo. Don’t bring it between us, Mo.” He reached out and caught her hand. “Please.”

  When he tugged, she let him pull her into his arms.

  “I love you, Irish. You are the only woman in the world for me.”

  She knew it was true. It was also true that whatever was wrong between Dane and Joanna had no place between them. They were strong. They were true. They were forever.

  So she held on and forgave him for being a good friend.

  ~oOo~

  Mo hosted exactly the Thanksgiving she’d hoped for. Aunt Bridie, Maggie, Roger, Annette, and little Marc were there. Robby—he was just Rob now—came home from the University of California. Faye and Lenny and their kids were there. Dane and Joanna brought Dane’s father. Rad and Ox came. And Collie. They filled the big new dining room table and the kitchen table, too, set up for the children.

  In her own home.

  It was perfect. Aunt Bridie and Maggie came a day early to help her and Joanna cook and bake. Though Joanna was due within a couple weeks, she still hardly looked pregnant and wasn’t uncomfortable at all.

  And Dane was over the moon about the baby. He’d been a storybook hero of a husband and father-to-be since the summer, even staying home when the club rode away from home for any length of time. He followed Joanna around, putting her feet up, fluffing her pillows, bringing her drinks and snacks. Joanna and Mo both hoped this new leaf would stay turned after the baby arrived.

  Meanwhile, the women all spent two lively days in Mo’s beautiful new kitchen, baking pies and breads, slicing vegetables, assembling everything they could the day before so they could cook it all on the day. Two turkeys. Two vats of mashed potatoes. Four kinds of bread. Dressing, cranberry sauce, casseroles, yams. All served in a room festooned with autumn decorations.

  Her family. In her own home.

  Mo had set up one of the so-far spare bedrooms as a playroom for the children. And the television was on in the living room, showing a football game. So they were all out of the way while the women cooked. The house was a riot of happy noise and heartwarming aromas.

  “Alright, you lot!” Aunt Bridie called, banging a wooden spoon on an empty pie tin. “Get yourselves to the table, aye?”

  Maggie went back for the children. Mo carried the last big bowl of potatoes and set it on her beautiful table.

  Then she stood back and watched it fill with the people she loved. There were some missing, dear souls who would always be missed, and wee people who’d never had a chance to become, and yet this home was full.

  Mo set her hand on her chest. Her heart was full. Yes, she wanted a baby of her own—with a fervor that was sometimes actual pain, she wanted that. But she understood now that she didn’t need a baby. If it wasn’t in the cards, her life would still be full and whole, as it was right now.

  All these people—so many they took up two tables and more than two rooms—were her family. She and Brian had come together and made this riotous clan. Boisterous and complicated, full of joys and sorrows, hopes and disappointments, mistakes and forgiveness. And above all, love.

  Strong arms came around her from behind, and she leaned back on her man.

  “How you doin’, Irish?” he asked softly, brushing his lips
over her ear.

  This man had walked into Quinn’s Drug & Sundry one spring day in 1968 while Mo was working, and from the love that had found its seed on that day, they had made all this.

  “I am perfect,” she answered.

  EPILOGUE

  2004

  Mo closed her journal and tucked the pen in the loop. During this long year away from home, she’d found herself writing often about the early years of her life with Brian. Thirty-six years had passed since the day a scruffy, dangerous-looking man had walked into her uncle’s store and bought gum, condoms, and cigarettes. Thirty-six years in which he had proven himself to be dangerous in more ways than one—but more than that, to be truly kind and loving, loyal and patient.

  Thirty-six years of a life full of joy and heartbreak, of fear and excitement. Of loss and gain, peace and strife. Of family. And of love.

  Through all those years, they’d endured the losses and changes that came with living. Aunt Bridie had gone to meet Uncle Dave ten years after him. Roger had been promoted and relocated several times, and he and Maggie, and their children, now called Connecticut home. Rob worked in Atlanta. Faye and Lenny had sold the motel and moved to Florida. All their children were flung to the ends of the earth.

  None of them came home to Oklahoma very often, and Brian and Mo had rarely traveled without the Bulls since the inception of the club. They hadn’t seen much of their blood kin until this road trip, when they’d made a point to visit everyone.

  They’d survived other painful losses as well. They’d buried dear friends—Collie, John, Dane, and Ox chief among them.

  And Mo had suffered three more miscarriages—six in all, each one more heartbreaking than the one before it. After the fifth, when the doctors had performed a new test and finally determined she had a condition that prevented her from processing folic acid, meaning she never would be able to grow a healthy baby inside her, Mo and Brian decided to adopt. But by then, the Brazen Bulls were an outlaw MC, with a well-known reputation, and they were denied the chance to adopt, though Brian had never been convicted of a crime.

  The final miscarriage, when she was near forty, had been an unplanned pregnancy, and it had ended like all the others. After that, Brian got the vasectomy he’d wanted years earlier. This time, Mo agreed it was right.

  But her dream of being a mother had already been achieved many times over by then. She was the matriarch of a grand, rambunctious, wonderful family. Especially as the Bulls grew and matured, many of the members saw her as the club’s actual mother. Some, like Eight Ball, who’d never had a woman in his life to care for him, had even come to call her by that very name.

  Mo had been there for the births of many children—first her nieces and nephews, by blood or by love, and then, since Rad’s first son’s birth, she’d been Grammo, with a host of new wee babes to dote on.

  With Brian, because of Brian, she had built the family she needed, and she was fulfilled. She’d had to pass the torch to a new club queen, but her family remained her family.

  Brian, too, had grown into a full, lush life. Until these past few years, they had had everything they could have wanted and more.

  But over the years, as the Bulls had evolved from a club of friends and fellow riders, to a club with a rowdy reputation, to an MC that worked together doing protection and security, to a one-percenter MC that occasionally contracted some outlaw jobs, to a major player in the outlaw world, Brian had begun to lose sight of what the Bulls were. When Dane had been killed, right in their own clubhouse, Brian had lost faith in himself and the club he led.

  Mo had known that day, when Dane’s body had lain lifeless in the middle of the Bulls’ home, killed by a club brother—when she’d held Joanna as she’d collapsed in grief and shock—that her man would never come back from that loss. Not as he’d been. She’d known it that day—to survive, Brian would have to turn from the club he’d made with his best friends. A club that no longer existed as they’d imagined it.

  It had taken him years to see it himself. Years of strife and turmoil, as Brian fought his inner demons, old ones reanimated and new ones born in new loss.

  In many ways, the past few years with him had been like the first—loving a man who knew himself best when he had an enemy to fight, but had lost himself in a war. Whether the distant battles of Vietnam or the home-front skirmishes of outlaw life, to a man like Brian, the result was the same. When the fight was right and righteous, he moved confidently ahead. When it was not, he lost his way.

  As in the years when Vietnam pulled him, to love him meant to wait for him to find his way home.

  She hadn’t been nearly as surprised as everyone else when Brian had retired from the club he’d founded with the friends he’d lost, and she hadn’t been surprised at all when he’d then wanted to take this long road trip, traveling the country for a year in an RV. She hadn’t wanted to go—her family was in Tulsa, and there were babies being born—but she hadn’t resisted. She’d understood.

  This was what he did: he rode when he needed to find his way. As a young man adrift, he’d taken exactly this route, just him, his chopper, and a knapsack. He’d spoken of that trip many times through the years, so much that she’d almost felt she shared the memories with him. With all that time to think, he’d learned important lessons about who he was, what he valued. He’d come home from that trip and enlisted in the Army. He’d been a warrior ever since.

  Now, more than forty years later, at the end of the long journey that first trip had sent him on, he’d needed to take it again and see who he was now, when his wars were over. This time, he was sharing it with her, so she could see what he saw.

  Mo understood him.

  Over the years he’d waited for her, too, though she’d never gone more than a few miles away from him in physical space. She’d had to learn a new way of understanding who she was, and how she could be complete, and the lessons had not been easy. But Brian was there, waiting for her, and loving her as she learned.

  He understood her.

  The RV door squeaked as it opened, and Mo looked over her shoulder to watch Brian come down the little steps. He had Toro in his arms. He’d bitched relentlessly about adopting a wee pup to join them on this trip—too much work, too restricting, what if the little shit barked all the time, who was going to clean up after him, if she insisted they get a dog why’d it have to be one that looked like a cat yakked it up—but Brian was a nurturer in his heart, as much a natural father as Mo was a natural mother, and it hadn’t taken long at all for him to love their dog. Now, Brian and Toro were inseparable.

  They sat beside Mo on the campsite picnic bench, and Brian bumped her shoulder affectionately. “It’s late, Irish. You comin’ to bed soon? You’re gonna ruin your eyes writing by lantern light.”

  She took her reading glasses off and set them on her closed journal. “I’m fine. Just wanted to get some thoughts down and write some postcards. If the weather’s good tomorrow, I want to ride into town and see if they have a library. I want to check email.”

  He set the pup down and pulled Mo into his arms. “Missing the kids?”

  “Aye. Annie and Emmie are almost a year old, and I haven’t set eyes on them yet. Last time she wrote, Sage said they’re nearly walking.”

  His arms tightened around her as he kissed her head. “What do you say we just get on the road and head straight home?”

  Mo pushed back so she could see his face. “But we’ve six weeks left. The whole of the southwest.”

  “I’ve driven through the southwest more times than I can count. I’ve seen all I need to see of it.”

  “Not the Grand Canyon.” Several times, while they’d planned this trip and while they’d taken it, Brian had mentioned that for all his trips through Arizona on Bulls business, he’d never actually stopped and stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon. He’d missed it as a young man, too, when he’d gone through Arizona in the winter.

  But he shrugged. “It’ll be there for some other t
ime. I’m ready to go home, too.”

  “Are you?” This trip had been about so much more than sightseeing. He’d needed so much more from it.

  Lifting her chin on his finger, he leaned in and put his lips on hers. As the first time he’d ever kissed her, Mo felt the same flutter in her belly. Her desire for him had never quieted, not in all these years.

  “I am. Let’s go home.”

  Mo studied his face in the lantern glow. So much older than the face she’d first met. So much life had carved its story deeply into his skin, leaving furrows and scars along which she could map their history. He was thoroughly grey, and his once-lush hair, still long, had thinned. His face had always rested into a severe expression, and that had deepened with age. But his eyes were the same keen blue, his love for her was the same deep shine. To her, he was the same. Like their love: timeless.

  They’d learned together that love itself wasn’t quite enough. It needed patience, too, and with both, broken dreams could be mended and made into something new. They had learned how to be present for each other, how to be patient with each other as they healed, and changed, and grew. They had learned how to reach the same place, even if their journeys there were different. They had learned how to wait for each other.

  And that was what lifelong love truly was. It endured not because it was invulnerable, but because it swelled and shrank and shifted with the blows of time. It was constant, and endlessly changing.

  It was life.

  THE END

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Susan Fanetti is a Midwestern native transplanted to Northern California, where she lives with her husband, youngest son, and assorted cats.

  She is a proud member of the Freak Circle Press.

  Susan’s blog: www.susanfanetti.com

  Susan’s Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/authorsusanfanetti