“Are they still treating you alright up there?”
“Yes, of course.” I could hear the smile in Jenna’s voice. “My therapists are half terrified and half in love with all four of you guys, they’ve all got major crushes on Dad, and they suck up to Mom like she’s wearing a crown on her head.”
“Good, whatever works,” I told her. “Take me off speaker, baby girl.”
I heard her fumble with the phone for a second and ask Clem and whoever else was in the room to give her a few minutes alone. Finally, she was back on the line with me.
“What’s up, Dot?”
“Just checking in. For real.”
“I’m okay, I promise.”
“What’s going on with Fain?”
“I’m still so mad at him, Dot, and I just don’t know why,” Jenna whispered. “It’s like one minute I’m so in love with him and the next I just want to wring his neck.”
“During the in-between times, does he talk?” I laughed.
Jenna chuckled, “Maybe that’s it.”
For years, she had pined after one of my club brothers, Fain. He was almost my age, so he was only about eight years older than her. She had been gaga over him since she was 16. Of course, back then it was just a little crush and we all humored her while we gave Fain shit about it.
But then Jenna had gotten older and she’d started to date. Not much, but occasionally.
None of us had realized it then, but she’d still been crazy for Fain and wasn’t really ever giving those other poor guys a chance.
The one time she did decide to give a guy a chance, she went to a party with a couple of her college friends and both of them ended up dead at the hands of Jenna’s date and his buddies. Jenna had been kidnapped, and when we found her along with a group of girls, they were being transported south to be sold to a brothel that had ties to a well-known drug dealer.
An all-out war had ensued and lasted well over a year. Right before we ended it for good, the women of our family, of our club, had been targeted. My sister-in-law Terra had been shot at, men had tried to enter my brother Bird’s home where his wife, children, and our parents were staying, a few of our guys had taken bullets trying to protect their women, and someone set Sonny and Brenda’s house on fire while she was home in bed - pregnant and sick.
All of our women had come out of it okay except for Jenna.
The night that the drug dealer had set off his final attack, Jenna and Fain had gotten into an argument and she had driven off alone in her car. It was the perfect situation for the men who had been watching her and they crashed into her when she passed through an intersection.
A crime of opportunity for them had caused my sister to be trapped for over an hour while first responders tried to cut her out of her car. Fain had come upon the scene seconds after it happened and stayed at her side while she fell in and out of consciousness.
He almost lost her. It took that to make him, and the rest of us, see that the two of them were meant to be together.
Jenna, on the other hand, was angry to the core, and couldn’t forgive him for what he had said that caused her to run away that night resulting in the car accident that almost took her life.
“Baby girl, I can’t tell you what to feel - that’s all on you,” I told her. “But that man has sat by your bedside pulling his hair out in worry for months now. If that’s not a big neon sign pointing to a man in love, I don’t know what is.”
“I think he should go home,” Jenna told me. “Can you talk to him?”
“Is he making you uncomfortable?” I asked her, worried since I hadn’t talked to Fain alone in weeks and never about my little sister.
“No, he could never do that!” Jenna said adamantly. “I just think that he can do so much better, Dot. I’ve got a lot of time left before I’m me again and he might be missing out on something if he waits.”
“Sweetheart,” I said softly. “You’ll be coming home soon and he wants to be there beside you when you do it. Open your heart, baby. Let him in. He’s been waiting at the door for months now and a year ago that was all you wished for.”
“I love you, Polka Dot,” Jenna said with tears in her voice. “You’re my very favorite brother.”
“I know, baby. I won’t tell the others.”
6.
DAUGHTRY
“We’ll get you all fixed up, Johnny,” I told the customer as I walked him out to his car. My friend Rowdy drove off in his tow truck and honked the horn as he passed us on his way out of the garage. “Your truck has officially been towed and delivered to our care and the next time you see her, she’ll be back to winning beauty pageants.”
“Not really sure that little bird you’ve got in there is the right one to work on my baby,” Johnny Elmer, a man I had known for years, said as I walked him to his car. “Not sure a woman understands the finer points of the engine I want.”
“Jamie Evans comes highly rated, Johnny, and I’ll be working by her side through the build. You know our reputation. We wouldn’t just hire anyone off the street,” I reminded him.
“I know, I know,” Johnny agreed. “But I just hate to see a little woman trying to do something that’s not her place. Worries me.”
Johnny and I said our goodbyes, I watched him drive away, almost sick at the thought that I had sounded just like him when I argued with the women in my family about hiring Jamie.
Fuck.
I didn’t know if she was worth a damn at fixing engines other than the references she’d sent, but I’d blown her off without even thinking of giving her a chance just because she was born with different chromosomes than me.
I shook my head and stared down at the concrete as I mentally kicked my own ass for being such a douche. If anyone tried to say shit like that about Mama or my sister or even any one of the women in my extended family, I’d kick their ass myself.
But I’d done it. Long and loud for weeks now. And I felt like a complete asshole.
“Don’t let the little woman work on that truck, boss,” Lout told me as he walked up beside me. He had changed his voice and tone to sound like Johnny’s country twang. “And make sure you don’t let those darker skinned fellas touch my baby either. You know they can’t be trusted.”
“He was a total dick,” I admitted. “I don’t remember him acting like that before.”
“He’s been that way every time he’s come in for fucking years, man, and his dad is even worse.”
“They’ve been shitty to you guys?” I asked Lout, angry on behalf of my friends.
“Now that wouldn’t be the good God-fearing way to act, would it? No, they just watch us like we’re going to pick their wallet out of their pocket and then steal away with one of their women.”
“Assholes,” I muttered.
“Not sure what he was more unsure about, the fact that Jamie is a woman or the fact that a black man and a Mexican man are in charge of some of your work. If he realized that Blaze is part Comanche and Rason is part Vietnamese, he’d have probably hitched that truck up to his car and found another garage.”