"Come on," she said. "Come hold your daughter."
I don't think I'd ever been scared so shitless in my entire life. There I was, this tatted-up biker, standing there in my fucking leather cut, the one that told the world I was a hardened criminal, and this thing that weighed 7 lbs 8 ounces was making me terrified. I hesitated, and stood there, my feet practically welded to the floor, just looking at April.
"I don't know," I said.
She grinned at me. "Get your fucking ass over here and hold your daughter," she said, her voice slurred from exhaustion. "Quit being such a goddamned pussy."
~ ~ ~
That moment, holding MacKenzie...it changed everything. We were different after that, April and I. Fuck, I was different after that. It sounds cliché - a changed man. But I was. I was loyal to April, always had been, back in those early days of our marriage - but not in the sense that I never got any strange. April knew I got some on the side, now and then, knew I partied hard at the club. She was okay with it, as long as I came back to her. But the day MacKenzie was born, all that shit stopped. There was just something about it that didn't seem right, that didn't fit with the man I wanted to be, the father I wanted to be to MacKenzie.
Same with the fighting. The fighting had always been a part of me. Shit, one of my earliest memories was of laying out a kid in the playground at school for calling my mother a whore. I was always a brawler, settled everything with my fists. That was something that never changed, my whole life, until after MacKenzie was born. I was a hothead, running my mouth, getting myself into trouble with other clubs, stirring shit up because I could. It was some destructive shit, the stuff I would attract.
Marrying April didn't calm me down. She'd married me crazy, and knew I was like that. But having that kid all of a sudden put everything in a new light. Stuff just stopped pissing me off like it used to. It started being too hard to be that guy, laying someone out because he made some smart-assed comment one second and then going home to have a tea party with my kid and her stuffed animals. MacKenzie saw through me, right from the very beginning, the way kids do. She knew when I was angry, and I didn't want to carry that shit around with me. I didn't want it to taint her.
So I stopped, got my shit under control. Stopped doing so much crazy shit with the club, didn't go around as much when things started going downhill. I kept up with the books and did my part for the club, but I knew shit was going bad at the club. I just didn't think it would ever go that far.
I didn't think it would ever affect April or MacKenzie. But it had, and in the worst imaginable way.
I pulled over someplace out in the desert, stood there watching the sun sink lower and lower on the horizon. The sudden drop in temperature was noticeable, but it was still scorching hot out. I could hear the bike tinging as it cooled off slightly, the only other sound was the soft gust of a breeze blowing past, and the crunch of gravel under my boots.
I didn't know if she could hear me or not, didn't know whether I believed in a fucking afterlife, the idea that April was looking down on me from heaven or some shit, but there were things I needed to say. So I sat out there alone in the dirt, talking to her.
"Shit's been so goddamned broken since you left, April. I don't know who the hell I am anymore. MacKenzie's lost without you. Hell, I'm lost without you. I don't know how the fuck to be a father with you gone..." I told her everything, how I'd been fighting again, grasping at straws, trying to do something - anything- that would ease the pain since she had gone. I told her how I'd felt adrift.
And I confessed - told her I was thinking about going back to the club that I'd broken from when they took her away from me. Told her that I missed the brotherhood, the feeling of family. I didn't have that anymore. Not without her.
And then I told her the final piece, the piece that I'd been afraid to put into words. "There's someone else, April. Someone I met. This girl. I don't know where it might be going - shit, probably nowhere - but I need your blessing, even if nothing comes of it. I don't want to be completely alone anymore, April." Even as I spoke the words, I knew they were true. I couldn't be alone anymore. It was killing me. I'd mourned April for years now. I couldn't spend the rest of my life in mourning. And I knew she wouldn't want me to. She would have kicked me square in the ass if she knew I'd spent this long all torn the fuck to pieces.
I pictured April shaking her head, her arms crossed over her chest and a look of mock disapproval on her face. "You better get out there and find yourself a good girl," she would say. It was something we'd half-joked about when we were married, what would happen if one of us died. I'd want her to move on, I'd told her, find someone else. She said she'd make sure he was richer than me, with a bigger dick. And I'd swat her on the ass and say she should go ahead and try to find someone with a bigger cock. Of course, both of us had always assumed we were talking about me dying. Not her.
"I need you to understand, April," I said, my voice breaking. "I need to start to let you go. I can't stay in mourning forever. I need you to let me go."