I shook off the memory. “She died last year,” I said. “But she gave me stuff to read, told me I could make something of myself. Even after I’d joined the MC, I’d go to her house, sit at her kitchen table and drink tea from white china.” I laughed, remembering how ridiculous I looked, wearing my leather cut and sipping from a delicate teacup. “We’d talk about Greek and Roman history, Buddhism, anything under the sun. When I got patched, she said it was ironic, the name of the club. Handed me a copy of Dante’s Inferno. I still go out to her grave sometimes with a book, read to her, ask her questions about life. It’s stupid, talking to her and stuff.”
“No,” Dani said. “I talk to my mom a lot about things, wonder what she would tell me to do.” She looked out at the creek, her expression wistful. “Sometimes I think she’d hate who I've become.”
“I get that,” I said. “Althea never said it, but I think she disapproved of the club. She had higher expectations for me. One time I asked her why she kept giving me stuff to read, and she said ‘knowledge elevates you, no matter who you are.’ I’m pretty sure she wanted me to get out.”
“Do you want to get out of the MC?”
“I couldn’t,” I said. “It’s my home. I don’t mind the muling, that kind of thing. There’s just certain things that go too far, you know? Smuggling stuff is one thing; people are another ballgame. That I want no part of.”
Dani nodded, and then a look of surprise crossed her face. “Hey! My line’s moving! Did I catch something?”
“I think you might have.”
“Holy shit!” She squealed, jumping up and down. “I’ve never caught a fish before!”
“Well, don’t drop it!” I put my arms around her, hands on hers, trying not to think about how good it felt to hold her. “Here’s how you reel it in. We can cook this guy up for dinner.”
Taking a pull on a beer, I watched Dani from the other side of the room. She sat reading and sipping on her wine, dark hair falling over her forehead, shielding her eyes, long legs tucked up underneath her. God, she really was beautiful. She looked up at me, eyes hooded, and I felt guilty, like a kid with his hand stuck in the cookie jar.
“I can see why you like it up here,” she said. The hostility that had colored our earlier conversations was gone. “It’s easy to forget about all the other stuff that’s happening. It’s like a little vacation. Even if I am stuck with you.” She smiled.
“If your idea of a vacation is hiding out in a dirty biker’s cabin because you might get killed, you have a pretty fucked up idea of what a vacation is.”
Dani laughed. It was good hearing her laugh. The sound warmed the house. “Well, a lot of my ideas are fucked up, so I don’t know why my idea of a vacation would be any different.”
I shrugged. “You turned out pretty normal for Guillermo Arias’ daughter. I mean, going to Stanford and shit.”
“Normal,” she said. “Well, at least that’s normal. My childhood wasn’t, that’s for sure.”
“No, I would guess it wasn’t.”
She smiled wistfully. “You know how I learned math? When I was in kindergarten, my father would give me stacks of bills to count. He’d smoke his cigar, and put them into piles of hundred dollar bills. Typical kids’ stuff.”
“That’s what happens when your dad is who he is, right?”
Dani giggled, putting her hand to her mouth, and I thought about kissing her, right then and there. “I feel so bad for the kids I went to school with. There was this one time-I think I was six or something? This girl-what the hell was her name? Carla, I think. She was bullying me a little bit. We got into a fight on the playground, and my parents got called in.”
“Oh no,” I said. I could imagine where this was going now that I’d met her father.
She laughed. “Yes, can you picture my dad showing up to the principal’s office? They suspended both of us, even though the other girl had started it. But the problem was-her parents had no idea who my father was.”
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“So she wouldn’t apologize, and I think her mother was almost proud of her or something. She just stood there. Anyway, my father didn’t say anything at all, not a word. But someone paid them a visit, and then a few weeks later, I’d heard they’d changed schools. I think her family actually moved.” Dani laughed. “I mean, it’s funny in a warped way, because it’s so terrible, you know?”
“Yeah, I can’t imagine him being asked to sit on the PTA.”
“No, and I wanted him as far away from me and Stanford as possible. I figured I needed some distance between us." She paused, more serious now. "Otherwise I’d wind up dead, like my mother.”
“She died because of someone who wanted to get at your father.” Guillermo had said the threat against him was connected to his wife’s murder.
“That’s the official party line.”
“You don’t believe it.”
“It’s -” She paused, then a dark look crossed her face and she shook her head. “No, never mind.”
“No, what were you going to say?”
“I shouldn’t. The wine is just going to my head, making me think things I shouldn’t think, say things I shouldn’t say.”
Maybe she wasn’t under her father’s thumb as much as I had assumed. “Say it.”
“You’re working for him.”
“So? That doesn’t mean anything.”
“I don’t know who to trust anymore,” she said.
“Yes, you do. You’re not stupid.”
She laughed, bitterly this time. “No, just reckless.”