"Yeah," Stan said. "Might be a little while. He was riding out to check on the cattle. He knows what time dinner is, though. He'll make it back for that, that's for sure. Even when he was a kid, he could be gone all day, but dinner? Like clockwork, he'd figure out how to get home. Of course, that's when it was his mother's cooking, and not mine."
"Oh, I bet your cooking is just fine," I said. "Now, your coffee, on the other hand, that's a different story."
"Hey, I warned you I make a mean cup of coffee."
"Yes, emphasis on mean,” I said, but I smiled.
“Now, speaking of coffee,” Stan said. “Why don’t you ladies grab a cup - or there’s some tea right over there - and go sit out on the porch? Joe and I can take care of the cooking.”
“Joe?” I asked.
“That’s me,” Crunch said.
“You just don’t want me near the kitchen,” April said.
“Joe has told me some stories.” Stan reached into the cupboard for a bowl.
“God, you start one major kitchen fire, and you never live it down, do you?” April asked.
“No, and you never will, either, doll,” Crunch said. “We’ve got this covered.”
“All right, all right,” April said. “You don’t have to tell me twice to not do work.” She held up her hands. “Looks like we’re free to hang out outside. Doesn’t hurt my feelings at all.”
“Sounds good to me, too,” I said. We took MacKenzie outside, and sat silently, watching her run up and down the porch steps and into the yard, finding stones and flowers and bringing them back one at a time to her mother, before sitting down to decorate Bailey's collar with dandelions.
"So do you like being part of the biker club, then?" I asked. I wasn't sure how to ask what I wanted to ask, wasn't sure if it was rude.
No, scratch that. I was sure it was rude. What I wanted to ask was how the hell she did it, marrying a man who was a criminal, having a kid with him, following him to Colorado on the run from whatever the hell trouble they were in. I just didn't understand it.
I would never do something like that, I thought. I just couldn't see myself following someone like that anywhere. Then I had the nagging thought that maybe I just didn't love anyone that much.
"Yeah," April said. "I know it's weird from the outside. Trust me, I know. I used to have more civilian friends than biker ones, but that changed over the years. But I remember when I was mostly friends with civilians, how they looked at me when I went to hang out at the club on the weekends. They thought I was getting, well, you know - " April leaned forward in her chair, glancing at MacKenzie playing happily in the grass before she lowered her voice.
"They thought I was getting raped or gang banged or something. I mean, something must be wrong with me or I must be into some kind of kinky shit if I was hanging around a bunch of bikers. Don't get me wrong. I was wild. But after a while, it became like my family. Then I met Crunch, and it was my family. He was my family."
"I don't think many people understand it," I said. I sure didn't. The only thing I really knew about outlaw bikers was what I'd seen on television. Of course, now that I thought about it, there were rumors about a couple of the enlisted guys who worked for me during deployment, a couple of the corpsmen-that they were hang arounds with a biker gang. I didn't know what that meant at the time, and I didn't want to know.
"No," April said. "Most people don't want to understand, either."
"Do you ever get tired of it, though?"
April didn't answer right away, rocking back and forth in her chair for a bit before she opened her mouth. “The truth?” she asked. “Yeah, of course I get tired of it. We didn’t have a kid when Crunch and I were first together. It was just the two of us. I was a lot more okay with risk-taking back then, you know? But now, MacKenzie's around. I don't want this kind of life for her."
“That makes sense,” I said. I could understand the part about risk-taking. Despite everything I told myself about wanting to settle down, there was still a big part of me that liked an adrenaline rush, the feeling of being on edge. It's one of the things that drew me to the military.
“Don’t get me wrong,” April said. “We love the club. They gave Crunch a place after he went to the Pen. Tank saw to that. There aren’t a lot of employers that are going to want you after you’ve been to the Pen for embezzlement, you know. Even criminal ones. So, we’re very grateful for that.”
I nodded. "Of course."
"It's just that Joe and I talk about whether we want MacKenzie to grow up in this, find a biker like her old man." She paused, looking at me. “I’d rather have MacKenzie grow up to do something with herself, be a doctor like you.”
I laughed nervously. If only she knew. “I’m not a doctor anymore. I gave up all of that, came back home. So you probably don’t want her to be like me, actually, wasting her education.”
“No,” April said, adamantly. “I do want her to be like you. You had a choice, at least - to come home or stay and do what you were doing. I want Mac to have a choice. It’s a choice I never had growing up. My choices were to strip or be a cashier at the grocery store. I chose stripping." She laughed, the sound bitter.