I’d only seen my dad get like that once, and that was when a group of older girls were bullying me at school and he’d tried to talk to the ringleader’s dad. Her dad had mouthed off, and it pissed my dad off. My dad had tried to be reasonable, but this other girl’s dad? He was a real jerk. My dad had whooped her dad’s ass so bad in front of us kids, no one had ever picked on me again. Unfortunately, it’d caused a big ol’ mess here at home when my dad got arrested by the police and they’d had to call my mom to leave Soul Fuel to come get me and Dante from school.
We’d had to go through all kinds of garbage interviews and check-ins with CPS to make sure my dad wasn’t beating us. But like I said – he was never like that at home. He’d yell and whatnot, had put a hole or two in some sheetrock, but he would never ever lay a hand on any of us.
“Where you going?” he demanded, setting down his papers from Open Road Ink and looking over his reading glasses at me.
“The club,” I answered with a shrug.
“To pester Smoke?” he demanded with an arched eyebrow.
I rolled my eyes and said, “Twisted Christmas?”
He frowned.
“Oh, shit. Is that tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“Take your brother with you so I can fuck your mother in peace,” he said, looking back down at his drawing and frowning as he refocused in on what he should be doing.
“Dad!” I cried, horrified. “Gross.”
“How the fuck you think you and Dante got here?” he demanded.
“Whatever, still don’t want to hear about it!” He smirked, and I called out, “Dante! I’m leaving! Come on!”
“If it gets too bad out there, stay at the clubhouse. Use my room.”
“Key?” I asked.
He grunted and detached his ring of keys from his belt loop. He had a special ring on there with just his club room key that he detached from the rest and tossed it in my direction. Dante’s hand appeared in front of me and snatched it from the air.
“Got it,” my brother said and gave me a reckless grin.
I rolled my eyes at him and said, “Come on, let’s go.”
“I’m driving.”
“The fuck you are!” my dad called out as we left the house.
I bit down on a giggle and said, “What Dad said.”
“Fuck,” Dante muttered.
“Shouldn’t have wrecked your car!” my dad yelled as my brother crowded out behind me and shut the front door on him.
“It wasn’t my fault!” he muttered, and I felt just a little bit bad for him. It really hadn’t been entirely his fault.
“You think that’s bad?” I asked. “Wait until you prospect.”
“Who says I wanna?” I stopped dead in my tracks and turned around to look at Dante. He started laughing at me.
“The look on your face! That’s great!”
“You little turd!” I cried, punching him lightly in the arm. He grinned and nodded his head. He was taller like Mom, but he was going to be huge when he finished growing. His arms long and lanky, his growing pains, when he had them, atrocious.
“So I can’t drive?” he asked, and I shook my head, looking up.
“Not even sure if we’re going to make it up into the club’s driveway. We might be parking on the side of the highway.”
I unlocked my car, and he opened up the passenger door and said over the snow-covered roof of my car, “Get in and get it warmed up; I’ll scrape. I’m sure the prospects were out there and shoveled, laid down deicer.”
“I hope so!”
I got in and started my car, shivering as Dante made good and cleared off my windows and the roof of my car. He was buttering me up for something, I just didn’t know what.
The drive to the club was done with a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel the whole way. Even Dante-the-Fearless was nervous beside me, but neither one of us wanted to miss out on Twisted Christmas Movie Night.
It was way too much fun.
We usually stayed up way too late, crashed at the club, then drove out to the Christmas tree farm the next morning to pick the club’s trees. We had two. One in the common room and one in the media room.
We would spend all day the next day decorating them and had a big dinner that evening. It was a tradition started mostly for us kids, and it had endured. I loved every minute of it. It was one of those things that bound us, that made the club our family as much as the bonds of blood did. It was our club Christmas, so that when the actual holiday rolled around in a couple of weeks, we could spend it with our blood families cozy in our homes.
“God, this winter is just fuckin’ brutal,” Dante said, and I nodded.
“Yeah.”
I turned onto the highway and crept along. It wasn’t quite dark yet – still just evening, the twilight just beginning to fall from the sky and creep up from the ground to meet in the middle.
“Eedee, watch out!” Dante cried, and I gritted my teeth and held steady and slow as the pickup in front of us coming the opposite direction slid across our lane almost kissing the front corner of my bumper on Dante’s side, and slid off into the ditch.
“You okay?” I asked my younger brother.
“Shit, yeah, just keep it steady. I’ll be glad when we get there.”
“Me too! Shouldn’t we stop to help, though?”
“Hell no! Just keep going. Dude was driving like an asshole, and the less time we gotta be out here, the better.”
“Okay…” I felt guilty, but the adrenaline and fear that coursed through me at the near miss kept me from feeling too guilty.
We made it to the club, laughing nervously and hearts still pounding.
“What do you think?” I asked. “Should I try the driveway?”
“Looks pretty good. Yeah, just low and slow.”
“K.”
I bit my bottom lip, and we went up and over the speed bump of packed snow left by the plows. The prospects had done a good job of making a cutout in the berm of snow so that we could get through the big iron gates, which had been left open.
“Drop it into first,” Dante said.
“Dante, we’re in an automatic! It’s already in first!”
“Yeah, but if you drop it into first, then it’ll stay in first and you’re less likely to spin out.”
“Oh, my God. We’re doing just fine!”
“You’re gonna spin your tires!”
“I am not!”
“Eedee, you’re gonna lose traction!”
“I am not!”
Of course, Dante had to be right. My tires spun and I started to slip. I panicked and braked and really started to slide back.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!”
“I told you!” Dante said laughing, and we managed to stop before sliding back out onto the highway.
I sat for a moment, chest heaving with my panic, the heater vents blowing, the windshield wipers shushing back and forth in the gentle snowfall. I jumped and yipped when a dark figure loomed outside my window.
“Uncle Reaver!” I shouted in admonishment as he doubled over laughing.
He tried the door handle, but it locked automatically when you started driving. I pulled on my door handle and the door popped open with a rush of wintry air.