Page 7 of It Takes a Thief

“What happened?” urged Bee.

I shrugged again. Now the entire incident, with words floating around my head like stars and tweeting birds around a dizzy cartoon character’s head, seemed remote. “Nothing particularly out of place or unusual. I just reacted unusually to it. It was kind of like…it builds and builds, then reaches a certain crescendo.”

“Oh, I get you, girl,” said Gudrun. She worked for the state in memory care facilities, going wherever she was needed, evaluating the degree of patients’ Alzheimer’s. “We have to know inside of us that what we’re doing is good, because looking around, you sure can’t tell. My job might be the most depressing one ever. Surrounded by drooling, nodding people who just aren’t there. It’s an epidemic. But someone has to do it.”

Everyone nodded sagely except me. Maybe because I was a drooling, nodding person. “But Gudrun, do we have to do it? I mean, maybe I’m ready for a break. To do something completely different.”

“Oo,” said Bee, warming to the subject. After leaving her nunnery, she’d bought a plant nursery. Now there was a soothing job if ever I knew one. “You mean like work in a nursery?”

I shrugged. “Could be. Don’t people take sabbaticals?”

“Not you,” said June harshly. “You’re the hardest worker I know. What happened, Maddy? Is it about Ford again?”

“Yes, Ford…” echoed Gudrun.

They all knew I had gripes about Ford. That was nothing new. It had been going on for years, basically since Fidelia had been born. I admit I had Niko thinking it’d turn Ford into more of a family man. But no. He was never home, always out on “runs,” sinister and dangerous face-to-faces with disreputable underworld types.

He had a regular business to run, Illuminati Construction. They rented out equipment from their mountaintop airplane hangar, and they also did jobs themselves, with their own labor. Ford somehow managed to juggle his two presidencies, usually sacrificing family time. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t just get someone else to run one of those entities. We hadn’t had a vacation, not a real one, in years, if ever. I’d given up trying to rope him into going anywhere with me. Even when I purchased a vacation getaway and handed it to him in a birthday card, it was always, “That’s nice, mija. But I’ve got work to do that week. Big sewer job for the County.” I could never tell if that was code speak for “big job with the Jones cartel.” Old Ladies were supposed to never question their men. That was a cardinal MC rule.

Then I’d started doing getaways alone. From our father, I’d inherited something like 1/10th of a vacation cabin in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. I flew there a few times, with or without June, but Ford seemed to barely notice I was gone. And it was hard to have a good time without him.

I sighed deeply, my chin almost touching the rim of my gin and tonic. “Yes, Ford. The usual. I had a hard day at work and when I tried to call him, Wolf told me he was going into church. Then in the background I heard Ford say I call him too much. So when I didn’t want to pick up the kids, I didn’t bother telling him. I sent Sabrina.”

The three women nodded sagely. June said, “Lytton’s almost as bad. Between the plantation and the dispensary and club business, I rarely see him either. Shit, I see Tobiah more than I see Lytton.”

“Tobiah lives at your house,” I pointed out. “He’s got all his nerd stuff set up in his office.”

“You want a sabbatical,” said Gudrun. “Why don’t you go help out somewhere else, somewhere that needs your expertise? I go from place to place. I’d go apeshit if I had to see the same vacant eyes, the same bedpans every day.”

“Very good idea,” said Bee. “You could ghost alongside Gudrun at her memory care facilities.”

Memory care didn’t appeal to me. It would remind me too much of the senile mother we’d watched die of pancreatic cancer. Actually, the obedient June had watched her die. I had refused to participate in caregiving after the old witch had continuously kicked me out of the house starting at the ungodly age of ten. I’d slept in the canyons, sitting around fires with other unwanted kids, learning to trade sex for food. A hand job for a McDonald’s burger was all right in the summertime, but come winter, the storms rampaged through those sandstone spires, and only the most unloved of us stayed huddled inside pocket caves, sopping goose down sleeping bags wrapped around us. I overstayed my welcome at Sabrina’s house—and that made two mothers who had kicked me out. I grew up knowing there must be something wrong with me.

Lately, I knew there was.

I straightened up. Got my chin off that gin glass. “No,” I said, a little bit decisively. “I want to do something different.”

And I grabbed my phone and went out back with the smokers.

It was October, when the fading sensation of the sun warms your skin still, but you know the storms will be upon you soon. Maybe it’s an age-old self-preservation technique programmed into our brains. But autumn was when I started feeling that urgency, the need to get my house in order. This was nothing new. But this year I felt more unattractive, more wanting and impoverished.

And I’d just had a major breakdown.

I couldn’t show it, to a large extent, even to my own friends. I was the Prez’ old lady. The Bare Bones Pure and Easy charter was the mother charter, the backbone. Ford, son of the founder, ruled with an iron fist over turf from Gallup to Seligman. We used to extend to Kingman but when Turk Blackburn had gone rogue and formed his own MC down in Lake Havasu, we’d carved out Kingman for him. We ruled with a mortal superiority over this land, and if I showed the other old ladies how empty I felt inside, well, that would reflect on Ford. I tried to keep it to a minimum.

There was one major difference this fall, though. This time, I couldn’t blame my mother for making me feel this way. What’s that adage? “Your parents make you what you are, but it’s up to you to change it”? Yes. That’s it exactly. She had caused this deep, lonely heartache, this inner knowledge that I was an imperfect being in a perfect world. It was my job to learn to fit into that beautiful world I could only view as an onlooker.

Walking around the corner of the building to get away from the drifting clouds of smoke, I listened to my messages with annoyance. I knew at least one would be from Ford, pissed that I hadn’t picked up the kids.

Yup. I was right. His voice had that customary tight, pissed tinge to it. I’d become scarily familiar with that tone. “Madison! Where the fuck are you? Some chick”—some chick? Her name was Annie, and she’d been our daycare lady for two fucking years—“called to tell me you never picked up Fidelia and Niko.”

I rolled my eyes. Blah, blah. Texts from Sabrina two hours ago told me she was on the job and had delivered them to my house. I punched 7 for erase before Ford was even done dictating to me. There wasn’t another message from him when he’d inevitably discovered the children safe at home. Probably off on another important “job.”

I had to settle at a table occupied by one dusty, ragged biker. He was just a riding club member, with a patch that said “Work Sucks. Let’s Ride,” so I wasn’t familiar with him. But one glance at my boobs and he smilingly allowed me to sit. I set up my phone on its little stand and punched a few buttons in FaceTime. The guy who thought work sucked was too distracted by my rack to listen in, and Ogden Taliwood picked up with a wide smile.

“Madison,” he acknowledged.

“Ogden,” I said, chipper. I actually did feel chipper, at last. There was something so serene and elevated about this cancer survivor brother. Ogden was a Bent Zealot, a member of the MC Turk had started out west. As such, he’d already been through hell and back. Grew up on the Four Corners Rez, blew a basketball scholarship by doing meth before a piss test, became a Bent Zealot…oh yes, and was gay. How much of a cross could one bear? If Ogden could do it, so could I. Two of his fingers had been fused together, too, like the gut-shot guy I’d seen dragged into the front doors of my hospital. That’s how I knew it was uranium poisoning, and that he came from the Rez. Uranium had given Ogden lung cancer.