Page 80 of The Broken Beginning: Part One

“What’s going on?” Lily asked the question from her desk when I came in the next day loaded down with takeout food I got from her favorite restaurant.

“I don’t want you to get mad,” I started to say when she pushed into the room, belly first, and started helping me take the food containers out of the bag.

“God! This smells divine!” The woman was practically salivating over the containers as she unpacked them. “And it’s never a good thing when you start a conversation with, ‘I don’t want you to get mad,’ so out with it!”

“Remember how I said I wanted us to be a real family?”

“Yes, and I told you that we already were.” She glanced around. “This is a whole lot of food, Merc! What were you thinking?”

The sound of motorcycle engines out front must have caught her attention. If the clock on the stove was correct, they were early, and I hadn’t warned her yet. That wasn’t a good sign.

“Well, we need to have our family whole and there’s no way to do that without…”

A knock at the door interrupted me as Lily’s eyes narrowed into a penetrating glare that I swear burned me right down to my soul.

“What in the hell did you do?” She yelled at me.

“Hear me out,” I told her with my hands raised in the air. “Our kids are going to need their full family at their back, and you and I are going to need a babysitter so we can have date nights and I can show you how much I love, appreciate, and respect you. Plus, we’re going to need someone to watch Declan when you go into labor. I know they have a lot of…”

Another knock interrupted me, but that time, Lily’s features softened, and I swear, she swatted a tear away.

“Go answer the damn door, Merc.” There was no heat in her voice though, so I knew she was starting to see reason.

“Pops!!!” Declan screamed as I opened the door and he noticed both of his grandfathers standing there.

“Hey, little man!” Boone called out as he hefted my son into his arms. “Merc.” He tipped his head to me and moved further into the house, taking cautious steps as if anticipating my wife hurling a frying pan at him.

“Thanks for having us,” Robbie told me as he lifted a bag full of wrapped presents. “We come bearing gifts.”

“Isn’t that usually what evil people say?” Lily asked, though again, there wasn’t any venom in her words. She was just being her usual smartass self.

Rob chuckled. “I suppose, but in this case, our only ulterior motive is to get you to let us back in.”

She glanced over at me, sighed, and then turned around to go set the table. “Might as well come on in and get settled while the food is hot. Merc bought enough to practically feed the whole clubhouse.”

Once everyone was seated, I ducked out and headed up to the loft to grab all the gifts that had been waiting to be opened – some of them for years. Earlier that morning, I’d packed them into a bag to make them easier to carry downstairs, and to leave me with a free hand to bring the tree as well. The end table had been moved into the kitchen, near the window, where Lily planned to put some sort of houseplant that she kept talking about but never seemed to produce. So, I put the tree on the table, plugged it in, and unpacked the presents all around it. Rob got up and added the gifts he brought to the rest.

“Momma! Why yous crying?”

Lily couldn’t answer, so I took the liberty of speaking for her, which was honestly something neither of us was used to doing.

“Mommy just has crazy, pregnant woman tears,” I told him.

“Momma’s crazy?” He asked, eyes going wide.

“Merc!” She hissed, but there was laughter in her voice too as she swiped her face free of tears.

“Momma’s just happy to see your pops!” She told our son.

“‘Cause you cries a lot when they don’t come visit.” Like the wise little angel that he was, our boy had missed absolutely nothing, even if he didn’t understand the full dynamics of our family’s latest rift.

Sometimes, all it takes is the innocent little kid at the table to break the ice and start patching up all the old hurts.

“We promise never to do anything that will keep us away again,” Robbie said, speaking for both himself and Boone. The code-talk in front of Declan was obviously appreciated by my wife too because she managed a smile for her father.

~*~

We sat around and opened our gifts, some that were years in the waiting. My Tiger Lily had gifted me a badass watch, some fucking awesome patches, and other cool shit. The thing is, the one present that destroyed me was the family photo album she had put together, no doubt just before finding out she was pregnant again.

---