Page 19 of Walker

“Seriously?” Griff asked.

“Said it, didn’t I?”

We walked out with Tash smiling after us. I wasn’t sure if she had shit to say to my Prez and VP because it wasn’t my fuckin’ business. If they didn’t get their priorities in order, this might be one of my last rides as a member.

7 - Ghosts of Husbands Past

My daughter cried the biggest tears I’ve ever seen when I kept her home from school the next day. I sent Josh off with my sister, who for once, gladly took him after I explained why I was so late coming home last night.

“I didn’t know how to tell you, or if I should. What if you knew and just didn’t care? You know?”

“Sweetheart, how could you think I wouldn’t care about someone saying that shit to you?”

“Not about me, but about Dad. He… He… Why was he such a bad person?” Her voice broke at the end as more tears fell, and my heart cracked wide open for the weight my daughter had been carrying on her shoulders.

This was where it got hard. I wanted to rant and rave about all the ways my husband, her father, had turned into a crappy person over the last few years of his life, but I couldn’t. Not to her. Not to my son. Not ever.

“Ariel, your dad made some mistakes in his life. I won’t argue that, but no person is the sum of their mistakes. We all have ups and downs. The longer you live, the more mistakes you make.”

“It’s not a mistake to have a baby with another woman when you’re married with two kids at home. That’s not a mistake. He was paying their bills while we were struggling.”

“I doubt he was paying many, if any, of their bills, baby girl.”

“How do you know?”

“I know exactly how much money your father made and even what he spent and where it went.” Though, there were niggling doubts about how much money he really lost at the casino. It made sense that he tried to turn his paychecks into something more every week, considering I knew to the penny what he would bring home in each check. Maybe he won more than he lost, and it all went to her. That wasn’t something I could talk to my daughter about, though.

“Well, maybe he had another job.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Sweetheart, we could speculate all day long about what your father did with his time when he was alive. The truth of the matter is that we don’t know, and we’ll probably never know. Without a DNA test, we may not know if that other child is your half sibling either.”

“How can you be so calm about this?”

“Mostly because I spent all of last night crying it out, but also because I already mourned your father being gone from my life. It turns out he may have been gone a little sooner in ways I didn’t know about back then. I don’t know, honey. It’s a lot to process and I don’t think I’m done doing that just yet.”

“Is it because you like the biker guy?”

“Whoa, how did this go from a talk about your dad and what that girl said to you to Walker.”

“Walker? That’s his name?”

“Yep.”

“Well, you didn’t answer the question. Do you like him?”

“I don’t know. We’ve only talked a few times.”

“I didn’t realize that you and Dad weren’t exactly happy, but the more I think back, the more I remember you guys arguing and-” She stopped in the middle of what she was saying.

“And?” I prompted.

“And you argued a lot about money, I think. I’m old enough to understand. You said you knew where the money went, but did you?”

My heart broke inside my chest all over again. “Ariel, I don’t want to tell you.”

“Because it’s bad, right?”

I nodded.

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