Page 20 of Handful

Here was what I learned about Austen Wicker over two hours and a bottle of Pinot Noir that neither of us finished.

Her parents were English professors at a small college in Vermont. Her father specialized in Victorian poetry. Her mother taught post-colonial literature, had opinions about everything and voiced them in a way that made you feel like you were being graded. They’d named their daughters Austen and Emma — both Jane Austen related — and had expected both of them to go into academia. Emma was a lawyer in Chicago now — not academia, but close enough in the parental ranking of acceptable professions. Austen had wanted a bar.

“A bar,” I said trying to picture what her parents had thought of that.

“A bar.” She broke a piece of bread in half. “I told them when I was nineteen. My mother didn’t speak to me for a week. My father sent me a reading list — economic theory, hospitality management, a biography of someone who’d opened a speakeasy during Prohibition. His way of saying he disagreed but respected the craft. We landed on a business degree as the compromise. Gave me the numbers, the logistics, enough to actually run the place.”

“They ever been to Velvet?”

“Vermont’s a long way. My father’s flown out three times — he sits at the bar, examines the woodwork and orders increasingly difficult cocktails to test my skills. I’ve never failed yet. My mother came once. She interrogated the staff.” She smiled. “They’re proud of me. They just don’t always know how to say it.”

Remember she’s got a father. Indira’s voice, clear as anything. The man who flew from Vermont to sit at his daughter’s bar. I filed that away next to everything else.

“My brother’s the same,” I said. “Doesn’t say it straight. Says it in, I don’t know. Indirect stuff. Tells me the kids are good at riding dirt bikes because of me, but he says it like he’s reading a statistic.”

She looked at me for a moment. “Brother, or MC brother?”

“Blood brother. Mark. Two years older. Lives over in Glenwood with his wife and two boys. I ride over the third Sunday of every month to see them — have for years.” It came out before I’d decided to say it. I reached for my glass. “He’s a good guy. Works at a plant. Married. Steady. He’s the one who turned out right.”

Austen looked at me. “And you didn’t?”

“I turned out different.” I drank. Set the glass down. “Our dad left when I was young. Before I was old enough to understand what he’d done to my mom, but not before I’d picked up the way he talked. About women. About everything.” I looked at her. “Mark picked it up too. Same voice, same jokes, same chin angle on the punchline. The difference is he’s got a wife, kids, a proper 9 to 5 job. Nobody’s pulling Mark aside because by every measure our dad ever handed us, he passed.”

Austen was quiet. She didn’t flinch, didn’t soften, didn’t rush to fill the silence with reassurance. She just listened. Bartender’s attention.

“The club helped,” I continued. “In the wrong direction. Being a Venom Rider, the cut, the road name — it gave me a frame for all the stuff I should have outgrown. Made it feel normal. Made it feel earned.” I tugged at my rolled cuff. “I’m not blaming the club. The club’s the best thing that’s happened to me. Dutch, Colt, Holden — they’re better men than I’ve been. I can see now they’ve been trying to pull me up to their level for years. I just kept finding ways not to notice until recently.”

“What changed?”

I thought about it. The honest answer was you, but I didn’t want to scare her off on the first date.

“A prospect died,” I said. “Just over two years ago now. Danny. He was nineteen.” I paused. Didn’t look at the candle. Looked at her. “After that, the club changed. Holden changed. Dutch and Colt - they’d already changed. Everyone around me got serious about something. And I didn’t. I stayed in the same gear. Made the same jokes. Chased the same nothing.” I set the glass down. “And then you kicked me out of your bar and I didn’t have anywhere left to hide.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time. The restaurant moved around us — the waiter clearing a table nearby, a couple laughing by the kitchen, the quiet clatter of someone else’s evening happening at a distance.

“My sister thinks you’re a project,” she said. “She thinks I’m trying to fix you.”

That wasn’t new. I’d been a project before — women who showed up at the clubhouse certain they’d be the one who finally cracked it. Ring, baby, the full domestication arc with the bad boy biker. Austen didn’t seem like the type. “Are you?”

“No. I don’t fix people. That’s not my job and it doesn’t work.” She met my eyes. “What I’m doing is sitting in a restaurant eating good food with a man who used to talk to my chest, and deciding whether the version of him I’m seeing tonight is real or temporary.”

“That’s fair.”

“It’s not fair. It’s necessary.” She folded her napkin. “Tell me about Danny.”

So I told her about Danny. Not everything — not the details of the ambush, not the blood, not Holden’s face afterward. But the prospect who’d shown up eager and stayed eager, who’d died trying to prove something to men who’d already decided he was one of them. The name the club had given him after — Anchor. The cut that hung in church. The way me and my brothers said see you out there when we passed it, like he was still riding somewhere.

“Every Saturday dinner,” I said. “Dutch opens with a toast. To Danny. The whole table. Every week. So he’s still there.”

Austen’s eyes were bright. “That’s beautiful,” she said.

I shrugged. “It’s what we do.” I looked out the window a moment. Thought about something I should have said at the start of the evening. “If we’re going to date — and I know you haven’t agreed to a second one yet — there’s something you should know. About how the club works.”

“Go ahead,” she said.

“Dutch has given me something to work toward. I can’t tell you what. What I can give you is notice. Every time I’m going to be gone, you’ll know the day before. A text, always. You won’t just find I’ve disappeared.”

“And if I ask what you’re doing?”