Page 171 of Devil’s Disciples

Five minutes later, we were sitting on the edge of the stone cliff, looking out over the Pacific Ocean.

“This is incredible. I can’t believe I didn’t know it was here,” she said. “Does it have a name?”

“Sunset Cliffs is what they call it. From where we’re sitting to all the way over there.” I pointed several hundred feet north, toward another section of stone that jutted out over the beach. “I’ve been coming here for twelve or thirteen years and solving problems.”

“What kind of problems?” she asked, keeping her eyes fixed on the western sky.

“The kind that can’t be resolved on my bike.”

“I might be crazy,” she said. “But I’d guess that thing can solve about anything that might come up. I love riding on it.”

“Sometimes riding isn’t enough,” I said.

“When my parents died, I went to Joshua Tree. It reminds me of this place. There’s no ocean, but it’s as serene.”

“I have to force myself to remember your parents are gone,” I said. “I can’t imagine losing my mother.”

“Tell me about her.” She looked at me. “If you want to.”

I rarely got a chance to talk about her to anyone other than Ghost and Baker, and they weren’t as interested in hearing about her as I was to talk.

I fixed my eyes on the horizon. “She’s older than you might think. Sixty-two this year. She grew up in Northern Ireland. Belfast to be exact. She married her way into citizenship. Tied the knot with a man she didn’t know, just to get away from the fighting between the Catholics and Protestants. When I was a kid, she told me stories of the Peace Walls, and how Catholics lived on one side, and Protestants on the other. She said that there were Catholics that had never spoken to a Protestant, and vice versa. Her parents raised her to embrace all races and religions. When they were killed by a bomb blast, she decided she’d had enough of the fighting.”

“That’s awful,” she said. “I’m so sorry she had to grow up exposed to that anger.”

“She’s not.” I shook my head at the thought of my mother’s optimism. “She says it caused her to embrace her convictions. She raised me to be open-minded, and not to hate someone because of who they prayed to, or what they looked like. She said there’s only one God, and that there’s just a lot of different understandings of how pray to him and who he or she might be. We’re all after the same thing, according to her.”

“She sounds like a smart woman.”

I grinned. “She is. She came here with her husband. After ten years, she hadn’t got pregnant. Wanting a family, and convinced she was infertile, he left her. A one-night stand with an oil field worker who was passing through proved he was wrong and produced her only child. She changed her name back to her maiden name before giving birth to me, so I could be Irish.”

“That’s an awesome story,” she said with a smile. “Do you ever see her?”

“At least once a year.”

“Where does she live?”

“Great Falls, Montana.”

“How far away is that?”

“Thirteen hundred and thirty miles if I ride to her house. Thirteen fifty to the cabin.”

“Do you ride your bike?”

“I do.”

It felt good to share my mother’s existence with someone other than the men in the club. She was the only woman I was close to, and I’d spent a lifetime believing she’d be the only one I’d ever care about.

I now questioned my beliefs.

“She had you when she was thirty-one?” she asked.

“Thirty. I’ll be thirty-two in six months. She had me late in life. She’s convinced I was a miracle baby. I told her there are a lot of women who have babies much later in life but arguing with her is like arguing with a rock. She’s stubborn.”

She shifted her gaze to the ocean. “Do you want kids?”

I laughed. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve always hated women. You’re cool, but you’re the only woman I’ve ever met that I can be around for longer than thirty minutes without getting a headache. Having kids is the last thing on my mind. Why?”