He Made Her His Old Lady. I Took His Baby and Vanished novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Table

Femke lays her patch on the leadership table in front of forty bikers, asks Joost to say her name, and watches Sanne announce a baby while his father gives her a week to get out.

Sunday dinner at the clubhouse started at four, and at four-ten I walked in with Joost's property cut folded over my arm.

Every seat was full.

Forty patches, their women and their kids ate at the long tables, and the noise dropped one table at a time as I went by.

I did not go to the kitchen.

I went to the leadership table and stopped in front of Joost.

The back of the cut said PROPERTY OF JOOST in white letters my own hands had stitched on two years ago.

I laid it across his plate.

Gravy soaked into the leather.

"Femke," he said.

"You gave my chair away on Friday," I said, loud enough for the back wall. "I came to give you back the rest."

Pieter set his fork down.

He took a breath off his oxygen line before he spoke, and the room waited for him.

"Kid, sit down. We can do this like family."

"I'm not talking to you, Pieter."

Somebody at the bar laughed and cut it off.

I kept my eyes on Joost.

"Friday you stood at a microphone and told forty people her name," I said. "Two years, and you never once said mine up there. Say it now."

His hands lay flat on the table on either side of the ruined cut.

"Say Femke Brandsma," I said. "That's all."

He opened his mouth.

Beside him, Sanne put her hand over his sleeve.

"Joost," she said gently. "Maybe not here."

He shut his mouth.

I had been braced for the shouting, the excuse and the sorry.

I had not been braced for how little it would hurt to watch him let her answer for him.

"That's what I thought," I said.

I turned to Sanne and took the folded list out of my back pocket.

It held eleven shelters, with a contact name beside every one.

"The winter run is yours," I said. "Four hundred coats are in a storage unit off Sixteenth Street, and the unit is in my name."

Sanne's eyes dropped to the paper.

"You can ask me for the code," I said. "I'll think about it."

I set the list down on top of Joost's ruined cut.

Several women near the front looked at their plates to hide their faces.

Truus stood up from the end of the table with her reading glasses in her fist.

She sat down again when Pieter looked at her.

I turned to go.

"Femke, wait."

Sanne had stood.

Her cut was buttoned over her middle again, and she kept one hand flat on it.

"I wasn't going to say this today," she said. "I wanted to be kind about it."

She looked around the room, at the faces turned toward her.

"I'm eleven weeks along. It's Joost's baby."

The noise came up from every table at once.

Chairs scraped.

A woman near the door started to cry happily.

Pieter pushed himself to his feet with both hands, and the whole room went with him.

"A baby in this club," he said. "A Verwey baby. My boy's child."

The patches started to bang their fists on the tables.

They were cheering a baby nobody could possibly be sure of, and they were doing it while I stood in the aisle in my coat.

I looked at Joost.

He had not moved.

He had gone gray, and his eyes were on his father instead of on her or on me.

He did not look like a man hearing good news.

Then I thought, he is not surprised, and my skin went cold.

"Congratulations," I said.

It came out level.

My own baby was nine weeks old inside me and I kept my arms at my sides.

Eleven weeks. Nine.

If there was a better time to say it, a better reason, it was gone.

If I said it now, I would be a second woman fighting over an heir, and Pieter would have a new line to hold over me in a room that already belonged to him.

So I walked.

I got as far as the door.

"Femke."

Pieter's voice carried over every other sound, still warm.

"Come here a minute, kid."

I stopped with my hand on the cold bar of the door.

He did not raise his voice.

He did not need to.

"The house on Ottawa belongs to the club," he said. "It always did. You were living there as Joost's woman. You aren't, now."

"I know whose house it is."

"Good." He smiled at me. "You have a week."

I looked at him.

I looked at Sanne beside him with her hand under his elbow, holding him up.

I looked last at Joost, who finally looked back, and said nothing.

"A week," I said. "I'll be gone in less."

I pushed the door open.

The cold took the heat off my face.

Behind me the room had started to cheer again, and I could hear Joost's name in it, over and over.

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