He Called Me Dramatic, So I Took the Club novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Keep It, See What It's Worth

Pearl patches Mallory up and the club's road captain keeps watch; at lunch Gage tries to get the necklace in front of the whole diner and walks out when Mace blocks him, and her house locks are changed with her things on the lawn.

I didn't go home.

I rode to Hutchins' Diner, because it was the only place in town with a light still on.

Pearl Hutchins lived in the apartment above it, and she came down the back stairs in a pink housecoat with her reading glasses swinging on their chain.

She took one look at me and said, "Sit."

I sat on the stool by the walk-in cooler, and she cleaned the gravel out of my cheek with a wet cloth.

"Stop flinching," she said.

"It hurts."

"It's supposed to. Who did this?"

"The road did the cheek," I said. "Gage did the rest."

I told her about the bar and Brandi and the kiss.

Pearl didn't say a word until I opened my fist and let the sparrow slide out onto the steel counter.

Her hands stopped on the cloth.

"That was your mother's," she said.

"It was in a tin in our closet. I never opened the tin."

"No." Pearl's voice had gone careful. "You wouldn't have."

"Pearl, why did she make me promise never to wear it near the clubhouse?"

"Put it in your boot," Pearl said. "Tonight, and keep it there."

She wouldn't say anything else, and I was too tired to push.

At midnight someone knocked on the back door, three slow raps.

Pearl opened it a hand's width.

Mace Wharton stood on the step with water running off his helmet.

He was the club's road captain, a big, quiet man with a gray-streaked beard who ran a custom garage on the east side of town.

In four years I had heard him say maybe fifty words to me.

"I saw you go down at the gate," he said. "Wanted to see you got up."

"I got up."

His eyes went to the scrape on my cheek and stayed on it a second.

"Gage went to your house looking for you," he said. "Stay here tonight."

"Why do you care?"

"Somebody should," he said, and he sat down in the dark of the back booth and stayed there until morning.

At eleven the next day the diner was packed.

I was working the grill with a bandage on my cheek and the sparrow in my left boot.

Gage walked in at the height of the lunch rush with two of the club's younger members behind him.

He wore his good vest, and he was smiling.

He took the stool at the end of the counter, the one I always kept clear for regulars.

"Babe," he said. "Come home. We'll talk."

Every head in the diner turned.

"You can talk here," I said, and slid a plate to a trucker without looking at it.

"Fine." He leaned both elbows on the counter. "Give me the necklace, and we'll forget the whole thing."

"It's my mother's."

"It's a family piece. Dad wants it looked at." He said it easily. "I'll have it back to you."

"You gave it to your girlfriend to wear."

"I let her borrow it for a night."

A woman in the third booth put her fork down.

"She wore it in front of the whole bar, Gage," I said, loud enough for the whole room. "Some loan."

His smile stayed where it was, but his jaw moved.

The bigger of the two members started around the end of the counter toward the back, toward my bag on the hook.

"I wouldn't," said a voice from the corner booth.

Mace stood up, and he took his time doing it.

He walked to the pass-through between the counter and the kitchen and stood in it, and the member stopped.

"This is between me and my wife, Wharton," Gage said.

"Then say it from where you are," Mace said.

Nobody in the diner was eating anymore.

Gage looked at Mace, then at the room, then at me.

He stood up and straightened his vest.

"Keep it," he said, soft and pleasant. "Go home and see what that's worth."

The three of them left, and the bell on the door rang behind them.

Pearl put a hand on my back.

"Don't," she said. "Don't go to that house yet."

I went anyway, at three, when the lunch crowd had thinned.

My key wouldn't turn in the front door.

The locks had been changed.

My clothes were piled in four black trash bags on the lawn, and my mother's picture frame lay on top, face up in the rain.

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