Page 85 of Freak
Unable to imagine what they might want to do that required her to sit, Abigail took a seat at the kitchen table, which was still a mess, laden with ingredients and supplies. They’d make up the kids’ table after the food was ready.
“Okay, I’m sitting,” she said—and realized that the food prep had stopped, and all the women were converging, circling the table and surrounding her. She cast her attention around the table, feeling a tendril or two of wariness hook into her mind. “Is everything okay?”
Lilli stood at her side and set a hand on her shoulder. “Mel told us that yesterday was a very big day for you.” She reached down and lifted Abigail’s left hand. “Your birthday and your engagement day. This ring is absolutely gorgeous, by the way. We can’t let that go by like it’s not important. That’s not how we do things in this family. So ...” She nodded at Adrienne.
Abigail swiveled her head to Adrienne, who was holding out a beautifully wrapped gift.
“Oh goodness!” As she took the offered gift, she felt tears flood her eyes, but she blinked them back. It had been so many years since anyone other than herself had marked her birthday in any way.
The paper and ribbon were too lovely to rip apart, so Abigail untied the ribbon and slid her finger into the paper seam to separate the tape gently, exposing a plain white box, about an inch deep and about six by eight inches long and wide. She lifted the lid and found a delicate silver picture frame and a white envelope, the size of a greeting card.
When she lifted the envelope, she froze. There was a photo in the frame already: one of her and Mel that she’d had no idea existed. Nor did she know who’d taken it. It was taken at the Harvest Festival, in the evening. Mel had just helped her close up her booth.
The photographer had caught them in a quiet moment Abigail remembered vividly. They were facing each other, nearly chest to chest. Mel had her face cupped in his hands, and she had her hands hooked over his forearms.
His lips were pressed to her forehead, and their eyes were closed.
This was her first photo of them as a couple. Again, tears welled. “This is so beautiful and so thoughtful,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady and clear. “It means so much to me. Thank you!”
Adrienne and Lilli both set hands on her shoulders and squeezed.
“Don’t forget the card!” Candy said with a wet sniff.
Abigail opened the envelope and found a card with a beautiful country landscape in watercolor on the front. The inside had no prefabricated message but a handwritten note:
Dear Abigail, we’re thrilled that you and Mel found each other, and that you’re part of our family now. No matter what happens in life, good or bad, small or enormous, we stand with each other. Nobody goes out alone, nobody comes home alone, nobody gets left behind. Might as well embroider that and hang it on the kitchen wall, because that’s our creed. We got each other, and now we got you. Welcome to the family, sister.
It was signed by every old lady and the grown daughters, too.
People who accepted her as she was—who valued her for who she was.
Sisters. Family.
We got each other, and now we got you.
Abigail put her hands in her face and wept.
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~oOo~
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The grand opening ofthe Signal Bend Pavilion was the next day, Black Friday, and the entire Horde family was on site early. The opening wasn’t officially a club event, but it was Autumn Rooney’s event, and Autumn was Cox’s old lady, so the Horde had been nearly as deeply involved in the opening as they’d been in the building.
Only one storefront and two office spaces remained empty. Autumn had explained at dinner the day before that so few vacancies at the opening of a multi-business location was a great result. She also had good prospects for those last parcels. For now, the windows that would expose bare interiors were shielded by holiday-themed covers trumpeting the shopping center’s big opening. A brand-new sign also stood on the hotel site, proclaiming it theFuture Site of The Pavilion Inn!
Though most everyone in the family was on hand to help, Autumn was an executive with a development company and had a big corporate budget to work with, so she’d hired out a lot of the work—from local and near-local vendors, of course. Vivien Lewis, a manager of the Keller Acres Bed & Breakfast, had agreed on short notice to cater the opening—just a nice spread of small plates and sweets, with coffee, tea, and cocoa to drink.
The Sachs family, which owned Marie’s, had been contracted to cater the event, but Saxon had been killed only a few weeks earlier. Autumn had assured them they could cancel their contract without any harm, and they’d taken the offer gratefully.
That was something Abigail had long known about the Night Horde and about Signal Bend: how symbiotic the relationship between the club and the town was. Despite a typical structure of town governance, including a mayor and a town council, the club really ran the town. Everyone understood that—and most were comfortable with the arrangement. One could argue that the comfort derived from familiarity and inertia more than real approval—the Horde had been around and in charge longer than most townspeople had been alive—but that wasn’t it. The Horde were in charge because people here trusted them with the responsibility.
There had been plenty of hard times in this little town in the middle of a state in the middle of the country, and Abigail had been around to witness many of them. For decades, Signal Bend had been dying the slow, stuttering death of a community left behind. The Night Horde was the only reason it wasn’t a ghost town now. The club had gone outlaw specifically because they’d found no other option to keep enough money flowing in and get trouble flowing out, to keep the town on its legs.
With that devil’s bargain had come new kinds of trouble, and Abigail recalled a few times that the club’s trouble had exploded inside the town, taking lives and livelihoods with it. She’d sat in a town meeting or two full of angry and grieving people, when she’d thought Isaac Lunden would be run out on a rail.
Each of those times, the Horde had been suffering with them, suffering more, yet they’d done all they could to make the wrongs right. The members of the Night Horde were were of the town,forthe town, so the real anger directed at them in those hard days was the anger between siblings. Battles fought on a field of kinship could blow over, no matter how intense they might be.
