Page 93 of Badd B*tch

Mara sat on the other side of the bed from her husband and met my eyes. "I only know what I've heard since sitting down, but it sounds to me like you've given the man a lot of grace."

“He's the only parent I've got," I said. “Yeah, my childhood was unusual. Some of the stuff he did was definitely…problematic. But he loved me and my sister, and he was there. He tried. He didn't know how to do what he was doing, so he made rules. He’s a military officer; it's what he does. So yeah, I guess I feel like giving him grace is the only move." I chuckled. "I can be bitter and cynical about my childhood, but you can't."

Mara smiled. "Now that I understand."

“Yeah?"

She nodded vigorously. "God, yes. I had a pretty fucked up childhood myself. Totally different but still fucked up. I have a weird relationship with my own father, and it's definitely one of those 'I can talk shit about him but you can't' things." She waved a hand. "Not the time or place for the whole thing, but the short version is that he abandoned my mom and me when I was thirteen. Sold all his shit, bought a Harley, and joined a motorcycle gang. He showed up the next summer and quasi-kidnapped me from my mom, and I spent every summer for the next five years with my dad on the back of his Harley, cruising the country with his gang. And it was a gang. Half of Dad's friends from that period are either dead due to gang violence or in jail for a laundry list of crimes. And there was me, a teenage girl, right there with them."

I blinked. "Wow. That’s…”

"Shockingly fucked up?" Mara said. "Yes, yes it was."

"But you don't hate him?" I asked.

"Hate? No. He's my dad. He just couldn't handle being a domestic dad in the 'burbs. He handled it all wrong, and he absolutely should not have taken me as he did, and I was definitely doing things I shouldn’t have been allowed to do, but those summers with Dad on the back of his bike were…" She sighed, looked away, her gaze distant. "They're fond memories for me now. If I was going to hate him for anything, it’d be for the fact that he spent twenty-two years in a federal prison. Which means he essentially abandoned me twice." She sighed. "But I forgave him, in time."

"So where's he at now?" I asked.

"He tends bar at a beach dive in the Florida Panhandle. He's still a biker, but his crew now is just a club of old dudes trying to relive the glory days. They’re harmless old farts.”

"Do you ever see him?"

She rolled a shoulder. "Not often, no. He doesn't leave his little town, and it's hard for us to get down to Florida. We've taken the kids to Disney and popped by to visit him a few times. Of course, the kids are all too old for Disney now."

Jax lowered the Jell-O and stared at his mother. "Pardon you, madam. I will ride the shit out of some Magic Mountain."

Mara gave her son a loving, amused look. "I'm not taking my adult sons to Disney."

Zane cleared his throat. "Pardon you, madam, but why not? Sounds fun. No strollers, no little assholes crying for snacks every five seconds, no looking for a tossed binky on that fucking train."

Jax had his phone out—somehow, both our phones had made it through the crash and stayed in the bottom of the backpack, and he’d clearly had his charged at some point; mine was still at the bottom of that bag and dead, I assumed. He dialed a number and put it on speaker while it rang.

"Jax-a-Lax," a young male voice said. "What up, doh? Heard you wrestled an alligator or some shit."

"It was a bear, Marco, and that's not why I'm calling. Mom and Dad are taking us to Disney."

Zane face-palmed himself. "I did not say that!"

Mara sighed. "Nice one, honey. Now we're taking our three giant children to Disney World."

"I said it would be fun, not that we were," Zane argued.

"Do you have any clue how much money we're going to spend on food alone?” Mara muttered. "Jax eats for six by himself."

Jax flexed his bicep and patted it. "I'm a growin' boy, mama."

He calls his mother mama. It was meant to be cute, but still. It was cute and endearing. I was all sorts of messed up, emotionally, watching the family interact.

Of course, when he lifted his arm to flex it, it tugged at his stitches, and he immediately dropped his arm, hissing.

"You gotta take it easy, doofus," I told him. "If you pop stitches, it'll take that much longer to get better."

He sighed. "I know, I know. I've never been seriously injured before, though, so it's hard to remember. Especially with the painkillers. It only hurts if I move wrong."

Zane laughed. "Oh, just wait. Once you get discharged and go off the juicy hospital-grade meds, you'll be singing a different tune."

"Won't I get anything to take at home?" Jax said.