“Tommy,” Jack said without turning around.
“Already on it,” Tommy said.
Which was not entirely true because he’d been so focused on the exchange that he hadn’t moved yet.
But he immediately became very focused on the coffee situation, as if he’d had it handled all along.
Jack gestured toward the table near the back.
The long wooden one with the chairs around it.
The one where chapter business got discussed and plans got made and problems got solved.
He walked toward it and waited for her to sit down.
Then he pulled out a chair for himself and sat across from her.
He set his hands flat on the table and looked at her the way he’d learned to look at people when he wanted them to know that he was actually, genuinely, completely paying attention.
“Tell me what you can do,” he said.
“And then tell me what you need.”
A pause.
“And then we’ll figure out what happens next.”
Evelyn Parker sat down across from the president of the Silver Creek Hell’s Angels chapter.
She set her old black handbag on the table beside her.
She took a breath.
And she told him she had been a bookkeeper for 31 years.
She said she’d worked for a hardware supply company in Phoenix before she and her husband moved to Silver Creek in 2001.
She could manage accounts payable and receivable, payroll, tax preparation, basic financial planning.
She was organized.
Systematically organized.
Not just tidied up.
Organized.
She had spent the better part of her adult life managing the administrative infrastructure that kept things running while other people focused on the actual work.
She could cook for large groups.
She had raised three children and been a grandmother.
She had been the woman the whole extended family called when there was a gathering because Evelyn’s food was the kind of food that made people forget they were at a family obligation and start actually enjoying themselves.
She could prepare meals on a budget or stretch what was available further than most people thought was possible because she had learned that skill young and never lost it.
She was precise.
She caught errors.
She remembered details.
She was not, she wanted to be clear, a woman who needed things explained to her twice.
Tommy arrived with the coffee.
He set it in front of her with a care that was slightly comic in its conscientiousness.
Making sure the handle faced her.
Making sure the saucer was level.
Then he stood there for a moment, not entirely sure what to do with himself until Jack looked at him and he found somewhere else to be.
Jack watched Evelyn wrap her hands around the coffee cup.
The sleeves of her cardigan had shifted slightly when she reached for the cup, and he caught another glimpse of that wrist.
He said nothing.
He filed it.
“You said he,” Jack said.
Evelyn looked up.
“You said you needed somewhere he wouldn’t come looking right away.”
She looked down at her coffee.
“I did say that.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Jack said. “Not right now, not today.”
He paused.
“But I want you to know I noticed.”
“And I want you to know that what I do with what I notice depends on what you tell me.”
He leaned back slightly.
“I’m not in the business of making decisions for people. That’s not how this works.”
Another pause.
“But I am in the business of understanding situations before I agree to anything because agreeing to things without understanding them has a way of going badly.”
It was possibly the most words Jack Walker had strung together in a single speech in several months.
And some of the men in the room were peripherally aware of this fact and were doing a good job pretending they weren’t listening.
Evelyn looked up from her coffee.
“His name is Ryan,” she said.
“He’s my grandson.”
She swallowed slightly.
“He’s 34 years old.”
“And everything I have, my house, my bank accounts, everything my husband and I spent our whole lives building is in his name now.”
She said it flatly.
Not without emotion.
But with the flatness of a person who had said a thing so many times to herself in the privacy of her own head that the words themselves had become separated from their full weight.
“He told me he was helping me after Gerald died.”
“And I believed him because he was family.”
Her fingers tightened around the coffee cup.
“And because I was not in a good place after Gerald.”