Page 79 of Moonshine Lullabies
His dad nodded, “Good, that’s good.”
“I think I need a beer,” I said, and the mood lightened some as Cy’s daddy raised a hand in the air to summon the waitress.
“So, tell me ‘bout you, son. I’d like to know the man my Jessie-Lou’s taken a shine to.”
I smiled some, it was a very dad thing to say and I could tell, Jess and Cy’s daddy had a problem with pride. A big enough one that it’d gotten in the way of his relationship with his kids. Still, he was a good man underneath and had a heart. That was good. It may never be perfect between the lot of them, but it could and would be better with some hard work – an’ you could tell by lookin’ at him, he weren’t no stranger to hard work.
“Well, first of all, I love your daughter very much, and I’m excited to see what a life with her an’ Tate could be like.”
He nodded and looked to Cy who I caught nodding out of the edge of my vision.
“What else?” he asked. “You hunt? You fish? You got a good job an’ can provide for my girl?”
I laughed and nodded to all of those things but at the last I said, “I can do all of those things, but I’m pretty sure if I tried that last one? Jessie-Lou would take offense. She ain’t the type to be a kept woman.”
He grinned with a savage pride at that and I didn’t give myself away but I couldn’t help but think;yeah buddy, way to run face first into the point while simultaneously missing it completely on that one…
Still, I wanted peace for my woman and so some things were better kept to myself.
CHAPTERTWENTY-SEVEN
Jessie-Lou…
We all turned in our circle of seats at the sound of the boat motor comin’ our way the next early afternoon. Tate stood up in his boat out there where he was fishin’ and put a hand over his eyes to peer out in the swamp before turning an’ crowin’ at us, “It’s Nuckie an’ the rest of the fellas!” excitedly.
“Ah, Nuckie?” Cor asked, and I grinned.
“That’s what Tate used to say instead of ‘uncle’ when he was a baby. It just sort of stuck,” I explained.
“That’s absolutely adorable,” Alina said and laughed.
“So, he callsCypress, ‘nuckie?’” Cor asked, and I nodded as she shook with silent laughter that she tried to keep to herself.
“I don’t know why I find that so funny!” she cried, and I grinned.
“Whoa, hey!” one of the men on the incoming boat called out, and I looked over. They were talking to Tate, Collier stepping out of the skiff and onto Tate’s boat, Cy, Hex, and La Croix himself manning the outboard turning in our direction after Collier was safely away and settling on the seat opposite my boy to talk with him.
“How goes it, ladies?” Hex called out to us as they approached.
“Oh, fine, just fine,” I called back, and I bent over the second to last rabbit skull I was working on to carve out the design that Miss Alina’d put on it.
She sat next to me, a small TV tray table set up next to herself with a cup of water and some of her paints out. She was bent over a skull carefully loading and layering on her home-made watercolor paint to build up the pigment in one of the grooves.
She and Cor had been talking about how Cor was trying to learn how to bind Alina’s home-made paper into pages and the like for journals. How she’d had some experience back in Texas with a friend in college who worked leather and how she was hoping to learn how to form and bind her own books.
She was just getting into it, though and we were talking about how if we wanted to start all this with hand crafted everything and only a minimal amount of mass-produced shit, how we’d need to spend a year, maybe even two, building up stock. That was a tall order to my mind, but could be done. It’d require a fair bit of dedication but I had that, and with Col doing what he did for the club an’ him an’ J.P. disappearing for long hours to do it, I would have the time.
I didn’t always like it, but that was a part of this life, and I knew there wouldn’t ever be askin’ him to leave it.
All I could hope for was that some day the plan would work out to fruition and that more time would come available.
“Oh, wow – love it when a plan comes together,” Hex remarked looking over Alina’s shoulder and going over to Cor to give her a kiss. She looked up from where she was stitching together a stack of paper with a thick, waxy kind of artificial sinew using these wood forms to press them together and keep ‘em stable.
Laughter brought my attention back to the little boat out in the swamp that held my two loves. Collier was holding Tate’s fishing pole while Tate loaded some bait onto another one. I smiled and a sense of contentment swept through me at the sight.
I was glad that Collier wasn’t trying to be my boy’s daddy and that he was just focusing on bein’ his friend first. I’d worried for a minute back at the house when Col had gotten a little bossy with my boy, but by the same token, I’d appreciated the lessons he’d been instilling. They seemed to be finding a balance, and I was grateful for it.
“What ‘cha think?” Alina asked, bringing my attention back to her and Len standing over her.
