****
After everyone else had filed out of the place, Mona was startled to discover that Ryan was still there. He’d stayed near her through the entire wake, almost as though he knew that she wanted him there. They hadn’t spoken to each other much in their lives, beyond the passing motorcycle- or Benny-related conversation. Ryan was gregarious, but Mona was rather shy, particularly while her father was around. She was his baby girl and he worked hard to keep her tender heart protected from the bad biker boys he’d rounded up.
Benny’s Running Hill Riders always felt like a close-knit group of people on the fringes and margins of society, a veritable mixing pot in a place where differences often went ignored, uncelebrated, or even condemned. Benny Myers’s wife Leila was a Native American woman who died of cancer not long after Mona first befriended Ryan at the tender age of 15. Benny always said he would never forget the stories of injustice and prejudice he heard from Leila and her family when they’d gotten married back in the late 1960s. Benny was forever changed, always bent on being as caring and compassionate as possible, and that included sharing his passion for bikes. Because of that, the Running Hill Riders worked hard to find bikers who were shunned or expelled from other groups, and it worked out splendidly; now, however, that sense of kinship and camaraderie was gone…
Mona didn’t know why, though she supposed it had something to do with the fact that they’d been under her kind but misguided leadership while Ryan dealt with his wounds.
There was no respect towards her. She was young and she’d only ever been on the back of her daddy’s bikes. She didn’t know what she was doing. Now that Ryan was back, she was prepared to fully step aside and not be part of it so much anymore.
“You did a great job putting all of this together today, Mona,” Ryan said to her once they were alone. His black helmet was off and still on the bar. He didn’t look like he was planning to leave any time soon.
Mona blushed. “Thanks. I highly doubt that anyone else agrees with you, though. I get so nervous when everyone’s together, all eyes on me. That’s one of the many reasons I’m not cut out to be the de-facto owner of the club now. I’ve got a voice like a chipmunk when I’m nervous and a raspy voice otherwise.”
“Your voice is my favorite sound. Why wouldn’t I want to hear that?”
Mona opened her mouth a little, not quite knowing what to say to that. She hadn’t expected him to stay there with her after the wake, and she had expected him to pronounce his affection for her voice even less. “Come on, I sound like a smoker who swallowed a bag of rocks,” she quipped, trying to lighten things. She couldn’t take him seriously, right? They’d known each other for years and he’d never made a move. So why now?
“And it’s hot,” Ryan insisted, prompting Mona to dissolve into awkward giggles.
She stopped laughing abruptly as a thought entered her mind. “I suppose that it would be better to talk to you about this while I’ve got you here alone,” she said.
His eyes widened before he waggled his eyebrows. She was starting to realize that he’d just been kidding around about her before. He often wasn’t serious about much of anything, except for motorcycles and charity work.
“I think that, now that you’re fully recovered, you should take over as the leader of the club. I’ll go back to being the barkeep.” With that, she opened up the bar and stepped out from behind it, though she stayed leaning against it because it was her turf and she aimed to look after the register until closing time.
This really did seem to surprise Ryan. “Me? leader? I don’t know… You’ve seen the way the others respect me.”
“That’s only because they’re jealous,” Mona pointed out. He couldn’t deny that. He was a top-notch rider, and he’d always been one of Benny’s favorites. “Who else should be leader? Lance? Give me a break.”
“Why not you?” Ryan asked.
She laughed, but then she realized that he was serious. “I’m not one of you, Rye. I love you all as my family, but I’m no biker. I can’t lead the team to glory from behind a bar. I can’t schedule races. I don’t know the first thing about it. I’m just an accessory.”
This seemed to displease Ryan. He shook his head a little. “I don’t know if the boys will feel right with me assuming the leadership position.”
Mona shrugged. “I’ll tell them it was Daddy’s idea. No one will argue with Daddy’s ideas…” She suddenly thought of something else, too. “Speaking of Daddy’s ideas and ways of getting the old band back together, when’s the last time you ran a charity race? Are the boys all still doing monthly food drives? This is something you’d know more about than I would.”
Benny had set up monthly donation drives for low-income families nearly twenty years before, and the members took turns making grocery drop offs. “I actually haven’t heard about one in a few months,” Ryan admitted.
“Months?” Mona repeated with a note of alarm. “How many months, Ryan?”
He searched his memory as anxiety knotted in his stomach. “About…eight? Nine?”
He knew then that he’d made a mistake, but it still wasn’t clear what had happened within the group to cause this change. “But you have to remember,” he said defensively, “I’ve been out of the game for a while now. Broken legs don’t heal within only a few months, you know.”
Mona let out a noise of exasperation and threw her hands into the air. She knew that she shouldn’t be too hard on Ryan. He had an excuse. The fault was largely her own. Ever since her father’s death, she’d been preoccupied with funeral arrangements and her own grief process. She hadn’t exactly been paying attention to the schedules of the club. “What the hell is going on with my father’s riders, Ryan? I thought everyone had their shit together.”
“Everyone had their shit together before I got hurt,” Ryan said sadly, “but I can’t orchestrate food drives while laid up in a hospital bed. I got too depressed to imagine all of my friends out on their bikes. And you know Lance. He’s…wily. And sharp. Like a needle. He would always speak over people and start assuming control of small groups whenever we did a charity drive without them even realizing it.”
Mona nodded.
“He hardly even came to meetings before Benny died, though, so I didn’t really consider it.” Ryan was regretting it now. “I think we’ve splintered off into factions. I hate to say it, but that’s what it’s beginning to feel like. And I don’t like it any more than your dad would.”
The Running Hill Riders that she had inherited and she was asking Ryan to help run were no longer her father’s dream team. “What do you think we should do?” she asked, feeling beaten before she’d even begun.
“I think we should start fresh,” Ryan answered. “Assemble the team and find out if people are actually for continuing or if they want to follow Lance’s more illegal approaches to racing.”
Mona thought about that. “Only one problem,” she said. “What if everyone is for leaving?”
Ryan slowly shook his head at her and smiled. “Trust me; the majority of us want to be with you.”
She blushed again, wondering if there was a double meaning in that. “Okay, then, you organize a meeting and have people sign up. Let me know when it’s planned. I’ll be there, at least to make sure you don’t screw everything up.”
He grabbed his helmet from off the top of the bar and put it on, grinning at her. “And I’ll be there, hoping that maybe you’ll consider signing up.”