“Can we still get gelato?”
Kelsey had to laugh. “Yes, we can still get gelato. You are extremely annoying, you know that?”
Hannah grinned. “Try having Cinder-fuckin-rella as a big sister sometime.”
~oOo~
Hannah sucked the bubblegum-strawberry gelato combination off her spoon. “This turned out to be pretty okay.”
Kelsey agreed. Looking for good gifts under such stark conditions had become a kind of scavenger hunt. They’d had a good time—they’d probably laughed together and simply gotten along better in the past couple of hours than they had all year.
“Yeah, you got some good stuff, I think. We got everybody covered, right?” Kelsey scooped a bit of mint-double chocolate onto her tiny pink spoon and slipped it into her mouth. Poor ice cream. It just couldn’t compete with gelato.
“I think so.” Spearing her spoon into her cup of bubblegum-strawberry, Hannah started digging into her bags. “That super cute scarf for Mom, and the journal for Grammo.” Both of which they’d found at a little pop-up import shop—one of those stores that took up a vacancy and was only open during the holidays. They were already discounting at seventy-five percent. Eight bucks went pretty far when it could pretend it was thirty-two.
“The model tool kit for Grampa,” Kelsey added. They’d picked that up at the toy store at half-off. A little set of filament-thin paintbrushes and glue applicators in a plastic case.
“Yeah. It’s not lame?”
“Not at all. He loves doing his models.”
“Yeah, but … he probably has all these. It’s just a cheap little set.”
It was, of course. But that wasn’t the point. There wasn’t anybody on Hannah’s gift list who couldn’t buy whatever they needed or wanted. “He’ll love that you thought of something for his models.”
“I guess.” Digging into another bag, Hannah perked back up. “But this isreallycool.” She opened a cardboard gift box and displayed the keychain as if Kelsey hadn’t been the one to notice it first. A silver-tone rectangle with the phraseWhen life throws you a curve, lean into it—a phrase probably only bikers and biker-adjacent folks would really get. For Duncan. From Spencer’s. Which, to be fair, was where a lot of Duncan’s gifts from his sisters had come from over the years.
Hannah had made a play for the Santa gift, too, to come from Spencer’s. But Kelsey had put her foot down hard. The grownups did stupid, often obscene gag gifts for their Secret Santa thing, but the kids all brought one gift for under the kid tree and did a thing where they each rooted around, blindfolded, in the pile and picked one gift. Every kid old enough to understand, from preschooler to high-schooler, got in on that.
So no, Hannah could not do plastic poop for the Santa grab. Or a pair of weed earrings. She’d settled for an Aquaman Funko Pop from GameStop. And for their dad, from the Dillard’s housewares department, a coffee mug that saidI don’t snore. I dream I’m a motorcycle.
Their father was a legendary snorer. All those broken noses had taken their toll.
“You did good, girly,” Kelsey said, smiling at her sister’s haul. They hadn’t gone over budget, they’d enjoyed each other’s company, and they had gelato for a finish. That was a pretty good Christmas Eve shopping result.
“Thanks, Kelse,” Hannah said as she repacked her loot. “This was cool.”
Wow. A thank-you from her brat sister? That was as good as a present, as far as Kelsey concerned.
“You’re welcome. Itwascool.”
~oOo~
Ultimately, the Brazen Bulls Christmas Eve bash was like every other party the club threw in the clubhouse: the whole point seemed to be to get as wasted as humanly possible and have as much sex and friendly violence as was humanly survivable. The club didn’t allow kids—meaning anyone under eighteen—to be present at their parties, and there had been more kids in the club than actual patches for years, so the old ladies/moms arranged for a sleepover party to happen at the same time, with the oldest teen or two in charge, and paid for being so.
Kelsey had been the teen in charge for a long time. She was the oldest of this big generation of club kids, and long before she actually was an adult, she’d been regarded—and probably rightly so—as the most ‘adult’ of them all. She’d frequently been in charge of the kids for a few years after she’d been old enough to party with the grownups, mainly because, as much as she loved her family, drunken bacchanals with public nudity and actual public sex didn’t do much for her. It was more fun to hang with the littles, pop popcorn and make homemade pizzas, and watch Disney movies and play dress-up.
Eventually, though, once she’d graduated college and finished her clinical study, and some of the kids younger than her had gotten old enough to go to the parties, it had been a bit weird for her to play with the littles. Also, she was blocking the teens from being in charge, and that was money they could have earned.
For the past few years, she’d done her face time at most of the parties. She hung out with the other grown kids, whom she didn’t get to see that often anymore, or went back to the throne room to sit with the old ladies.
Nowhere on the planet was a better source of information about bikers than the place where their old ladies gathered. All the good tea was there.
Christmas Eve, however, began quite a bit differently from any other party. Kids were invited—not just club kids but neighborhood kids. The party room was decorated—some might sayover-decorated—for the holiday. Carols blared from the stereo. Eggnog of virgin and slutty varieties, cookies and candies and cakes, the complete deal.
The patches did a big thing, with light and sound effects, like Santa was landing on the roof, and then Gargoyle, the portliest Bull, with a long white beard of his very own, appeared from above, dressed as Santa, and dragged a huge green sack around the party room, handing out gifts and noisemakers to the kids.
One year, they’d even had a couple reindeer in the parking lot, but one of them had spooked, gotten away from his handler, wrecked two bikes and taken down part of the fence, and hurt himself in the process, before he could be controlled. Kelsey didn’t have a ton of experience treating livestock animals, only her clinical rotation, but she’d gotten a refresher that night.