Fearless Read-Along: Chapter Eight

 

“She’s a smart girl.”

               “Yes she is.” She felt her smile stretch and let it go, allowing it to spread at will. “She was raised by a smart girl.”

               “Oh.” Ronnie’s expression tightened with panic. The pulse in his throat looked ready to punch through the skin. “I didn’t mean–”

               “I know what you mean.” She waved for him to calm down. “She and I aren’t the same kind of smart. I get that. She’s my little book-smart brainchild.” Maggie had been drinking Jack Daniels since she was sixteen, and she’d developed a taste for its subtle, sweeter undertones. It was almost like honey down her throat as she took another swallow and twisted her smile to something sinister. “Now let me tell you what I mean. When I said you were a salesman, that wasn’t a compliment, sweetie.”

               He paled under his golden tan.

               “I know your kind. Boys with good backgrounds, boys with money – you see something you want, and you take it for yourself. You saw my daughter, and maybe I should give you some credit. Maybe you saw that she was beautiful, and brilliant, and talented, and quirky in a cute sort of way. Maybe you adore her for that. Or maybe you saw a hot piece of ass and figured, what the hell, she’s from a biker family, she must be easy to nail.”

               “Mrs. Teague, I swear–”

               “But let me make something perfectly clear to you, Ronald.” She heard the knife-edge in her voice, the one that made Ghost say, “That’s my girl,” and sent prospects and hangarounds running for cover. “If you’re just out for a lay, if you don’t adore my daughter, then you made a big mistake crossing my threshold.”

This chapter was fun to re-read given what I'm currently writing in Beware of Dog; I do love a good family-threatens-significant-other scene. In fiction, I want to stress. 

Not much happens as far as plot movement goes in this chapter. We learn of Andre's death, and, at the end of the chapter, we learn that the powers that be in Knoxville are going to villainize the Dogs. We get to "see" Ava's gator tattoo, but don't learn what it means yet. Ghost proves that he's experienced quite a bit of character growth over the course of the series. He'll always be my favorite asshole, but it's stark to go back and see him in Fearless after writing him for ten years and winding up in Lord Have Mercy. He does lighten up a little over time. 

The star of the chapter is, unquestionably, Maggie. There's a line that I love which explains everything about Maggie and Ava's relationship:

She’d never been a mother for lectures. Grammie Lowe said it was because she’d been a teenage mother with no idea what she was doing. Ava thought it was because Maggie had known from the start that the two of them would need to be friends and allies, women in this sea of outlaw men.

 

There's hundreds of literary fiction novels about families with deep, unfixable, foundational cracks; cycles of abuse, and resentment. I do love to write history repeating itself, because that's just life, and Ghost Teague is the biggest hypocrite in this whole series, but I made the choice early on that I wanted this to be a family that loved each other. It's not a story about a family in crisis; it's more like the world's in crisis, and this is how this particular family goes about carving out space in that world, not caring how it looks from the outside. Maggie is tough as nails, but she always knew she needed another woman on her side; she raised her daughter to be that woman. 

Overall, Chapter Eight is another "layering" chapter: layering in history, and relationship nuances, and characterization, and groundwork for what's to come.