Lucky Forever - Cee Bowerman

1.

ROWDY

I glanced up from my reading and checked my daughter’s location in the gym. They were back on the floor mats, this time practicing their tumbling routine. I critiqued her, as she always asked me to do, and I made a few mental notes to talk to her about on the drive home.

I wasn’t a professional by any means, but I had been watching my daughter Leia in gymnastics since she was two years old and taking classes at the local YMCA. Her tiny stature had come in handy and she had excelled in flying around the mat. She was now in an advanced class that helped her focus on the skills she would need to try out for the local competition cheerleading team.

A glance around me at the other parents on the bleachers showed me that once again, I was one of only two dads in attendance. I recognized the only other man in the gym, and waved when he saw me, glad to see him heading my direction to talk for a while.

“Hi, Rowdy!” Reagan, a friend of mine, was a realtor here in town and in the process of helping me work on my credit so that I could buy my house. His partner in the realty company, Brenda Marks, was married to a friend of mine, Sonny, who I met right after I moved to Rojo as a teenager.

I belonged to the Texas Knights MC, a motorcycle club in our town. Sonny belonged to a separate MC, the Texas Kings. The clubs were friendly, almost family even, since the men who had started each of them had been best friends since they were in grade school.

“Hey, man,” I greeted Reagan as he sat next to me. “Good to see another dad here.”

“I didn’t know if I was even going to make it today. Brenda had her baby yesterday and is still in the hospital.”

“Are she and the baby doing okay?”

“Yes!” Reagan pulled his phone out of his pocket and pushed a few buttons to find a picture to show me. “Mama and baby are both fine. I’m pretty sure Dad has even more white hair already.”

I chuckled at the thought. Sonny Marks was a unique looking man. His eyes were blue and brown, which was unique enough, but he also had a patch of white hair that he usually kept covered with a ball cap.

“They named him Lucky, right?”

“They went with the soap opera theme, just like their names.” Reagan and I both chuckled. “How is your studying going?”

I blew out a breath, “It’s going.”

“I think it’s noble what you’re doing,” Reagan admitted. “Getting your GED after all this time has to be hard, but since you made a deal with your girl, it’s kind of worth it.”

“Yeah.” I smiled as I watched my daughter do front handsprings the length of the mat in front of us. “If I’m going to expect her to get good grades and go to college, I should at least try to do it myself.”

“Let’s just hope she doesn’t challenge you to do gymnastics!” Reagan laughed. “Holly tried to teach Marcus how to do a cartwheel and he ended up at the chiropractor’s office.”

Reagan and I had a good laugh about that, but it trailed off as we watched our daughters and a couple of the other girls practice standing backflips. My daughter Leia was in the middle of the line, her friends Lexi and Holly on either side of her.

Holly was Reagan and his partner Marcus’s daughter and she was a pistol. With what I knew she’d gone through in her young life, I was glad that Holly and Leia had become such good friends. Holly’s mother had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer last year and had just enough time to get her daughter and two sons settled in with Reagan and Marcus before she died.

My daughter Leia was one of the first girls Holly met when her mother brought her little family to Rojo to be closer to her Uncle Reagan. Holly’s mom, Veronica, was Reagan’s older sister and she died knowing that her children would be well taken care of by Reagan and Marcus. Even though their union wasn’t recognized as legal quite yet, Reagan and Marcus were just as much of a married couple as any of the others I knew.

“How are your little ones getting along now?” I asked Reagan quietly. Holly had problems accepting and adjusting to her new family, but nothing like her younger