Eleanor produced the list on the first Tuesday of March, in the year she turned eighty-seven, with the ceremony of a woman tabling a treaty. The escort had been completed; the corner table was in its second round; Saint was demonstrating a new method of folding a napkin. Eleanor opened her handbag — the good bag, the bank bag — withdrew a single sheet of lined paper folded in thirds, unfolded it with three precise pats, and laid it in the center of the table like a fourth hand of cards.
I have made a list, she announced. "Before anyone panics — Claire has seen it. Claire has had her feelings about it in an orderly fashion, by telephone, and has initialed it in spirit. This is not a bucket list. I find the expression vulgar and the concept morbid. This is a list of things I intend to do while I am still able to enjoy being told I shouldn't."
Maya, behind the counter, stopped pretending to polish a glass. She read the list over Hank's shoulder, in Eleanor's handwriting — upright, unhurried, every letter fully formed, the hand of a woman taught penmanship as a moral discipline.
There were three items.
*1. Ride. Properly — wind and all. As a passenger, the safe way, like anyone else who pays for the privilege.*
*2. The ocean. I have not seen it since Arthur. I would like to see it while I still know what I am looking at.*
*3. Dance once at the club's anniversary. A real dance, to real music, with a partner. It may be measured in inches. It will be a dance.*
Item one, Eleanor said, tapping the paper, "requires engineering, which this table has in embarrassing abundance. Item two requires a vehicle and a day. Item three, gentlemen, requires courage — yours. I have watched you all at these events for two years. You dance like furniture being moved. I am prepared to accept the risk." She folded her hands. "I am not asking permission. I am notifying the relevant authorities. Questions may be addressed to the chair."
There followed the silence Maya had learned to recognize as the club doing arithmetic at high speed. Tommy Reyes, twenty-six and incapable of containing anything at all, was visibly vibrating. Hank had taken on the expression of a man reviewing a bridge he intends to hold. Books was already calculating — food, vehicles, insurance, the word *liability* moving behind his eyes like weather. And Grizz sat beside Eleanor looking down at her three lines of handwriting with an expression Maya had seen exactly once before: on the pavement, kneeling, the first day.
Dance — you're on my card, Eleanor. That's handled. Ocean — that's a day trip; the van and six bikes, coast road. The ride. He turned his head. "Saint."
Miguel "Saint" Santos had already — Maya swore to this ever afterward, and Saint never confirmed or denied it — taken the small notebook from his inside pocket, the grease-smudged one in which he recorded every act of maintenance he performed on Eleanor's walker as if it were a show bike, and begun to draw. Saint spoke perhaps forty words a day in company. Now he drew in silence, with a machinist's certainty: a sidecar rig in profile — low-slung, wide-tracked, with a proper seat and back, grab rails and a step — and beneath it, in block capitals, measurements. He slid the notebook down the table to Eleanor with the gravity of an architect presenting a cathedral.
She studied it a long time. "What is this in aid of?"
Saint cleared his throat. "Stability," he said. "Center of gravity." He indicated two points with the pencil's end. "Wind screen, cut down, so you get the air but not the blast. Step here, so you mount it like a lady, not like cargo. Harness — not because you'll fall. Because you'll relax." He considered. "It's not pity, Mrs. Vance. It's a sidecar. Guys in my grandfather's day courted in sidecars. It's the most respectable seat on the road."
It has, Eleanor observed, "a certain look of a bathtub about it."
It'll have a certain look of whatever color you say, said Saint, and wrote, in block capitals under the measurements: OCCUPANT'S CHOICE OF COLOR.
She chose, after deliberation that consumed the rest of the hot chocolate, midnight blue — "Arthur's car was midnight blue. I have never had the chance to say that sentence to a motorcycle, and now I have." The list was then read aloud, formally, by Hank, standing — because somehow it had become that kind of morning — and accepted by the club with the gravity of men receiving orders they had been hoping for two years to receive. Item two was assigned to Grizz and the calendar. Item three was entered into the anniversary's program by Books in pencil, underlined twice, with the notation, in his metronome hand: *E.V. — FINAL DANCE — NO SUBSTITUTIONS.*
We will need Claire, Maya said from the counter, quietly. "For the ride especially. If she's not standing there holding the helmet, she'll spend the rest of her life being the daughter who wasn't told."
She has initialed it in spirit, Eleanor said. "But you're right, which is a burden to us all. Telephone her. Tell her to bring her worst predictions and her good shoes. If my daughter is to watch me get into a sidecar, she will do it in person, in the sun, having been consulted — which is more than her mother got," she added serenely, "for the first eighty-four years."
She folded the list in thirds and returned it to the good bag, and the Tuesday proceeded — bank, escort, home, the machinery of devotion turning on oiled rails. But Maya, walking home past the club's garage two streets over, saw the lights on and a shape already taking form under a sheet in Saint's bay, and heard the small, contented sounds of men beginning work they considered an honor: a tape measure's snap, and Saint's voice — one of his forty words, spent on the only subject that ever loosened them — "Again. From the frame."