It was true, every word of it, and she could hear that it was true, and she could also hear what it was not. It was not a destination. A man does not pack saddlebags — and the bags were packed, squared and strapped, not empty — for eighty miles of familiar road and nothing at the end of it that he cared to name. He was headed home the way a river is headed to the sea: true enough in the end, and not the part of the story happening now.
"That's a long ride at your age, alone," she said.
"It feels shorter than it used to," he said. "The road hasn't changed much. I have, some. We meet in the middle."
"Do you have family expecting you?"
"I have family," he said, "who know better than to expect me at an exact hour. My son David is an engineer. Practical man. My daughter Sarah teaches school. They both worry in their own ways and I've learned to let them, in small doses. It's a kind of love tax. You pay it gladly."
He said it gently, and the gentleness made it feel less like information and more like a door closed without a sound. Emily knew the difference between a man with nothing to say and a man who had decided, long before she arrived, exactly how much he would say to a stranger at the side of a road. James Harris was the second kind, and he was better at it than she was at undoing it.
"Mr. Harris, I'm going to be honest with you," she said.
"I'd prefer it."
"I don't think a man of eighty-two should be riding a motorcycle alone on a highway this empty. If something happened out here — a blowout, a dizzy spell, anything — you could be lying in that ditch a long while before anybody passed. There's no signal for half this stretch. Did you know that? No signal, from the creek bridge to the county line."
"I know where the signal goes," he said. "It goes right where it always did. I carry a paper map too, in case the world ends and the satellites get tired."
Reed made a small sound that he covered by clearing his throat.
Emily pressed on. "Have you taken any medication today? Anything that affects your balance, your vision?"
"No, ma'am. I take a pill in the morning for blood pressure, same as half the men in America over sixty, and my doctor knows I ride. He rides himself, when his wife lets him, which is his burden to bear."
"Any dizziness today? Any episodes — blackouts, confusion?"
"No, ma'am."
"When was your last eye examination?"
"March," he said. "Same month as my birthday. I make a season of it. Twenty-twenty in one eye, near enough in the other with the glasses I wear for reading, which I'm not doing at present. Would you like to check my vision, Officer? I can read your plate from here, if the big letters on your car count."
She did not rise to it. "I'm trying to establish —"
"I know what you're trying to establish," James said, and for the first time something firmer crossed his face, not anger, a line drawn in a place she had not known a line existed. "You'd like a reason that fits in the box. I understand boxes. I've filled out enough forms in my life to paper this highway. But I haven't given you one, and I've been polite about not giving you one, and I'd ask you to notice that."
Reed shifted his weight. The leather of his duty belt creaked.
"Em —" he said. "Officer Carter. A word?"
"In a minute, Sergeant."
Reed looked at James and then away down the road, toward the west, where the highway climbed a long, shallow rise and vanished over it against the sun. His expression had changed in some small way. He had recognized something, and not in the distance. In the old man.
"Mr. Harris," Reed said, in the tone he used with veterans at the VFW hall fish fry — a tone Emily had heard perhaps twice. "You served?"
James's eyes went to him properly for the first time. Not to the uniform, not to the badge, to the man: Reed's stance, the way he carried his hands, the faded ghost of a tan line at his wrist where a watch had lived through a desert deployment.
"I did," James said.
"Army?"
"Army."
Reed nodded slowly, at the bike now. At the color of it. "That green's not a fashion choice, is it."
"It was the color that was available," James said, "when I first got her. I kept it. You get used to a color. It gets used to you."
"What unit?" Reed asked.
James smiled then, small and private, and shook his head once. "Another lifetime," he said. "I was a sergeant, if it matters. It mattered then. I turned in the stripes a long time ago — nineteen ninety-one, thirty years in, and I still miss parts of it I wouldn't name to my own children."
Reed let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "MP, myself," he said. "Iraq. One tour and a piece of another. Came home and put on this uniform instead."