You know I don't ride.
You could learn.
I don't want to.
You might someday.
I won't.
Daniel would smile. Not because he had won the argument. Because he knew her better than she knew herself. Evelyn remembered that smile now, standing in the far corner of the lot at Murphy's, with the engine ticking and the music coming through the open doors, and she felt the familiar tightness in her chest that was not quite grief anymore and not quite anything else, either. It was the feeling of carrying something precious in both hands and being careful not to drop it.
She set the kickstand down with her boot, the way she had been taught, and swung her leg over the seat. The lot was uneven here, patched concrete with a thin skin of gravel near the fence, and she tested the ground with her boot before she put her full weight on it. She took off her helmet slowly. Her hair, dark with silver beginning to show at the temples, was flattened where the helmet had pressed it, and she ran her fingers through it once, quickly, without thinking about how she looked. She was not here to be looked at. She was here because it was Friday, and because the bike was ready, and because the road to Murphy's was a good road, with a long straight stretch where the wind came clean off the fields and the sky opened up above her in a way that made her think, every time, of Daniel saying that the world was larger than anyone had imagined.
Around her, the lot went on being loud. A bottle clinked. Somebody shouted a name. The jukebox changed songs, and a steel guitar slid into the space between the engines. Evelyn stood beside the Heritage and looked at it for a moment longer than she needed to, the way a person looks at something they love before they turn away from it. The chrome caught the orange light. The black paint held it. The bike stood there, old and clean and exact, in the far corner, unnoticed by almost everyone.
Then, from somewhere behind her, near the doors of the Roadhouse, a burst of laughter rose above the rest, sharper than the laughter around it, and Evelyn heard her own name in it, or thought she did, or heard only the tone of it, the particular edge that laughter gets when it is aimed at someone. She turned her head, slowly, and looked toward the doors, and the laughter went on, and the music went on, and the engines went on, and she stood there with her helmet in her hand, listening, not yet knowing that the laughter was aimed at her, and at the bike, and at everything the bike meant.
Six years earlier, the garage had smelled of oil and metal polish and dust, and of the particular quiet that belongs to a room where a man is sitting very still because moving costs too much.
Daniel Hart sat on a low stool beside the Harley. The stool was the one he had used for twenty years, its legs uneven, its seat worn smooth. The bike stood on its kickstand in the middle of the garage, black and clean, and Daniel held a soft cloth in both hands, and he polished the chrome the way he had always polished it, in slow circles, as if the chrome were listening and would remember being cared for. His hands trembled. He did not pretend that they did not. He simply went more slowly, and he rested the cloth against the metal when he needed to, and he breathed, and he went on.
Evelyn stood in the doorway with a cup of tea she had made too strong, and she watched him, and she did not say that he should come inside and rest, because she had said it already that morning, and the morning before, and because Daniel had answered her the same way every time, with a look that was gentle and stubborn at once, the look of a man who had decided what the rest of his day would be for.
Come and sit, he said, without looking up. "It's warm in here, for once."
She sat on the upturned paint bucket beside him, and she put the tea down where he could reach it, and she watched his hands move over the chrome, and she listened, because listening was what the afternoon was for.
He talked about trips they had never taken. He talked about mountain roads they had never ridden, the kind of roads that climb in long curves and open, at the top, onto a view so wide that a person stops the bike and stands there for a while without saying anything. He talked about small towns where they might have stopped for coffee, towns with one main street and a diner with a bell on the door, towns where the coffee was cheap and strong and the waitress called everyone honey whether she knew them or not. He described the towns in detail, the color of the awnings, the sound of the screen door, the way the light fell across the counter in the morning, and Evelyn listened, and she did not point out that he was inventing them, because the inventing was the point. He was giving her places to go, the only way he still could.
Then he told her, again, about the first time he had seen the Pacific Ocean.