A season passed, and the passing of it was marked not by grand events but by the small, steady changes that add up, over months, to a life lived differently. At the accounting office, Evelyn's desk was the same desk, with the same calculator and the same neat stacks of files, but Grace, sitting across from her, noticed that Evelyn talked about the future now in the way she used to talk about the past: as something real, with dates attached to it. They worked through the autumn figures together, and the winter figures after them, and Evelyn's columns were as precise as ever, and her totals were underlined, and her clients, who had always trusted her, trusted her still. Once, a client asked her about the motorcycle parked outside the office on a Sunday — Grace had seen it and mentioned it — and Evelyn, who would once have deflected the question, said, simply, "It's my husband's bike. I ride it now." The client nodded, and said, "Good for you," and the conversation moved on, and Evelyn went back to her numbers, and Grace, watching her, smiled to herself and said nothing, because some things do not need to be said.
The garage stayed open. That was the simplest way to describe the change, and also the truest. The door, which had stayed shut for two years, now stood open on fine days, and the tools were in their places, and the helmet hung on its nail, and the gloves sat on the workbench beside the half-empty bottle of metal polish, which Evelyn had finally replaced with a new bottle, keeping the old one on a shelf, because some things are kept. The calendar on the wall was turned to the present month, and then to the next, and then to the next, and Evelyn marked the Sundays on it with a small pencil star, and the Fridays with a small circle, and the days of the trip planning with a line under the date. She polished the chrome on Saturday mornings, slowly, the way Daniel had polished it, with a cloth and a patience that had become, for her, a kind of prayer — not a prayer of asking, but a prayer of attention. She talked to the bike sometimes, as Daniel had talked to it, not in full sentences, but in fragments: "There you are." "Good as new." "Ready for Sunday?" And the bike, being a bike, said nothing, and Evelyn, being Evelyn, did not need it to answer.
She rode most Sundays, with Ray beside her, and sometimes with Frank and the Iron Saints, and sometimes alone, on the lake road, or the river road, or simply around the town and back, because riding did not always need a destination. The Heritage gleamed, and the chrome caught the light, and the black finish held its depth, and the scratch was only a story she told when someone asked — and people did ask, sometimes, at Murphy's, or at the shop, or at the office, and Evelyn told it plainly, without bitterness and without triumph, as a story about a bike that had been knocked over and a phone call that had been made and a repair that had been paid for and a young man who had learned to sweep a floor. "It was a bad Friday," she would say, "and then it was a good story. Most bad Fridays can become good stories, if you let them." People nodded, and some of them told her their own stories, and Evelyn listened, because listening was part of riding, and part of living, and part of what Daniel had taught her without ever saying so.
Sarah's Sunday calls were lighter now. She called at the same time, every week, and she asked about the bike, and about Ray, and about Grace, and about the trip, and Evelyn told her, and Sarah told Evelyn about Denver, and the hospital, and the patients who made her laugh, and the ones who made her worry, and the two of them talked the way a mother and a daughter talk when the distance between them is measured in miles and not in silence. Sarah visited again, in the spring, for a long weekend, and she rode pillion behind Ray to the lake, and she sat at the kitchen table with the map, and she helped Evelyn plan the second leg of the trip, and she framed a photograph of the memorial ride for the wall beside the note — Evelyn and Ray and Frank and the line of bikes, in the morning light, on the lake road — and she said, "Now the wall tells the whole story." Evelyn looked at the two frames, side by side, the note and the photograph, and she said, "It does. It tells the beginning and the middle. The end is still being ridden." Sarah hugged her. "The end is a long way off," she said. "Good," Evelyn said. "I like a long ending."
Grace, too, marked the season in her own way. She brought a small potted plant for Evelyn's kitchen windowsill, and she began leaving newspaper cuttings about mountain roads and small-town diners on Evelyn's desk, folded neatly, with the interesting paragraphs circled in pencil. Evelyn kept them in the folder with the figures, and when Sarah visited she showed them to her, and the three of them laughed about Grace's thoroughness, and about the fact that a trip planned by an accountant, a practical friend, and a nurse from Denver was bound to be the best-planned trip in the history of the state. "We will not get lost," Grace said firmly. "We might get lost," Evelyn said, smiling. "Daniel got lost, and it became his favourite story." Grace considered this. "Then we will get lost efficiently," she said, and Evelyn laughed until her sides ached, and the office, for once, sounded less like an office and more like a kitchen.