I love you, Ruth. She hung up, held the phone for a second, then she put it in her purse, straightened her back, and turned around to face the group. All right, she said. Let's go. Bear made a sound that might have been a cheer.
Diane grinned. Priya reached over and very gently adjusted the color of Evelyn's blouse. The small matter-of-act gesture of someone who helps without asking permission because asking would make it bigger than it needs to be. Cole helped her onto the back of his motorcycle with the care of someone transporting something genuinely irreplaceable. He showed her where to put her hands, how to lean, told her to look past his shoulder at the horizon rather than at the ground.
"What if I panic?" she asked. "Tap my left shoulder twice," he said. "I'll pull over immediately." And if once that means you're okay, but you want me to know you're thinking about it.
She considered this. That's a good system. Had some practice. The engine started beneath her and she gripped his jacket instinctively. The vibration traveled up through the frame of the bike and into her bones.
And for one full second, she was entirely certain she had made a profound and irreversible mistake. Then Diane's bike pulled alongside hers with Diane's silver hair catching the light. And Diane caught her eye and gave her a look that said, "You've got this old girl without a single word." And the convoy moved. The wind hit her face and for a moment she couldn't breathe, not from fear, but from the sheer physical fact of forward momentum after what felt like a very long period of standing still.
She didn't tap the left shoulder. She held on. They rode for 37 minutes, which she knew because she counted the time automatically the way anxious people do. But somewhere around the 20 minute mark, something shifted. Her grip on Cole's jacket loosened slightly.
Not from carelessness, but from something closer to release. The air was different at this speed. It didn't give you time to replay conversations or rehearse things you should have said. It just pushed through you forward, constant, indifferent, in the best possible way. Evelyn had not thought about Michael for 11 minutes by the time they pulled off the highway.
She would realize this later and find it remarkable. The clubhouse was not what she expected. She had no clear idea what she had expected. Something rough, maybe. Something that smelled like gasoline and bad decisions.
What it actually was was a large converted building with mismatched chairs and long wooden tables and the smell of coffee so strong it announced itself before you reached the door. The walls were covered in photographs, event flyers, handwritten notes, a large corkboard near the entrance with names and dates, and what appeared to be a signup sheet for something called the Sunrise Ride for Seniors. That last one stopped her. She stood in front of the corkboard and read the sheet carefully. The Sunrise Ride for Seniors was a monthly event where the group escorted elderly residents from care homes from isolation from wherever they found them on short motorcycle rides around the county.
The sheet had dates going back 2 years. The attendance numbers were in the dozens. This is what you do, she said to no one in particular. Cole was beside her. One of the things, yeah, you find old people and take them for rides.
We find old people who haven't been outside in a while and remind them that moving feels good. She turned and looked at him with an expression he would describe later to Diane as the look of someone doing arithmetic that keeps coming out to a number they didn't expect. Why? She asked. He didn't answer immediately.
He found a chair, turned it around, and sat on it backwards, the way men of a certain type always sit on chairs, forearms resting on the back. He looked at the floor for a moment. My mother's name was Carol, he said. She had four kids. I was the youngest.
When my dad left, she kept all four of us together by working two jobs and never once complaining about it to any of us because she thought complaining was weakness, which it wasn't. But that's what she believed. He paused. When she got older, my brother, oldest one, the responsible one, the one with the nice house and the right job, decided she was too much to manage. He had her move to a facility 2 hours away without really asking the rest of us.
She spent the last 3 years of her life 2 hours from everyone she knew. Evelyn was very still. I couldn't fix that, Cole said. No, I tried, but I was I was going through some things myself at the time, and I didn't fight hard enough, and she died in that facility, and I've had to live with that. He looked up.
So, that's why the honesty of it hit Evelyn like a physical weight. Not the sad story she had, her own sad stories, everyone past 60 did, but the directness of it. He had simply told her the truth without performing the telling of it, without managing her reaction, without making it about anything other than what it was. "I'm sorry about your mother," she said. "I'm sorry about your son," he said.
They looked at each other across the small distance of the room, and something passed between them that had no name, but was felt by both, and was in its way a kind of recognition. It was Diane who broke the moment by appearing from the kitchen with two mugs of coffee and the announcement that someone had heated up the breakfast casserole from yesterday and that everyone was welcome and that yes, Evelyn that included her and no, she didn't have to do anything except sit down. I'm not used to sitting down, Evelyn said. Nobody good is Diane said cheerfully. Learn anyway.
Uh she sat. She drank at the coffee which was stronger than anything she'd had in years and exactly right. She watched the room fill people moving in and out, conversations overlapping, somebody's dog wandering between table legs, and she had the strange, disorienting sensation of being in a place that operated by a different set of rules than the places she had recently inhabited. Rules she didn't know yet, but that seemed navigable. Shahab Bear put a plate in front of her without asking.
Eggs toast the casserole. Eat, he said, as if this were a simple declarative fact rather than a suggestion. I never got to eat my eggs at the diner, she said. These are better, Bear said with the absolute confidence of someone who has never doubted a sentence in his life. She ate.
It was in fact better. But Priya sat across from her and asked where she was from originally, and Evelyn said Indiana. And Priya said she'd never been to Indiana. And Evelyn said there were parts worth going to and parts that were mostly soybeans. And Preya laughed, the real kind of laugh, the kind you can't manufacture.
And Evelyn felt something loosen in her chest. Some muscle she had been holding contracted for so long she had forgotten it was tense. Was she told them about Frank, not because anyone pushed her to, but because his name came up naturally when she explained how she'd ended up in Montana. She had followed Michael here when Frank died, believing that proximity to her son would fill the space Frank left. A belief that had proven over several years to be incorrect in ways that had accumulated slowly and then suddenly the way all accumulations do.