Now he was at his bike, a 1998 Road King in a color the factory had called Sierra Red that had faded over the years to something closer to the inside of a peach pit. He had rebuilt the engine twice. He had rebuilt himself, in a manner of speaking, about the same number of times. And he was about to ride away when the running reached him.
The girl came around the bumper of a white county pickup so fast she had to put a hand on its fender to keep from going down. She was maybe ten. She wore a pink jacket, a puffy nylon thing too warm for the afternoon, zipped right up to her chin, and her hair was a dark braid that had mostly come apart. Her face was red. She was breathing in big ragged pulls, the way kids breathe when they've run farther than they ever have, and she held something out to him in a fist.
"Wait," she said. "Mister. Wait. Don't."
He took his boot off the peg and set both feet flat on the ground and held up one hand, palm out, the way he would to a skittish horse or a frightened dog. "I'm not going anywhere," he said. "Catch your breath."
"You were," she said. "You were going. I saw you from the window."
"I was," he agreed. "But I'm not now."
She looked at him with great suspicion, as if grown men said that sort of thing all the time and then left anyway. Then she stepped forward, took his right hand, which was the hand without the helmet, turned it palm up with a seriousness that nearly undid him, and pressed a folded piece of paper into it. She closed his fingers over the paper with both her hands. Her hands were cold despite the running. Hospital cold, he thought. Air-conditioning cold.
"Don't read it here," she said. Then immediately, "No. Read it here. Read it right now. But don't go."
"Who's it from?"
She opened her mouth and closed it again. "Just read it."
It was a sheet of lined notebook paper folded into a small square, the way kids fold notes to pass in class, with the edges tucked into each other so it would hold itself shut. He knew that fold. His sister had used it in 1964. Some things did not change. He worked it open with his thick fingers, which had lost some of their feeling to forty years of vibration and two decades of cold winter mornings, and he smoothed it against the tank of the bike.
The handwriting was not a child's. That was the first thing. It was a grown woman's hand, slanted and looped and a little shaky, in blue ballpoint, and it said only:
She kept every one. She never spent a dime. Don't you dare think it was because she didn't read them.