Sophia
It was four-eleven in the afternoon when the bikes came back, and the part of me that hears for a living was sitting up in bed before the part of me that thinks for a living had caught up to why.
Loud, multiple, a crew. Not the morning ride-by I’d half-clocked through sleep — that one had been a single throttle going somewhere on its own.
This was four engines. Five. The throaty oncoming of a pack arriving at a destination, and the destination was twenty feet across the asphalt from my bedroom window.
Dread had arrived a beat ahead of the count. It had taken its position in my shoulders and the back of my neck and the floor of my stomach before the part of me that did the counting was ever invited to weigh in. It had been beating the count to the punch like that for years.
I sat up. My hand went to my own throat, something it had been doing since I was twelve. I’d stopped fighting it somewhere around twenty. My heart was racing, my mouth had gone dry. But I knew I was safe in my bedroom with the curtains closed against the day. Nothing in here was on fire.
I did the catalogue — something else I had been doing since I was twelve — and one of the kinder things life had given me was a profession that needed a catalogue every shift, so what had been a private survival inventory was now a billable skill.
Outside, the noise was sorting itself. Engines dropped out one at a time as their riders cut them — thuck, thuck — until one was left running, throaty and slow, and I knew without going to the window: a man with a wrench at the end of a driveway, twisting the throttle in idle to listen for the thing that was off about it.
The kind of sound that did not ask the neighborhood’s permission.
I'd told myself I'd find out who my new neighbor was in the morning, when I had first spotted that SOLD sticker four nights ago, and then the morning had happened to me, and then four more mornings had happened to me, and the most attention I'd offered house since was a glance through the kitchen window when the kettle was on.
I crossed to the dresser and pulled the curtain back an inch and looked.
Five bikes. Black, mostly. One oxblood. Parked nose-out on the wide concrete of the new neighbor’s driveway, every front wheel cocked to the same angle.
A handful of men stood around them with coffees. One was carrying a box. Another was laughing at something somebody had said.
Nobody appeared to be planning a felony.
My pulse declined to be reassured.
A knock on the screen door. Willow let herself onto my porch before I’d crossed the kitchen, because Willow had let herself onto my porch every morning and every afternoon she had been ambulatory since the day I’d moved in eight years ago.
The day after the closing, she had appeared on my flagstones with a chicken pot pie and the announcement that the neighborhood had been improperly inhabited until I came along, and we had been family ever since.
Eighty-four years old, four-foot-eleven, hair the color of saltwater, and a heart of gold inside a personality engineered to hide it.
She had two cardboard cups balanced in one hand, a foil-covered dish in the other, and the unhurried face of a woman who had been waiting since seven a.m. to be looked at.
"Don't even think about helping me," she said. "I'm eighty-four years old and I have been carrying things since 1948."
"Willow."
"Sit down before you fall down. You look like a wet cat."
I sat. She handed me the coffee. The sleeve had given up somewhere out on the lawn.
"Dottie's," she said, referring to the 24/7 diner in town run by the woman of the same name. "She knew the flat white was for you before I'd opened my mouth. She is a witch and I have made my peace with it."
I took a sip. The caramel hit and my eyes closed around it without my permission.
"Oh, my god. Willow. That is delicious. That is exactly what my tired soul needed."
"On your behalf" — she lowered herself into the second wicker chair one vertebra at a time, like the chair should be grateful — "I have been doing intelligence work since dawn."
"You've been doing what —"
"Sophia. The man across the road is a biker."
"…a biker."
"A biker. With biker friends. Who have been arriving on motorcycles, in shifts, since dawn, and who all appear" — she paused to let her words sink in — "and I want you to hear me when I say this — to have fallen directly out of the pages of Sexiest Man Alive magazine."
"Is that actually a thing?"
"Sophia. I do not know. But if it isn't, it should be. There is an oversupply of beautiful men in your driveway and at eighty-four I am absolutely, unreservedly here for it."
"Across the road—"
"Whatever. I am here for it. And your new owner over there is — and I will say this once and then we will move on — very, very easy on the eyes."
"Willow!"
"I think you should go over there and introduce yourself."
"No."
"Sophia. He's been at it since eight a.m. Offering him a glass of water would not be the worst thing you have ever done in your life."
"No way."
"It is the warmest October on record."
She took a slow sip of her coffee and looked at me over the rim of it, and there it was — the look. She had been deploying the look on me for eight years. She held it. I held out. She raised one eyebrow a single, patient millimeter, a woman who had all day and most of the next one.
"Fine," she said, setting the cup down. "Then I will tell you about Noah because our new neighbor has reminded me of my wild Noah days."
"Oh God, please no." I was laughing already.
"Noah" — she settled deeper into the chair, getting comfortable, a storyteller arranging her props — "was a Hells Angel out of Sacramento in 1972, and may he rest in peace, he ran his bike into a tree in '78, and he was, without one word of exaggeration, the most beautiful man I have ever had the privilege of taking my clothes off in front of. "
"Willow —"
"Six-foot-three. Hands the size of dinner plates. And the most beautiful member I have ever seen in my life." She gave me a wink she had clearly been saving. "If you know what I mean."
"I know what you mean."
"Do you, though?"
"Yes."
"Because I want to be specific —"
"Oh, God, please kill me now." It came out of me on the wrong half of a breath. I put both hands over my belly because something had pulled there. I put my forehead down on the porch table, and laughed into the wood until I lost the sound of it entirely.
Above me, unbothered, she carried on. I could hear that she was not smiling. That was the genius of her. She delivered the whole thing flat, like a coroner reading findings.
"— so that you understand. I have been alive for eighty-four years.
I have seen many things. I have, in fact, seen many of those things up very close.
And in the long catalogue of beautiful members I have been privileged to know personally, Noah was the gold standard.
The platinum standard. The one against which all subsequent —"
"I am begging you."
"— members were measured, and most of them found wanting.
Two husbands. One fiancé. A summer in San Francisco in '67 that I have never found a comfortable way to describe in mixed company.
And Noah. And I am telling you now that the man across the road has the look of Noah about him.
That is all I am saying. That is the entire content of my report. "
My face was still on the table. My ribs hurt. I could not get a clean breath, and every time I thought I had one, she would be there in the dark behind my eyes, six-foot-three, dinner-plate hands, reading her coroner's report, and it would go again.
"Get up, girl."
"I can't."
"Get up, finish your coffee, and go get your mail."
I peeled my face off the table and wiped under both eyes with the heel of my hand. "Thank you, Willow."
"For what."
"For looking out for me."
And there — for one second, gone almost before it arrived — the mischief dropped off her face and something like sincerity came up to the surface. The whole operation had only ever been the wrapping on it. Then she pulled the bossing back on like a cardigan.
"Hurry up,” she said. “That man is going to come over here if you don't go over there, mark my words, and I am too old to witness anything I am going to wish to God I hadn't witnessed."
A few minutes later, I left Willow on the porch — with a knowing laugh I did not appreciate — and walked my flagstones to the gate because pretending I had any other reason to be outside would have required acting, and I was too tired to act.
I’d grabbed my trash bag off the side gate on the way past — a small concession to dignity. If I was going to be observed by half the cul-de-sac, I might as well be doing two errands.
He hadn’t seen me yet.
He had his back to me, bent over the bike, one hand braced on the tank and the other working a wrench.
The man beside him was talking. The black t-shirt across his back had given up trying to lie about any of what was under it.
I could see his back muscles moving each time the wrench turned — a slow seam of motion under the cotton that my eye followed before I'd had the chance to ask it to.
The hem had ridden up at the waistband, an inch of skin showing low on one side where the shirt had untucked itself.
Hair damp at the nape of his neck. Black ink running the length of one forearm and disappearing into the sleeve.
When he switched his grip, his shoulder rolled, the cotton across it shifted with the muscle underneath, and my hand went slack at the wrist.
The trash bag bit into my palm again when my fist closed around it. My mouth had gone dry. My heart rate had picked up the way it picked up before a code.
There was, on the available evidence, no code.
I lifted the latch on my mailbox.