Chapter 1
Rev
So when something white came up in my headlight at seven in the evening, I assumed it was trash.
A tarp off a truck bed. Then it moved, and I thought deer, which was wrong in a way that would have embarrassed me if anyone had been in my head to hear it, and then I was close enough to see that it was a woman in a wedding dress standing in a ditch with her thumb out.
I have been riding this road for nineteen years. I want to be clear that this had not previously happened.
I went past her. Not on purpose — you don't stop a bike at seventy in loose gravel because your brain has served you an image it can't file. I got it down, turned it around a hundred yards on, and came back with the light on her.
She had her chin up. That was the first thing.
Everything about her said she'd been walking for hours — the hem of that dress was the color of the shoulder, gray-brown to the knee, and her hair had come down on one side and given up on the other, and there was a sunburn coming up across her nose and her chest like a slap.
But the chin was up, and she looked me over the way you'd look over a produce delivery.
I killed the engine. The quiet out there is enormous.
"I'm fine," she said.
"Okay."
"I'm— " She stopped. She'd clearly had a longer sentence loaded and I hadn't given it anywhere to go. "You didn't argue."
"No, ma'am."
"People argue."
"I don't know you well enough to argue." I put my boot down and looked past her at the forty miles of nothing going east, and the forty-one going west, and the sun that had gone down without lowering the temperature so much as a degree. "You're standing in a ditch."
She looked down. There was a pause you could have driven a truck through.
"It's a shallow ditch," she said.
"It is."
"I'd like the record to show I chose it."
"Noted."
She was shaking. Not shivering — it was ninety-eight degrees at seven p.m. — but her hands had a fine tremor in them where they held the skirt, the kind that comes about six hours after the thing that caused it, when the body finally gets the memo. She hadn't noticed yet. People don't.
I've done a lot of talking in my life, most of it before I was twenty-five, and I've come around to the position that it's overrated. So I didn't ask. Not who, not why, not where's the groom, not the eleven other questions sitting right there like fruit on a low branch.
I said, "Copper Ridge is thirty-one miles. There's a diner. Woman named Margo runs it and she'll feed you whether you want it or not."
"I don't have any money."
"I didn't ask you for any."
"I don't have my shoes."
I looked at her feet. Bare, filthy, blistered across both heels, and one of them was bleeding a little where a rock had got her.
She looked at me looking, and I watched a thing happen in her face — a flinch, and then a straightening, like she was bracing to be told what an idiot she'd been.
Braced for it. Expecting it. Somebody had trained her to expect it.
"That'll be uncomfortable on the pegs," I said. "Nothing else."
She let out a breath that had a laugh somewhere in the middle of it.
"Do you do this a lot?" she asked.
"Route's quiet."
"That's not an answer."
"No," I agreed, and got off the bike, and pulled the spare helmet out of the saddlebag, because Otto rides pillion sometimes and I've learned to travel prepared for Otto.
She looked at the helmet like it was a legal document.
"I'm going to say something," she said, "and I want you to take it in the spirit it's intended."
"All right."
"You are an enormous man in a leather vest with what appears to be a skull on it, on an empty highway, at night, offering a stranger a ride."
"Correct."
"That's the whole sentence. I don't have a second half. I'm just saying it out loud so that later, when I tell this story, everyone knows I noticed."
I turned the vest a little toward the headlight so she could see it properly. "It's a crown."
She squinted. "It's a crown on a skull."
"It's an aesthetic choice made in 1974 by men who are now on blood thinners.
" I held out the helmet. "Copper Ridge Kings.
There's a sheriff's substation two doors down from the diner, and the sheriff's name is Ruth, and she'll be at the counter at eight because Wednesday's meatloaf.
You can walk in and out of my life any time you want. Starting now."
She took the helmet.
It took her a minute to get on. The dress was not designed for it. There was a maneuver involving both fists and a hip, and a sound of tearing that she visibly decided not to acknowledge, and then she was behind me holding four feet of skirt bunched against her stomach like a hostage.
"Where do I—" she said.
"Anywhere you like."
Her hands landed on my sides, light, the way you'd touch a wet railing. I started the bike and felt them close.
Thirty-one miles. And I didn't ask her a single question, the whole way.
Not because I'm noble. I want that understood.
I didn't ask because I've been on the other side of it — I've been the one on a shoulder somewhere with my whole life on fire behind me, and what I remember about that night is not the man who stopped.
It's the man who stopped and then needed to know.
Who wanted the story, so he'd have something to carry away.
So I gave her thirty-one miles of nothing. Just the road going under us, and the last light bleeding off the Cinder Range, and the temperature finally, finally starting to drop as we climbed.
Twenty miles in, I felt her forehead come to rest between my shoulder blades.
And she started to cry — I couldn't hear it over the engine, but you can feel it through a person's hands, it turns out.
Her fingers tightened in my shirt and stayed tight the rest of the way, and I did not say a word, and did not slow down, and did not look back at her in the mirror even once, because there are things a person needs to do in private and sometimes the only private place available is the back of a stranger's bike at sixty miles an hour in the dark.
By the time the Copper Ridge water tower came up out of the black, she'd stopped.
She let go, sat up, wiped her face with the heel of her hand, and shouted over the wind, in the steadiest voice I have ever heard from a woman with dried blood on her feet:
"Is the meatloaf any good?"
"No," I shouted back.
"Good," she said. "I was worried I'd have nothing to fix."