Chapter Eight
Lennox
The road he picked was nothing -- a cracked two-lane that ran south off the back of the property through a long flat between two stands of pine, no houses I could see and no other vehicles for the half mile we’d been on it.
He slowed without signaling, because there was no one to signal to, and rolled the bike onto the shoulder where the asphalt gave way to weeds and broken glass.
The sun was low and gold. He killed the engine.
I got off the back with one hand on his shoulder for balance. I stepped back into the gravel and tucked my thumbs into my front pockets. I looked at the bike, and then I looked at him.
“No,” I said. Before he’d said anything.
“I haven’t asked you anything yet.”
“You were going to.”
He swung a leg over and got off the other side, stood the bike on its kickstand, and put his hand flat on the seat. He looked at me across the saddle. His eyes held something I hadn’t seen before -- a small amusement more in the corner of his mouth than anywhere else.
“Come here,” he said.
I came.
He moved me where he wanted me without making a production of it.
A hand at my shoulder, light, turning me to face the bike.
He took my left wrist -- gentle, but not asking -- and set my hand on the grip.
He helped me straddle the seat, then he took the right hand and did the same.
He stepped in behind me and reached around my body to put his hands over mine and adjust the angle of my fingers on the throttle, and the warmth of him at my back was a thing I was aware of and decided not to think about.
“This is the throttle. Roll it toward you, you go. Roll it away, you slow down.” His voice was at my ear.
Low. The way he said things he intended me to hear once and remember.
“Right hand also has your front brake. Two fingers, that lever. You squeeze that hard at speed, you go over the bars. Two fingers. Light.”
I nodded.
“Left hand is your clutch. You’ll be in first the whole time. We’re not shifting today.” A pause. “Left foot, gear lever. Right foot, rear brake. Use the rear brake more than the front. The bike will tell you the rest.”
He stepped back half a pace and looked at my posture.
Then he came back in and put one palm flat against the small of my back, low, where the hoodie was thin, and pressed gently -- not pushing, just communicating a direction.
“Hips forward. Shoulders down. You’re sitting on it. You’re not bracing on it.”
I let my shoulders drop.
“Better.”
His fingers, sliding off my waist, caught the cuff of my sleeve where I’d pushed it up that morning, and the back of his knuckle brushed the inside of my wrist -- the place where the bruise had gone from purple to that soft yellow-green.
He paused. He didn’t say anything about it.
He settled his hand at his side, and he stepped back, and the only acknowledgment of any of it was the half second itself, which I noticed and which he meant me to notice and which neither of us would mention.
“Throttle,” he said. “Roll it on slow. Not a lot. Find the friction point on the clutch with your left hand. Let it out slow and steady.”
I rolled the throttle.
The bike jumped under me -- not far, but with a small mechanical violence I hadn’t expected from the solid machine that had been steady beneath him for forty-some miles -- and the front wheel jerked left and I corrected too hard to the right and the engine made a sound I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to make.
I squeezed the clutch in a panic and the whole frame shuddered and the rear tire bit and then didn’t, and the bike began the unmistakable lean of a thing about to fall over with me on it.
His hand was on the handlebar.
He hadn’t moved fast. He’d been ready, was the thing -- his hand had been hovering an inch off the bar the whole time, and when I needed it, it was already there.
He steadied the bike with one easy press of his palm and put his other hand under my elbow and held me upright until I’d gotten my feet back under me.
“You’re steering it,” he said. “Not fighting it.”
It came out flat, the dry tone of a man who’d said the same sentence to a lot of Prospects on a lot of afternoons on this same stretch of road.
The laugh that came out of me surprised both of us. It was short. A real one. I felt my shoulders shake once and a little air come out of my nose, and his hand stayed under my elbow a beat longer than the steadying required, and then he let me go.
“Again.”
I rolled the throttle again.
I did it the way he’d said -- slow, the friction point, the held breath -- and the bike crept forward, six feet, ten feet, twelve, and then I overcorrected to the left and stopped to keep from going into the ditch.
“Again.”
I came back around. He hadn’t moved from where he was, just turned to track me. He had his arms crossed now, which was a thing he did when he was watching something he didn’t intend to interrupt.
The third attempt found whatever the first two hadn’t.
I rolled it on and the bike took the throttle and went, and I let the clutch all the way out and the gear caught and I was moving -- not fast, twenty miles an hour maybe -- and the road stayed under me and the bars stayed where I put them.
I let my shoulders down. I felt my thighs ease against the tank.
My chin came up to meet the road ahead, and there was nothing coming but more of it, and the gold light in the trees, and the wind across my face.
I felt my hair come loose at the back where I’d pinned it up. I didn’t care.
I went a quarter mile.
I came back.
I pulled up in front of him and got both feet on the ground and squeezed the brake the way he’d said, two fingers, light, and the bike rocked once and held. My cheeks were tender from the wind and I knew without a mirror that my hair was a wreck, and I was grinning.
He looked at me then shook his head. “There she is.”
I didn’t answer.
I didn’t have to.
The ride back was on the seat behind him.
I kept my hands at his waist and I noticed that my grip was different.
Not the clamped-fist hold of a girl who didn’t know what else to do with her hands.
Looser, now. The kind of hold you took when you’d been on the back of the same bike enough times to trust the man in front of you to keep the rubber on the road.
He parked under the awning and we walked across the yard in the last of the light. He didn’t say anything about the lesson. I didn’t either. There was nothing to say that hadn’t already been said when I’d pulled up in front of him.
The kitchen light was on. I didn’t remember turning it on. He must have before we left. He set his keys in the dish by the door. He filled the percolator without asking what I wanted, because by now we both knew what I wanted, and he set two mugs on the counter.
I took my mug to the couch, and he followed with his, settling beside me. We didn’t touch, but the space between us felt carefully maintained. I could feel the heat radiating from his arm through two layers of flannel as the evening light outside the window deepened to a blue-gray.
I drank half my coffee, then set the mug on my knee, both hands wrapped around it. “Nobody’s ever protected me without wanting something back.” It came out flat. I’d been carrying the sentence for so long it had worn its own edges off. I didn’t look at him. I looked at the rim of the mug.
He didn’t move. He didn’t fill the silence. He just sat there in the held quiet of a man who’d heard a sentence and intended to let it finish.
“My father,” I said. “Every birthday. Every dress. He’d take me to lunch the week before and talk about what he expected from me at the party, and the dress would be hanging in my closet by the time I got home.
When the day of the party arrived, I knew before I came down the stairs what I was supposed to say to whichever of his friends he’d seated me next to.
The dress wasn’t a gift. The dress was a uniform. I just hadn’t learned that word yet.”
He still didn’t say anything.
I went on, because once I’d started, I didn’t know how to stop.
“My mother. She used to put a heating pad on my back when I had cramps. She’d come into the room with the pad in one hand and a glass of water in the other and sit on the edge of the bed without saying anything for ten minutes, and I used to think -- I used to think she was being kind.
And then on the way out, every time, she’d say one thing.
Something I’d done that week she wanted to fix.
The heating pad was an excuse to come talk to me, but her real purpose was to correct me. ”
I drank.
“Grant,” I said. “Grant gave me a diamond bracelet for our six-month anniversary. He clasped it on my wrist himself, in a restaurant, and the table next to us applauded. And on the car ride home he told me he’d seen me laugh at something one of his cousins said at dinner.
He told me he didn’t ever want to see me laugh like that at another man again.
He didn’t raise his voice. He took my hand.
He kept his thumb on the inside of my wrist, right over the bracelet, the whole way home. ”
My voice had dropped. I could hear it. I could hear myself going quieter. “Every kindness,” I said. “My whole life. Every single one of them had a cost. I just didn’t always know when the bill was coming due.”
I waited for him to say something.
He set his mug down on the coffee table, the motion slow, but I saw the muscle in his jaw jump once before the ceramic touched the wood. He turned toward me on the couch -- a full turn, his knee on the cushion between us -- and waited until I looked at him. So I did.
His face was a mask of control, the same one he’d worn at the meeting table, but his eyes were harder now, the softness I’d seen on the road gone. “I don’t want anything from you that you don’t want to give.”