Chapter 28: Frank's Jacket
Deb Santos had been asking, in her roundabout way, for the better part of a year, and she finally asked straight out on a slow Thursday at the Rusty Spur, wiping down the bar in front of Carrie's stool with the rag she used for emphasis. "The wall looks lonesome," she said. "There's the photograph, and there's the empty peg next to it, and everybody who comes in asks what the peg is for. I keep saying it's waiting on something. I hate not knowing what I'm waiting on, Carrie. It's bad management."
The photograph was the one the Gazette had run: fifteen bikes in the Spur's gravel lot at dusk, headlights on, none of their riders looking at the camera, because Ray had told them not to pose and they had obeyed with the air of men defusing a bomb. It had hung beside the register for two years, in a frame Deb's brother had made, and the empty peg beside it had been Deb's own idea — "for balance," she had said at the time, lying.
Carrie went home and stood in front of the hall closet where Frank's club jacket hung in its dry-cleaning bag, and she stood there a long time, not deciding so much as visiting. The jacket was older than her marriage. The leather had gone soft at the elbows and shiny at the cuffs, and the patches had the faded, earned look that no amount of money can buy and no honest rider tries to fake. It smelled, faintly and impossibly, still of him — of the garage soap he used and the road. She had taken it down twice in the first year: once to cry into it like a girl, and once to consider giving it to Goodwill in a fit of forward motion that had passed by morning. Since then it had simply hung there, a sentence she was not finished reading. Ray, when she told him what she meant to do, had said only, quietly, "He'd have liked the company," and then had cleared his throat and found urgent business with his coffee, and Carrie had loved him for both halves of that.
She took it off the hanger and held it up against herself in the mirror, the way she had done at twenty-five, and the woman in the mirror was fifty-eight and gray at the temples and entirely herself. "Well," she said to the jacket, or to Frank, the two having become hard to separate in the quiet of the house. "You'd want to be where the bikes are. You always did."
What she kept, she decided, kneeling by the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, were the gloves. Frank's riding gloves, battered and beautiful, the left one resewn at the thumb by her own hand on a camping trip in 1998 with a needle meant for canvas. They had been enormous on her once. Trying them on now, she found that her hands had grown into them across a lifetime of work — garden, throttle, wrenches, years — and that they fit her almost exactly, and that this was not a sad thing but a true one: she had become, in the end, a person his things fit.
On Saturday the club came to the Spur the way they came to everything that mattered, in a bunch and early, and Ray himself climbed the stepladder that nobody trusted and drove the peg's screw home a half inch deeper, because a thing that hangs for good should hang right. Carrie hung the jacket on it herself. The room made the particular silence that rooms make for flags and for brides. Somebody — it was Gus, of course it was Gus — said, "Road captain," quietly, and nobody else said anything, and it was enough.
Deb, who was not a sentimental woman, produced a small brass plaque she had ordered without telling anyone, because she had known for a year what the peg was waiting on even if she had pretended otherwise, and she set it on the bar for Carrie to approve before it went up. It read: FRANK DOYLE — ROAD CAPTAIN — HE ALWAYS CAME BACK FOR PEOPLE. Carrie read it twice. "He'd say it's too many words," she said.
"He'd be right and I'd hang it anyway," Deb said, and did.
The gloves Carrie put in the Electra Glide's saddlebag, where they rode from then on against her own thinner pair, a spare set of hands. On the ride home she took the long way without deciding to, up past the fairgrounds and the motel and the dark shoulder of the highway where the White Mountains stood in their evening order, and the jacket was on a wall where it belonged, and the gloves were with her where they belonged, and she rode between the two facts like a woman between two lit windows, at peace with the arrangement of her losses.
Chapter 29: The Long Way Home