They left on the first Saturday of May that promised to hold, three bikes and a forecast, with the Sierra still wearing its snow like a collar it was not ready to give up. Ali Moreno rode the middle position on her Scout, steady as a metronome now after two springs of Carrie's patient tuition, and Ray Novak rode sweep on his big tourer, last in line the way he had ridden behind Frank for thirty years, out of a loyalty so old it had become simple habit. Carrie led, on the cream-and-teal Electra Glide, because it was Frank's loop and she was the only one of the three who had ridden it with him, and a route, like a song, belongs to whoever remembers all the words.
The long way home, Frank had called it, though it was not a way home at all but a loop of nearly three hundred miles that left Bishop going north and came back from the south two days later, and the name was his joke and his philosophy in one: the point was never the arriving. They climbed out of the valley in the cold bright morning, past the cottonwoods coming into leaf along the canals, up through the long grade where the air thinned and sharpened and the Glide's engine note deepened in the way of all engines working honestly at altitude. Carrie felt the old machine settle into its stride beneath her — Paul's rebuild, Chase's paint prep, her own hands on half the bolts by now — and she felt, as she always did on this road, that riding it well was a form of conversation with everyone who had ever kept it alive.
They stopped at the overlook above the reservoir where Frank used to stop, always, whether anyone needed to or not, on the stated grounds that a man who rides past beauty without stopping will eventually ride past everything. Ali took off her helmet and stood looking at the water with her hair mashed flat and her face lit up like a struck match. "I used to drive this in a car with the windows up," she said. "I lived here six years and I never once saw it."
"You're seeing it now," Ray said. "That's the whole curriculum. The rest is just throttle control."
They ate gas-station sandwiches in the sun like royalty. Ray produced, from some depth of his tourer's luggage, a bag of oranges, and peeled one for each of them with his thumbnail, an old road sacrament. They rode through little towns waking up to spring, past a schoolyard, past a church letting out, past a man washing a truck who raised a hand without looking up, the universal liturgy of the road. Twice Carrie caught the Glide's reflection in storefront glass — an old bike, a not-young woman, a line of light down the teal paint — and both times she thought not of age but of maintenance, which is age's better angel: everything in the picture had been cared for, and it showed, and it ran.
On the second day, coming down the eastern slope with the valley floor shimmering below them and the wind gone warm, Ali pulled alongside at a stop sign and shouted over the engines, "She hasn't missed once!" — meaning the Glide, though she patted her own bike as she said it, the way riders do, distributing credit. Carrie thought of the machine's biography: Frank's hands, then years of standing, then a stranger's wrench in a gravel lot, then a winter of patient resurrection by people who had decided that a thing worth breaking was a thing worth fixing better. "She had a lot of help!" she shouted back, and Ali grinned and nodded as if Carrie had confirmed something she already believed about more than motorcycles.
Ray took the lead for the last ten miles, an old courtesy — the sweep brings them home — and they rolled into Bishop in the gold of late afternoon in a line, unhurried, complete. At the Spur they put the bikes in a row and stood around them in the pleasant exhaustion of people who have been somewhere and come back improved. Deb came out with cold drinks and demanded the report, and Ali, who had been the student of the outfit not long before, gave it standing straight with her helmet under her arm: roads good, weather fair, nobody lost, everybody fed. "And the Glide?" Deb asked.
"Ran sweet and strong the whole way," Carrie said. "Like she was showing off for somebody."
She rode the last mile home alone, slowly, through the streets of her own town, and put the bike in the garage as the light failed, and stood a moment with her hand on the warm engine, thanking it in the private way of people who talk to machines. The loop was closed. The road had kept its promise. Whatever came next would be new road.