Chapter 30: The Open Road Ahead
The season's first ride began the way all important ones had, before the town was properly awake, with Carrie standing in her garage in the blue hour drinking coffee out of the mug that said nothing on it — she had chosen it for that — and looking at the Electra Glide under its cover with the feeling she imagined farmers have for fields: not ownership, exactly, but responsibility, affection, and a list of things to check.
She pulled the cover off in one motion, the way Frank taught her, so the dust went outward and not onto the paint. The bike stood revealed in the gray light, cream and teal, chrome gone soft at the edges from years of polishing, and she did her walk-around the way she did everything that mattered, slowly and by hand. Tires. Belt. Lights, each one lit and looked at. Oil. The toolkit in its roll, complete. Frank's gloves in the saddlebag, her own on the seat. The photograph of the two of them at this same garage door in 1994, which she kept in the bag's inner pocket now, had been joined this spring by a second one: fifteen bikes at dusk, and her own small figure in the middle of the headlights, standing. Two photographs, forty years apart at the ends, and her whole life in the saddlebag between them.
Her phone sat charged in her jacket pocket, one hundred percent, the way she kept it now — not out of fear, though she had earned the right to fear, but out of a settled understanding of what a phone could be. It had been, once, a thing she clutched in a gravel lot with her heart going like a hammer. Then it had been the thing that rang on a Tuesday evening with a stranger's trouble in it. Both times it had been answered by people who showed up. Carrie had come to think of the phone the way she thought of the lantern over her porch: a small piece of equipment whose whole purpose was to refuse the dark its favorite lie, which is that everyone is alone in it.
She wheeled the Glide out into the driveway, down the slight slope to the street, the bike rolling easy on its bearings, and the neighborhood was in its dawn condition — sprinklers ticking somewhere, a dog conducting an inventory of the air from behind a fence, the smell of somebody's early bacon and of the desert beyond the town waking up to heat. The Sierra stood westward in its white crown, enormous and indifferent and, Carrie had decided long ago, fond of her in its way, the way mountains are fond of the people who look at them every morning of their lives.
Mabel from two doors down came out in her robe with her own coffee, as she did most mornings now, and the two women stood a while in the companionable arrangement of neighbors who have seen each other through things. "First ride," Mabel said. It was not a question. "First ride," Carrie agreed. "Tell the mountains I said hello," Mabel said, "since you insist on going up there to talk to them yourself."
The Glide started on the second breath, as it always did when it had been properly put away, with that deep, settling thunder that she felt in the soles of her boots. She sat a moment in the music of it. It occurred to her that gratitude, practiced long enough, stops feeling like an ache and starts feeling like a route — something you ride not to escape where you have been, but to honor it, mile by kept mile, for as long as the machinery holds. Fifty-eight years old, she thought, and the machinery all running — hers and the bike's both, maintained at some cost, making no apology. She thought of Frank, not with the old ache but with the companionable clarity that had replaced it, the way a healed bone is simply a bone again. She thought of Chase, who would be opening the shop about now. She thought of Ali, probably already texting her — and yes, the phone buzzed once against her ribs, and she smiled and did not look, because some messages you can answer with the whole day.
The road out of Bishop ran north into the light, empty and bright, the lines of it clean, the mountains drawing back on either side like doors being opened by courteous giants. Carrie let the clutch out and rolled on, up through the gears, the wind coming to meet her with its familiar hands, and there was nothing behind her that needed carrying and nothing ahead of her that needed fearing, only the road doing what the road had always promised to do for those who maintain their machines and answer their phones: going on.
She rode, and the town fell away, and the valley opened like a hand.