Chapter 6: One Call
The parking lot lights at the Rusty Spur burned the color of old pennies, and Carrie stood in that light a long while after the racers' car had gone, looking at what they had left her.
The Electra Glide lay on its side in the gravel like something that had been put down hard. Cream and teal, 1974, the paint Frank had picked the winter they were married because he said it was the color of the lake above Bishop in March. Now a stripe of black spray paint crossed the tank, still wet enough to shine. The left mirror hung by its stem. A scrape ran the length of the exhaust where the bike had gone over, and the gravel had ground itself into the chrome.
Carrie did not scream. She had done her screaming two years ago, in a hospital corridor in Reno, and learned what it was worth. Instead she crouched down in her good boots and put her palm flat against the engine case, the way you check a forehead. Still warm. She had ridden in at dusk with the engine ticking happily, and some boy with a spray can had decided that was funny.
She stood up slowly β her knees were fifty-seven and the gravel unkind β and took out her phone. Her hands, she noticed, were perfectly steady. That surprised her. She scrolled to a number she had not dialed since the funeral, a number she had almost deleted a dozen times and never had.
Ray Novak answered on the second ring. She could hear a television behind him, and then the television went quiet, because Ray had always been able to tell, from the first breath, what kind of call it was.
"Carrie?" he said.
She looked at the bike. She looked at the stripe of black paint drying on thirty years of March-colored lake.
"Ray, it's Carrie Doyle. They hurt Frank's bike tonight."
Nine words. She counted them afterward, sitting on the curb, and she would count them again many times in the weeks to come, the way you count anything that turns a life. At the time she only heard the silence on the other end of the line, which was not an empty silence. It was the silence of a man standing up.
"Where are you?" Ray said.
"The Spur. The lot."
"Are you hurt?"
"No. I'm not hurt."
"Stay there," Ray Novak said. "We're coming."
He did not ask who they were, or how bad it was, or whether she was sure. Twenty-six years Frank had ridden beside that man, and Carrie had never once heard Ray waste a word, and he did not waste one now. The line clicked. The night went back to being a night: crickets somewhere past the fence, the neon sign over the roadhouse door buzzing one letter short, a truck on 395, sighing its brakes.
Deb Santos came out carrying a folding chair in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other, and she set the chair on the curb gravel beside Carrie as carefully as if she were setting a place at a table.
"Sit," Deb said. "You look like a fence post, and fence posts fall over."
Carrie sat. The coffee was strong enough to stand a spoon in, the way Deb had made it for thirty years, and the mug warmed her hands. She had not realized she was cold. The desert did that after sundown; it took the day off you in pieces.
"I called the sheriff already," Deb said. "Before I came out. Laura Beaumont's on her way, though she's coming from a wreck up at the county line, so it'll be a bit. And I called Ray's number before you did, matter of fact, and got no answer. Seems he was waiting for a better caller."
Carrie almost smiled. "He said they're coming."
"Course he did." Deb lowered herself onto the curb on the other side of the chair, because Deb Santos did not sit in chairs when there was a friend on a curb. "How many you figure?"
"I didn't ask."
"You don't have to ask," Deb said. "You know these boys. Minimalists they're not."
They sat together in the penny-colored light and drank the coffee and did not talk about the bike, which lay three feet away saying everything there was to say. Deb talked instead about her grandson, who had lost a tooth and put it under the wrong pillow, and about the price of fryer oil β about nothing, on purpose, the way you hold a rope steady for somebody climbing. Carrie understood, and loved her for it, and let the rope hold.
Then, from far down the highway, so faint at first that she thought she had imagined it out of wanting, came a sound like weather deciding.