Page 22 of Rogue
“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.”
