Page 22 of Open Road

“Hey.” Roam’s voice stops her. Not sharp, just certain. “Some of those will be hot. Don’t touch without asking.”

Rose turns around. “Hot like the stove?”

“Hot like the stove.” Roam nods.

She takes a step back from the nearest one, reassessing. Then, because Rose operates on principles of fairness, “But I can touch yours?”

“You can touch mine.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

Rose absorbs this hierarchy. Then Roam crouches down to her level, which for a man his size is a considerable distance to travel.

“You know how you’d feel if someone picked up Mr. Rabbit without asking?”

Rose’s eyes go wide with the specific outrage of a person confronting a hypothetical violation. “I wouldn’t like that.”

“Nobody touches another man’s bike without asking. Same thing.”

Rose looks at the bikes, then at Mr. Rabbit, and nods slowly, the gravity of this entirely understood.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll ask.”

“Good.”

“Why do they call you Roam?” she asks, the way she asks everything, as though the answer already exists and she’s simply retrieving it.

“Because I do,” he says. “I roam.”

Rose thinks about this. “Do you like it?”

There’s a pause. It’s not a long one, but long enough to mean something.

“Used to,” he says.

Rose accepts this with a solemnity slightly beyond her years, the way children sometimes do when an answer landswith weight they can’t quite name but can feel. She pats the handlebars on his bike.

I watch his face.

He’s not looking at Rose the way people usually look at her, with the surface-level warmth of adults performing themselves at children. He’s looking at her the way he looks at everything—level, patient, and taking it in. As though she is worth the full attention of his eyes, and it hasn’t occurred to him to give her anything less.

It does something to my chest I’m not equipped for this morning.

There’s a voice in my head, my husband’s voice, which has an opinion about the state of things. About me standing here. About the kind of woman who ends up in a place like this. About what this says and what I am.

I notice I’m listening to it.

So I stop.

The morning is warm. Gerald, the dog, is still asleep in his strip of sun. Rose is sitting on the Softail, asking Roam if it goes fast. He tells her very fast. She tells him she would like to go fast too. He says maybe someday. She accepts this without argument. It’s the second time this morning a Roam answer has landed without pushback. I file that away under things I don’t have a category for yet.

The compound hums around us, alive and purposeful. It’s a place with its own rules, own rhythms, and a particular understanding of what it means to be here.

Rose says, “Okay, Roam. I’m ready to go fast now.”

“Not today,” he says.