Page 67 of Open Road

Closer than it’s ever been, sitting warm in my chest, certain in a way nothing has been certain in four years. The compound through the window, the coffee in my hands, the documents on the table dissolving what tried to dissolve me. This man across from me came back when I asked him to, sat down without requiring anything in return, and is currently holding my daughter with the particular steadiness of someone who has decided she is his to hold.

The word.

“Home,” I say.

It comes out quiet, the way true things come out when they’ve been sitting long enough—simply, without ceremony, finding the air because it was time.

Roam looks at me without saying anything, the corner of his mouth moving in that particular way it has. I feel something shift in my chest the way it does now when he’s in the room and looking at me like that, like I’m something he’s already decided on. Rose looks up at both of us, back and forth, running her ownsmall, serious assessment of whatever is happening between the adults at the table.

“Can I have a cookie?” she says.

The laugh comes up through both of us at the same time, and it fills the kitchen. Gerald lifts his head in the yard. The afternoon goes gold in the window.

Home.

Chapter Twenty-Three

ROAM

The Softail has been patient about this.

Six weeks of that slow weep from the left pushrod tubes, six weeks of me clocking it and deciding it could wait because there was always something that couldn’t or something the club needed ahead of what the bike needed, always a reason to keep moving and not stop long enough for the engine to ask anything of me. It stopped being a choice I was making somewhere around week four.

Now it’s a debt.

Today I pay it.

The yard is quiet in the particular way it gets on a Thursday afternoon when there’s no run scheduled, no Church, and nothing requiring the kind of attention that makes men loud. Gerald has appointed himself the concrete in the shade of the east wall, stretched to his full considerable length, monitoring the yard from a position that has the look of absolute vigilance and the content of deep, comfortable sleep.

Scout went south this morning and won’t be back until dark. Winchester is at Bare Assets on what he would call an inventory check and what the rest of us would call whatever this is becoming with Nova, which is none of our business and all of our entertainment.

Creed came out an hour ago, stood with his coffee, watched me work for a while, then went back inside without saying anything.

Twenty-two years in this club.

That’s still the most comfortable silence in my life.

The rocker cover is off, the chain tension is set. The weep is farther back than I’d hoped, two gaskets instead of one, which adds an hour but doesn’t change what the answer is. I work through it in sequence, parts laid out in the order they came off. The discipline of it is its own thing, the same thing it’s always been, every other variable falling away until there’s nothing in my head except this.

The back door opens.

The sound of feet on the steps. Small and most definitely not careful about the volume. Then Rose arrives, which is the right word for it. She doesn’t walk into places, she arrives. Velocity managed at the last second, Mr. Rabbit dangling from one fist, hair in what was probably a braid this morning and is now a general suggestion.

“Whatcha doing?”

She stops two feet from the bike and looks at it the way she looks at everything mechanical, seriously, with the particular focus of a small person who has decided engines are worth understanding.

“Working on the engine,” I tell her.

“Is it broken?”

“Leaking… different thing.”

She processes this. “Where does it leak to?”

“Ground.”

“Like blood?” She looks up at me.