Page 70 of Open Road

There’s a kid down the hall who said a word as if it was already true, because to her it was and doesn’t know how to be wrong about the things that matter. There’s a woman in the next room who drove five hours in the dark on a gas gauge she didn’t trust, with fifty-seven dollars in her pocket and a three-year-old in the back seat, because she decided her daughter was worth the risk of everything.

The Softail will be together again tomorrow. There’ll be something else the day after. None of it requires a saddlebag.

The ceiling is the same ceiling.

This is the first night in twenty-two years that the walls haven’t run the calculation.

The room is the same room.

But it’s different now.

Epilogue

JANIE

Three months is long enough for a thing to stop feeling like it could be taken away.

The legal aid office is on the fourth floor of a building downtown that smells like old coffee, determination, and the particular strain of fluorescent lighting that has been arguing with the afternoon sun through those windows since before anyone currently working here was born. My desk is in the corner by the window with the view of the parking structure, which is not as depressing as it sounds, because on a good day you can see a strip of the river between the concrete levels, and on a very good day, there’s a pelican on the railing of the third deck who seems to be working through a personal crisis, and I find his presence oddly companionable.

The woman who sat across from me this morning wore long sleeves in July.

It’s the thing that stops your breath when you recognize it. The deliberate choice of fabric. The angle of the chair. The way she answered my questions precisely, carefully, giving me exactly what I needed while keeping the narrative as contained as possible, because you don’t learn to make yourself small in one place and then not carry the habit somewhere else. You carry it everywhere. You carry it until someone helps you put it down.

I’m working on putting it down.

Three months in, and I’m still working on it, which is, as it turns out, completely correct. The director told me that in my first week, when I asked how long it took. She’d looked at me with the particular expression of a woman who has answeredthis question a hundred times and finds the honesty of it no less important for the repetition. ‘As long as it takes,’she said. ‘And then a little longer.’

My phone buzzes at four thirty.

Devil:You’re not backing out.

The drive back to the compound takes eleven minutes. Devil and Lucy are already in the kitchen when I walk through the door, two glasses on the counter and a third being poured without consultation. Rose is in the yard with Roam, which I can hear but not see, her voice carrying the particular escalating cadence of a story she’s telling to someone who has made the mistake of showing mild interest. Gerald is visible through the window, strategically positioned in what Rose believes isplaying with the dog,and Gerald believes islying down.

“Where is it?” Devil asks by way of a hello.

“Hanging in the closet.”

“Go put it on.”

“I’m still thinking about—”

“You’re not thinking,” Lucy says, handing me the glass. “You’re rehearsing a speech to yourself about why you shouldn’t. There’s a difference.”

The thing about these women is they’re not wrong. They are almost constitutionally incapable of being wrong about this particular category of thing, which is both their greatest quality and occasionally inconvenient.

“Go put it on,” Devil says.

“I will… later. When it’s closer to—”

“Janie.” The way she says my name is not unkind. It’s the same tone she used in the fitting room three weeks ago when I reached for the shapeless option out of pure reflex, and she handed me something else without a word. It’s the tone of awoman who has watched me come a long way and has no patience left for watching me stall at the last ten feet.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll go put it on.”

“We’ll come up,” Lucy says.

“You absolutely don’t need to—”

They’re already moving.