Chapter 1
I was bringing thirty-one grieving riders home when I saw the little girl.
At first, I thought she was a piece of trash moving under the parking lot lights.
Then the pink bicycle turned.
Then I saw her bare feet.
It was 11:47 p.m., and a child in butterfly pajamas was riding alone through the far corner of a Walmart parking lot.
One training wheel had folded sideways.
Every few feet, it dragged against the asphalt.
Scrape.
Scrape.
Scrape.
I raised my hand.
Behind me, thirty-one engines went quiet.
We had buried Wizard that afternoon.
His real name was Malcolm Reed, but nobody had called him Malcolm in twenty years. He could fix an engine by listening to it. He could find his way through a mountain pass in weather that sent everybody else turning back.
He had not found his way through cancer.
I still had the folded funeral program inside my jacket.
Before we left the cemetery, his wife, Ruth, had taken my hand.
“Bring them all home, Tom.”
I had promised.
Now I was looking across an empty stretch of asphalt, wondering who had made that same promise about this child.
And why they had broken it.
“Two o’clock,” I said into my helmet microphone. “Anybody else seeing her?”
“I see her,” answered June.
June rode third in our line. She worked as an emergency department nurse and had spent the last six months helping Ruth care for Wizard.
Her voice changed immediately.
“How old?”
“Little.”
That was all I could manage.
The girl pedaled harder.
Her knees rose too high, as if the bicycle was too small for her. One pajama leg had caught around the chain guard. She pulled it free without stopping.
She kept looking over her shoulder.
Not toward us.
Toward the dark road behind the store.
“Stay here,” I told the others.
I took off my helmet.
The night air hit my face, and I realized I was holding my breath.
We had stopped for water and coffee before the last forty miles home. Some of the riders had children waiting for them. Others had spouses who would stay awake until a motorcycle rolled into the driveway.
I had nobody waiting.
My wife had been gone seven years.
Our daughter lived two states away, and most nights, my house felt like a room somebody had forgotten to leave.
Still, I knew what it meant to be expected home.
That little girl did not look like she expected anybody to welcome her.
She looked like she expected somebody to catch her.
“Tom.”
June had dismounted.
“Don’t go straight at her.”
“I know.”
“Let me come.”
We walked together, slowly enough that the child could see us approaching.
Behind us, our members remained by their motorcycles.
No shouting.
No revving engines.
No wall of leather moving toward a frightened kid.
Just two people crossing a parking lot.
The girl reached a shallow dip in the pavement.
Her damaged training wheel caught.
The bicycle lurched.
She dragged one bare foot against the ground and saved herself from falling, then immediately pushed off again.
That little scrape of skin on asphalt made something inside me tighten.
June noticed it too.
“She needs shoes,” she whispered.
“She needs more than shoes.”
The girl passed beneath the streetlamp.
I could see her properly now.
A small Black child with two uneven braids. A butterfly on the front of her pajamas had nearly washed away. Her face shone with sweat despite the cool night.
There was a supermarket receipt clenched between her fingers and the handlebar.
She was not playing.
She was going somewhere.
I stopped beside a cart return, leaving the open lot between us.
“Hey, sweetheart.”
Her head jerked toward me.
The bicycle wobbled.
I lifted both hands.
“My name’s Tom. You don’t have to stop.”
She stared at my jacket.
At the patches.
At the gray in my beard.
Then her eyes jumped past me to the motorcycles.
I understood what she saw.
Thirty-two large machines.
Strangers in heavy boots.
A man built like a refrigerator speaking from the shadows.
I eased my jacket open so the bright blue shirt underneath showed.
June stood a few feet away.
“I’m June,” she said. “I help people when they’re hurt.”
The girl’s mouth moved.
No sound came out.
June lowered herself onto the curb.
It was such a simple thing.
She made herself smaller.
She gave the child somewhere to look that was not above her.
“Your bicycle’s having a rough night,” June said gently.
The girl glanced at the bent wheel.
“It still goes.”
Her voice was thin and fierce.
“I can see that.”
“I’m not stealing.”
Neither of us moved.
“I didn’t think you were,” June said.
“I didn’t take it from the store.”
“Okay.”
“It’s mine.”
“Okay, sweetheart.”
The child swallowed hard.
I had seen men lose houses, marriages, and brothers.
I had seen them try to speak through grief.
This little girl was trying harder than any of them.
A shopping cart rattled near the entrance.
She flinched so violently that the front wheel snapped sideways.
I looked toward the store.
A tired employee was collecting carts.
Nothing more.
But the child had already begun pedaling again.
“Don’t follow me,” she said.
I stayed where I was.
“We won’t grab you.”
“I have to get there.”
“Where?”
She looked at the receipt in her hand.
Then at the road.
She did not answer.
Behind me, somebody shut a car door.
The sound cracked through the quiet.
Her foot slipped off the pedal.
She caught it again, gasping.
June looked at me.
There were questions in her eyes that I did not want answered.
Who lets a child ride barefoot near midnight?
Who sends her out with a damaged bicycle?
And what happens in a home that makes a parking lot full of strangers seem like the safer direction?
I thought about Wizard.
Three weeks before he died, I had sat beside his hospital bed while he watched rain slide down the window.
“I hate leaving things unfinished,” he had told me.
“You fixed half the motorcycles in this county.”
“Not talking about motorcycles.”
I had asked what he meant.
He had closed his eyes.
“The people we pass, brother. You never know which one needed you to stop.”
I had thought he was talking about his own life.
Standing beside that cart return, I finally understood he had been talking about mine.
The girl pushed the bicycle toward the darkest edge of the lot.
The broken wheel shrieked.
I touched the microphone at my collar.
“Everybody stay put.”
Then I watched that tiny figure in faded butterfly pajamas pedal harder, each frantic turn of her feet carrying her closer to the road.
Scrape.
May you like
Scrape.
Scrape.
