Chapter 2: The Garage Apartment
The ride back to the east side of town was deafening in a way it hadn't been an hour ago. Every stroke of the V-twin beneath me felt like a hammer blow against my ribs. I kept my throttle hand steady, but my mind was stuck back on that linoleum counter, under the yellow halo of a fluorescent tube that flickered every three seconds.
I parked the shovelhead in the gravel bay behind my garage workshop, the hot pipes popping and pinging in the cool autumn air as the metal contracted. The town of Oakhaven was quiet now; the rally crowd had drifted out toward the interstate or passed out in the motels along the county line. Only the wind rustling through the dry sagebrush broke the stillness.
I climbed the exterior wooden stairs to my apartment above the shop, the treads groaning under my boots. The room smelled of what it had smelled of for five years: stale tobacco, citrus degreaser, old motor oil, and the dry parchment scent of paperbacks I bought at the thrift store and never finished.
I didn't turn on the overhead lamp. I walked straight to the small plank table by the window where a single gooseneck desk lamp cast a pool of amber light. Digging my hand into the front pocket of my leather vest, I pulled out the small, tightly folded square of lined paper the boy had laid on the counter before Clara had chased him off with a plate of scrambled eggs and a demand for names.
My hands were steady now—the cold night air had seen to that—but as I unfolded the paper under the lamp, the ink blurred slightly against the yellowed lines.
It was my handwriting.
There was no mistaking the sharp, cramped slant of the capital letters, the way the lowercase t’s crossed themselves with a heavy downward slash. I hadn't seen this handwriting in twenty-one years. Not since the night I left a cardboard box on the porch of a small white house three counties over, packed with three changes of clothes, a Chilton’s manual for a sixty-nine Triumph, and fifty dollars in twenty-dollar bills folded inside an envelope that simply said Sarah.
Don't look for me, the note under the lamp read. The road is all I’m good for, and I won't drag you down into the dirt with me.
I stared at the ink until the blue lines of the paper seemed to swim. Sarah had kept it. Through twenty years of cheap apartments, broken down cars, and whatever hard-scrabble life had led her to a rundown motel off Route 4, she had kept that scrap of paper like a title deed. And now, she had sent her boy—my boy—to hand it back to me with interest.
A dull ache settled behind my breastbone, heavy and solid as an engine block. I remembered Sarah back then—quiet, sharp-eyed, with hair the color of raw copper and a laugh that could cut through the noise of any roadside tavern in the state. I had believed every word I wrote in that letter. I truly believed that my absence was a gift, that the violence and the restlessness in my blood would eventually turn on anyone who got close enough to touch it. I had traded a family for a clean conscience and a clear road.
And looking at the photograph I’d laid beside the note—the little boy with my eyes staring out from the gray paper—I realized how cowardly the road really was.
I crossed the room, my boots heavy on the plank floor, and grabbed my heavy canvas riding jacket from the peg by the door. I didn't bother turning off the desk lamp. The single glowing circle cut through the dimness of the workshop below as I hit the bottom of the stairs, swung my leg over the saddle, and kicked the starter. The engine caught on the second stroke, roaring to life with a deep, territorial growl that rattled the dust off the rafters.
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I didn't have to guess where they were staying. There was only one place in Oakhaven where a woman with a child and no car could check in past midnight with cash: the Starlight Motel on the old highway, where the neon M-O-T-E-L sign had been missing half its letters since the Reagan administration.
The night air hit my face like cold water as I rolled out onto the asphalt. The streetlights flickered overhead, casting long, distorted shadows of the bike and me against the boarded-up storefronts of Main Street. Every mile felt like an admission of defeat, and for the first time in twenty years, I wasn't running away from the sound of my own exhaust. I was following it.
