Page 149 of Roadrunner

He gave a small nod. Nothing more.

I looked at the driver’s door.

I opened it.

I got in.

The seat was right. The position of it unchanged from how I’d always kept it, all the way forward the way it had to be at five foot two. The steering wheel in front of me. The dash I’d looked at for over a decade. The small crack in the corner of the gauge cluster I’d gotten in year three from a rock on a trail outside Sedona.

Still there.

I put both hands on the wheel.

I breathed in.

It smelled exactly the same.

I don’t know how that was possible. After everything it had been through. After the accident and the tarp and the transport and Jay’s shop and however many months of work.

It smelled exactly the same.

Like dust and sunscreen and root beer and every road I’d ever taken it down.

Like the first summer.

Like Riley.

I put my forehead on the wheel.

I fell apart.

Not quietly. Not with the controlled two or three seconds Della had allowed herself on the day I came back. Fully. Without reservation. The kind of falling apart that arrives when the last thing you were missing is suddenly right there in your hands.

The parking lot was completely silent.

Twenty bikers finding somewhere else to look.

All of them except Riley.

I knew without looking up that he wasn’t looking away. He never looked away from things that mattered.

I let myself have it.

All of it. Every year and every mile and every version of the Jeep and what it had carried and what had been done to it and what it had become, in a parking lot in Marana, whole.

When I was done I sat up.

I wiped my face with both hands.

I looked through the windshield at the club. At the lineup of men in leather who were all deeply invested in the middle distance.

Brisco had something in his eye.

He was dealing with it privately.

Price was looking at the mountains with his arms crossed and his hair pushed back and an expression on his face that I had never seen there before and would probably never see there again.

Lackey was talking to Jay about something. Intently. About nothing. The conversation of a man filling silence on purpose.