Page 3 of My Broken Biker

She looks at me. "For who?"

"People who need it done."

She doesn't bite at it, doesn't push on the non-answer or make a production of it, just nods.

The light through the window has shifted to where it's hitting the table between us, and she's got the cup in both hands and she's looking at me, so I look at my coffee.

The cups have been empty for a while by the time either of us moves, the place mostly cleared out around us and the light outside going long.

She reaches into her bag and comes out with a receipt and a pen, writes something on the back, and slides it across.

Her name. A number.

"Coffee again sometime," she says. "If you want."

I pick it up and the paper is warm from her bag.

"You do this often," I say.

She looks at me for a moment, not working out what to say, just looking. "No," she says. "I don't."

She stands and gathers her things without making anything of the fact that I'm still sitting, no pause or adjustment or particular production of leaving, just says it was nice to meet me and means it plainly and goes, and the door swings shut behind her on the way out and lets in a brief cut of warmer air.

I sit there with the empty cups for a while.

Outside the window the street carries on with what it was doing, and eventually the server comes out to wipe down the counter so I take the hint.

The drive home is the long way, back roads out past where the town gives out and the fields open up on both sides, with the heat haze sitting low over everything and making the far treeline look like it isn't quite solid.

A hawk on a fence post doesn't bother moving when the truck goes past. Out here the sky is wide and the distance goes somewhere, and I didn't used to need that the way I seem to need it now.

The receipt is in my shirt pocket.

I park in front of my place and sit for a while with the window down, watching a kid at the far end of the street ride a bicycle back and forth along the same short stretch of sidewalk, working at something or maybe just going back and forth for the pleasure of it.

The evening is coming in, the light going off the fronts of things rather than onto them.

Inside, the house is the same as I left it, the files still on the table. I set the pharmacy bag down, take the receipt from my pocket, and put it on the kitchen counter.

Chapter 2 — Harper

Angela is still in her booster seat when she starts talking, which means she's been holding it in since school.

"Did you know Triceratops doesn't actually mean three horns?" she says.

"I didn't know that," I say, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

"It means three horn face. Which is kind of saying the same thing twice." She considers this with genuine gravity. "Why would you say it twice?"

"That's a really good question," I say.

She's satisfied by this and spends the rest of the drive looking out the window at things that interest her.

We stop at the corner store for a carton of milk and she carries it to the car because she likes being trusted with heavy things.

Dinner is pasta, because Thursday has always been pasta, and I make it with the jarred sauce she prefers while she sits at the kitchen table with the dinosaur encyclopedia open, the one she's read so many times the spine has cracked.

She tells me things out of it that I mostly already know, but I listen like they're new because she's telling them to me like they are.