Page 5 of My Broken Biker

"Horses," I say.

He's quiet for a moment, and when he speaks again his voice is exactly the same as it always is, which is how I know it's a joke before the words arrive. "Did the horse phase cause any structural damage to the household?"

The laugh comes out unexpectedly, out loud and real, the kind that happens before you've agreed to it.

"No structural damage," I say, when I can. "Just galloping. Through the house. For months. She's very committed when she commits to something."

"That's good," he says, in that plain undecorated way he has, and it lands differently than it would if someone else said it differently.

We talk, and the conversation drifts the way it does when nobody's steering anything.

"Can I ask you something?" I say.

"You can ask," he says.

"The leg. Is it getting better, or is that just how it is now?"

A pause, longer than the others. I wait through it without filling it.

"Just how it is," he says.

"Okay," I say.

Another pause, and then: "That's all you're going to say?"

"What would be the useful thing to say?" I ask.

"Most people say they're sorry," he says.

"Well," I say. "I'm not going to do that."

He's quiet, and I can't tell from the quality of it what he's doing with it, and then he says: "Okay," in the same flat way I'd said it, and the symmetry of it feels exactly right.

The cardigan has slipped off one shoulder and I pull it back up and shift further into the corner of the couch, legs stretched out now, and I've stopped tracking the time entirely, which I notice only because I usually don't stop.

"What's it like?" I ask. "Growing up in the same place your whole life, mostly."

"You want a description of Bloomfield?"

"The version you actually see," I say. "Not the one you'd give a stranger."

He's quiet for a moment.

"Pelham's Hardware on Main Street has had a cast-iron dog outside it since I was a kid," he says. "Nobody's sure whose it was originally. It's just always been there."

"Has anyone asked Pelham?"

"He's been gone a few years," he says. "I guess before that nobody thought to."

I think about a dog standing outside a hardware store for thirty-odd years while a whole town walked past it without once thinking to ask, and then the asking becoming permanently impossible, and I find this both funny and exactly right about the kind of place this is.

"What else?" I say.

Another pause, longer. "There's a road past the east edge of town," he says. "Goes straight through the fields for a couple of miles before it bends. No lights on it." He stops there, where I expected him to stop, and then he adds: "I drive it sometimes. When I've been out and I'm not ready to be back yet."

"I know that kind of road," I say. "I think most places have one."

"Yeah," he says. A beat. "I suppose they do."