Page 8 of My Broken Biker

At some point she says she has something to finish before Angela's pickup and we stand.

Then I hear myself say there's a walking path near the east side of the park if she wants to go later, and the offer is out before I've made any decision about making it.

"Two o'clock?" she says.

"Two o'clock," I say.

She gathers her bag and goes, and I sit back down and finish the rest of the coffee slowly, watching the street outside the window until the cup is empty and there's no reasonable case for staying any longer.

The drive home is the regular route.

The house is the same as I left it, the morning's files still on the table, the chair pushed back at the angle it was when I got up at five-thirty.

I make another pot of coffee and sit down with what Cain needs for the afternoon, a communications thread that requires flagging and a set of location data that needs mapping against a six-week timeline.

It's detailed work, the kind that demands enough attention that most other things fall away while it's in front of me, and I let it do that.

By one-fifteen it's done. I close the laptop and wash out the mug and set it on the rack and stand at the kitchen window looking at the street. A car passes. The cat from the house across the way is on the porch doing nothing in the deliberate way cats do nothing. The early afternoon light sits flat on the houses and on the road and doesn't have much to say for itself.

I notice I'm waiting for two o'clock in a way I don't usually wait for things, and I notice that I'm noticing this, and I leave both observations where they are.

She's on the bench near the park entrance when I pull up, her face turned toward the sun with her eyes half-closed, and she opens them when she hears the engine cut and sees the truck and lifts one hand in an unhurried wave. In the full afternoon light she's generously built, warm to look at, wide through the hips and full through the chest and soft through the middle, and she holds all of it with the specific ease of someone who stopped negotiating with themselves about it some time ago and simply exists in it. I notice this. I've been noticing it since yesterday and the noticing has not gotten smaller.

We take the gravel path that runs through the stand of old oaks on the east side of the park, wide enough to walk alongside each other with room to spare, the shade under the trees a few degrees cooler than the open ground. The light comes through the leaves in the way it does at this hour, broken and moving, different from one step to the next, and our feet make the same sound on the gravel and we settle into the pace without discussing it.

"Were you ever anywhere else?" she asks, after a while. "Between getting out and coming back here?"

"New Mexico," I say. "Just after the military. Tried living somewhere I didn't know anyone."

"How was that?"

"Not good."

She waits, the same way she waited this morning over coffee, quietly and without hurrying, and it works the same way it did then.

"I sat in an apartment for four months," I say. "Waiting to understand what I was supposed to be doing with a civilian life and the understanding didn't come."

"What made you wait four months before deciding it wasn't going to?" she asks.

I think about it. "I didn't know how long it was supposed to take," I say.

She walks for two or three steps with that, and then: "What brought you back?"

"My brother," I say. "Knox. That's as far as I go on that for now."

"Okay," she says, and doesn't push on it.

The path curves around the older oaks, the roots coming up through the ground in places, and we go around them.

A dog is somewhere off in the park making its position known. Two kids on bikes go past on the open path beyond the tree line, their voices carrying briefly and then going.

She tells me something about the city she came from, not the name of it, just what it felt like to be there, a place big enough that you could go years without encountering someone you knew, which she'd taken for privacy and which turned out to be something different.

"What did it turn out to be?" I ask.

She's quiet for a moment. "Disappearing into someone else's version of what your life should look like," she says, and she says it plainly, without any drama in it, and I understand it as the real answer to why Bloomfield, and I don't say that, I just walk.

The path goes through a denser stretch of trees and the light goes darker and greener and then opens again as we come out the other side, the oaks thinning and the sky widening overhead.