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That Sunday, he was waiting in my driveway at dawn, an old Sportster beneath him. We rode for hours, up into the mountains, not speaking, just riding. When we stopped for coffee, I noticed his hands weren’t shaking anymore.
For two years after that, Tommy rode with me every Sunday. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we didn’t. He told me once that the only time his mind quieted, the only time the memories stopped playing on repeat, was when he was on his bike.
Tommy was married now, with kids of his own. Still rode. Still called me “Mr. Ray.”
And there were others. Sarah Jenkins, who’d lost her husband and started riding his old Indian as a way to feel close to him. Dave Perkins from the auto shop, who’d been sober twenty years and swore riding saved his life when the bottle almost took it. My club brothers, most of them Vietnam vets who’d found on two wheels the peace that eluded them on four.
We weren’t outlaws. We were accountants and plumbers, retired cops and schoolteachers. We were men and women who’d discovered that sometimes, the only way to stay sane in a broken world was to feel the wind on your face and the rumble of an engine in your chest.
But none of that mattered to people like Mrs. Westfield, who saw a leather vest and imagined gang violence. Who looked at weathered men on motorcycles and saw only danger, not decades of quiet dignity.
The first call came the next morning. Cindy Parker, mother of twins I’d driven for six years.
“Ray, this is ridiculous,” she said without preamble. “Jacob and Jason are devastated. They said the substitute driver wouldn’t play their game this morning.”
The boys and I had a routine—they’d call out car models, and I’d honk once for American-made, twice for foreign. Simple thing, but it was ours.
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