Mike told me to ask Donna about the night I sold the bike, so I went back inside, and I did not ask her in front of her sisters. I took her out to the driveway, to the Harley, and I showed her the old photograph, 1978, her arms around my waist, her own handwriting on the back. Ronnie, best day of my life, promise me we will ride forever.
Donna looked at that photo and forty years of pretending fell right off her face, and she told me the thing she had never told me.
The night I sold the bike in 1980, when she was pregnant with our first, she had started bleeding, badly, and we nearly lost the baby and nearly lost her. She was alone in the house when it started, terrified, and in her fear she decided the motorcycle was to blame, that the vibration, the risk, the whole reckless joy of it had put her and the baby in danger. It was not true, the doctor said so, but fear does not listen to doctors. From that night on, the bike was the thing that almost took everything from her.
She was not mocking a foolish old man. She was a frightened young woman who never got over the night she almost lost her family, and she buried it under forty years of saying no.
She cried in the driveway, and so did I, two old people finally saying the true thing. I told her I would sell the Harley that week if she wanted. She shook her head.
She said, no, Ronnie. I am tired of being afraid. Teach me to not be.
So I bought her a helmet of her own. And on a warm Saturday, sixty-three years old, she climbed on the back of that Softail and put her arms around my waist, exactly like 1978, and we rode.
She was shaking at first. By the end she was laughing into the wind. We ride most Saturdays now. The photo from 1978 is framed in our hall, next to a new one, two gray-haired fools on a black Harley, keeping a promise she made and we both forgot. Ride forever. We intend to.