"I hear you. I understand why you're worried, but I need you to hear something back. A man was dying. I helped him. That is the entire story.
Whatever anyone has decided to add to it is their addition, not mine. And if they come back," Terrence said, "if more of them start showing up around here then I'll deal with that," Sienna said, "the same way I deal with everything. " She walked to the bus. She sat in the back because the back was where she could put her head against the window and close her eyes for 10 minutes, and she did that. And she tried to let the vibration of the bus do what it sometimes did, which was organize her thoughts through some mechanical process she couldn't explain, but had learned to rely on. What the bus gave her those 10 minutes was clarity about something she hadn't been willing to look at directly.
She was afraid. Not of the bikers specifically, she was past that, or at least past the surface version of it. She was afraid of what the neighborhood was doing because the neighborhood was her safety net. These were the people who watched Maya walk home from school. These were the people who would knock on her door if something was wrong.
These were the people who formed the invisible infrastructure of her life in the way that low-income communities always formed infrastructure for themselves because no one else was going to do it. The informal network of watching out of knowing each other's business, not as gossip, but as care. And she had introduced something into that network that they didn't know how to categorize. She understood their fear. She had felt a version of it herself standing over Hawk in the lot.
The instinctive self-protection, the voice that said, "Not your problem. Keep moving. " She had overruled that voice. She didn't regret it. But she understood now that overruling it had a cost she hadn't fully calculated. And the cost was this, she was standing slightly outside her community now in that uncomfortable space between the choice you made and the place you started from.
And she didn't yet know how to get to the other side. Her phone buzzed. Cole, "Hawk is being released tomorrow. He wants to know if you'd be willing to come by the clubhouse Saturday. Just you. " "Not a big thing.
He wants to show you something. " She stared at the message. The bus stopped at her corner. She got off. She stood on the sidewalk. She typed back, "What does he want to show me? " Three minutes passed.
She was almost at Harland's when the reply came. "He says you'll understand when you see it. And that if you still want to leave after he'll drive you home himself. " She stood outside the diner with the morning rush already going through the windows, visible in the way that the world behind glass always looks slightly surreal. All that motion and heat and hunger contained. She thought about 15 families.
She thought about Lily who had been 17 years old and kind and had died in a hospital bed while the world didn't notice. She thought about Maya who had said, "I think you did the right thing" in a voice that had been clear and steady and had sounded for a moment frighteningly like an adult. She typed, "Saturday. What time? " She put the phone in her apron pocket and she pushed through the door or into the morning rush and the smell of coffee and bacon grease and something sweet from the bakery box someone had left on the counter and she was already three steps into it before she let herself think one more time about what she just agreed to. She had agreed to it.
She moved. Saturday morning came in the way that important mornings do not with any particular drama. Just ordinary and unremarkable. The sun doing what it did. Maya eating cereal and asking questions about whether it was weird that she found math easier than English since everyone always said girls were supposed to be better at English and Sienna answering on autopilot while the other part of her mind ran quietly through what she was walking into.
She had told Maya she had an errand. Again, it was becoming a word she was going to have to retire. "Mom," Maya said. "Mhm. " "You've done the face. " "What face? " "The face you do when you're thinking about something you're not telling me yet. " Sienna looked at her daughter, 12 years old, seeing things that hadn't been named. "I'm going to meet the man I helped," she said.
"Hawk, the man from the gas station. " Maya stopped chewing. "The Hell's Angels man? " "Yes. " "Why? " "Because he asked me to and because I think there's more to him than his vest. " Maya thought about this with the thoroughness she applied to things. "Is it safe? " "I believe so," Sienna said. "Yes. " "Are you sure or do you believe so, Maya? " "Those are different things, Mom. " "I believe so," Sienna said again. "And I'm going to trust that. " Maya looked at her for a long moment and then she went back to her cereal and after a moment she said, "Okay. " Just that.
"Okay. " The clubhouse was on the east side of town in an industrial area she didn't know well in a building that from the outside looked like a heavy-duty auto shop which Cole had told her it partly was. She rode the bus for 40 minutes which gave her time to think and which she used instead to look out the window and not think because she had found that sometimes the best preparation for something unknown was to arrive at it as empty as possible. Cole met her outside. He looked less careful than he had at the diner. More comfortable in his own context, which she understood everyone was a different version of themselves in the place where they belonged.
"Hawk's inside," he said. "There are a few other people, but it's not" he searched for the word "intimidating. They know who you are. They're not going to be weird about it. " "What would weird look like? " Sienna said. "Grateful," Cole said, very loudly.