A girl stood next to it. Maybe nineteen. Arms wrapped tight around herself, and not from the cold.
I pulled my Harley up slowly so I wouldn’t scare her. Killed the engine. Told her my name and that I’d have her rolling in ten minutes.
She didn’t say thank you. She just kept looking back at the car.
My name’s Dale. I’ve been riding since before this girl was born. Sixty-one years old, gray in my beard, knees that crack when I kneel down and crack louder when I stand back up. I ride a black Road King that’s older than most of the cars on that highway and runs better than half of them.
People see the leather and the patches and they lock their doors. I’ve watched it happen at gas stations my whole life. A mother pulls her kid a little closer. A man puts his body between me and his wife. I’m used to it. I stopped expecting anything different a long time ago.
But I never stopped pulling over.
My old man taught me that. He was a mechanic, hands black to the wrist every day of his life, and he had a rule he said more than he said anything else. You see somebody stuck on the side of the road, you stop. Doesn’t matter who they are. Doesn’t matter what they think of you. You stop, because someday that’s going to be you out there, and you’ll want somebody to do the same.
So I stopped.
