“Ruthie, we’re old men with bad knees and grandkids. Nobody’s touching anybody.” He crouched down in front of her chair so they were eye level. “But Walt Harmon’s widow got left bleeding in a parking lot, and people stepped around her. That’s not going to be the end of this story. We came to ask your permission to write a better ending.”
Mom looked at me. I looked at her cast, at the yellow-green bruise still spreading under her eye.
“What did you have in mind?” I asked.
Frank stood up, knees popping. “First thing? Breakfast. Riley’s Diner, all of us, and your mother rides up front in Tommy’s trike if she’s willing. She’s not hiding in this house another day.”
Mom actually laughed. First time since Tuesday. “I’m 82, Frank.”
“Peggy’s 79 and she’ll be doing the escort in front of you. You want to argue with Peggy?”
Nobody argues with a woman named Peggy who rides a Road King. Even I knew that.
So that’s how my mother ended up rolling down Main Street at nine in the morning, tucked into the passenger seat of a trike, her blue walker strapped to a luggage rack like it was made of gold, with forty motorcycles around her in formation.
People came out of shops to watch. Somebody filmed it. That video got more shares in a day than those thugs’ video got in a week.
At the diner, they gave her the corner booth and took turns sliding in across from her. Old men in leather telling her stories about my dad I’d never heard. How he once rode two hours in the rain to jumpstart Frank’s bike. How he gave his rain gear to a stranded college kid on I-80 and rode home soaked.
