Lily swallowed hard. Her knee was scraped. Her calf was bleeding. Her shoulder throbbed where she’d landed. She felt clumsy, and old, and weak. She felt, in a word, pathetic. She struggled not to cry as Jasper unzipped a first aid kit, knelt down, and gently dabbed the blood and grit off her leg.
“Just a little road rash,” he announced, wiping off her calf. “I don’t think we’ll have to amputate.”
“Road rash?”
He gestured toward her leg. “Cyclist plus pavement equals road rash. Happens to all of us. Have you been drinking?” At first Lily thought Jasper was asking about liquor. She’d started shaking her head, preparing to explain that she wasn’t drunk, just desperately inexperienced, before realizing that he was talking about water, not alcohol.
“A little,” she said. It was a hot day, and she’d been thirsty for at least the last hour, but she wasn’t coordinated enough to pull her water bottles free and drink while she was riding. Maybe she’d get one of those hydrating backpacks that some of the riders had, with a tube that hung over your shoulder so you could just pop it in your mouth. The guy at the bike shop had tried to sell her one, but she’d refused. She hadn’t wanted to look like she was trying to impersonate a real cyclist, and have the other riders think she knew what she was doing, when she didn’t.
She drank half of the water in the bottle in a few swallows, and tried to apologize, to explain that her husband was supposed to be the one doing the riding. “I’m not very good at this. As you probably noticed.”
Jasper didn’t answer. He was probably too polite to say You’re terrible and it’s obvious.
Lily took another pull from the water bottle. Her knee had stopped bleeding, the scrapes gleaming under a sheen of Neosporin. “I thought it would be nice for Morgan and I to have some time together, but she’s barely spoken to me since we got in the car.”
Jasper gave a sage nod. His braids rustled as he moved. “I’ve got two sisters. I know how that goes. Teenage girls and their mothers.” He pushed his hands together and made a noise like an explosion before pulling them apart. “How about I put your bike in the van and we motor on to the lunch stop?”
“That sounds…” Lily swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. “Yes. Please. Let’s do that.” Jasper got to his feet, extending his arm, waiting for Lily to put her hand in his so he could pull her to her feet.
“What did your mother do?” Lily asked as he walked beside her, wheeling her bike to where the van was waiting. “When your sisters were awful?”
“She hung in there,” he said. “She waited until they got older. I think that’s all you can do. And call on Jesus, if that’s your thing.”
Lily started to say that it was absolutely her thing, that her husband was a pastor, that maybe Jasper had seen him on YouTube. Then she pressed her lips together. Sometimes Morgan got funny about having strangers know she was a preacher’s kid. “I’ll call on anyone who can help me,” she said, and Jasper held the door open, giving her a boost up into the van. Lily pulled her seat belt across her chest and stared at the cars and buildings rushing past the window. She thought that maybe Jasper’s mother had the right idea. The way things were going, it actually would require a divine intervention to get Morgan to open up.
Sebastian
Lunch the first day was a picnic in a park. They’d ridden another easy twenty miles, parallel to the Saw Mill Parkway, with cars humming past, just on the other side of the trees. Sebastian knew there were towns they were passing through, but it felt almost like riding through a tunnel, just greenery overhead and on either side, without a house or a street or a car in sight.
A few miles’ ride off the trail, on twisty two-lane roads, brought them to their hotel in Mount Kisco at just after five p.m. Sebastian and Lincoln were sharing a room with two twin beds. They did rock, paper, scissors to see who’d get the first shower, and after they both picked paper, then both picked rock, Sebastian won the third round. The hot water made him groan happily. He tilted his head back and let the water rain down on his sweaty face, feeling his muscles unwinding after the day’s sustained effort, his entire body glowing and relaxed. As far as Sebastian was concerned, that feeling was one of the best parts of working out, running, or riding your bike—not how you felt while you were doing it, but, instead, how you felt when it was done.
He stayed under the spray until Lincoln started politely knocking and inquiring whether Sebastian intended to use up all the hot water. Then he dried off, pulled on his off-the-bike outfit of khaki shorts, short-sleeved navy-blue linen shirt and suede sneakers, patted aftershave on his cheeks, smoothed product through his hair, and sat on the bed to wait for Lincoln.