“Ah.” Okay, Sebastian thought. A thing she liked that Doctor Mark didn’t. “Is he a big cyclist? Do you guys do trips together?”
Abby paused, then said, her voice tight, “He doesn’t ride a bike.”
“At all?” Sebastian asked.
“He never learned as a kid. There were extenuating circumstances.”
“Was he born without legs?”
Abby didn’t laugh at that, or even smile. “We’ve known each other a long time. We do lots of things together. It’s fine if he doesn’t ride with me.”
Leave it alone, Sebastian told himself. Be her friend. And so, even though he wanted to stay on the topic of Mark, who didn’t like food and didn’t ride a bike, he asked, “Are you a big Eagles fan?”
“Not really. But when you live in Philadelphia, you kind of can’t help being caught up in it, when they’re having a good year. I remember, when they won the Super Bowl in 2018, it felt like the whole city was out in the streets, cheering.” Finally, she smiled a little. “And when they finally called the election for Biden, in 2020, everyone in my neighborhood came outside, and we were all dancing in the streets.”
Sebastian nodded and described the exultation in his own neighborhood… and realized, gratefully, that he hadn’t thought about the whole TikTok mess in at least five minutes.
“How was COVID for you?” he asked. “Did people leave Philadelphia the way they left New York?”
“Some did,” Abby said. “But almost everyone in my neighborhood stuck it out.” She told him about a photographer friend who’d started a project of photographing families from a distance, as they sat on their stoops or waved at her from their front windows, and how she’d worked with a mutual aid organization to deliver lunches to food-insecure families. “It was awful for the kids who’d been getting breakfast and lunch at school. The schools in Philadelphia stayed closed much longer than they did in other cities. And online learning did not go well for a lot of kids.” He heard the click-click-click of Abby’s derailleur as she shifted gears. “There’s a family on my block with three little girls. I taught them all how to ride their bikes in the spring of 2020, just so they’d have something to do outside of the house.”
“That was nice of you,” Sebastian said. Stellar observation, he thought. Really top-notch.
“How about you? Did you run for the hills?”
“I did go home for a little while. You know. Portable job, and all of that.” He didn’t like thinking about the weeks he’d spent back in New Jersey. His mother’s drinking had picked up, because of the stress, or because of the uncertainty, or because it was a day that ended in Y, and his dad had been even more distracted than usual, because he was trying to manage his job and his wife and also take care of his own mother. Grandma Piersall was in an assisted living facility, and the staff had been decimated by the virus. Nurses and aides had gotten sick, or they’d quit before they could get sick. The place hadn’t allowed visitors. Sebastian’s dad had resorted to sitting outside of his mother’s window on a folding chair, talking to her on the phone, so she could see him as well as hear his voice and know that she wasn’t alone. Between his own mother “napping” on the couch most afternoons from two or three o’clock on, and his father spending hours on the phone, trying to get someone at his mom’s facility to talk to him, or someone at the state ombudsman’s office to deal with his complaints, it had been pretty miserable. Sebastian had been happy to get back to Williamsburg, even if the neighborhood felt, he imagined, like London after the blitz—bombed out and empty, eerily quiet.
“Did you ever get it? COVID?” he asked.
“I feel like everyone’s gotten it at this point,” she said. “I was lucky. I had a very mild case, last October. No real symptoms, except fatigue. How about you?”
He told her that he’d gotten it the previous summer; how it had almost been a relief. Lincoln had brought him Gatorade and Theraflu, and Lana had left chicken soup outside of his door every night.
“You’re lucky to have friends like that,” she told him.
Look at me, Sebastian thought to himself as the trail sloped downhill, along the canal, and Abby’s ponytail fluttered in the breeze. Having a conversation with a woman! Being her friend!
She told him about the guy in her bicycle club who never stopped talking on rides, unless he was singing, and how sometimes she could handle it but sometimes she found him so annoying that she fantasized about buying him a muzzle. He told her about how, during the pandemic, he’d ordered hair clippers from Amazon and had tried to give himself a haircut and had ended up using the wrong attachment and shaving a bald furrow down the center of his skull.