My Biker Chose His First Love novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Her Own Wake

Rhona rides to her own wake in a full helmet on Pia's bike and reaches the back of the lot as Rhett starts the eulogy.

Pia's tow yard sat behind a chain-link fence with a sign that said DUNN'S, YOU CALL, WE HAUL, NO JUDGING.

She opened the gate herself at three in the morning in a bathrobe and steel-toe boots.

She looked at me for a second, then pulled me into a hug that smelled like motor oil and cough drops.

"You're warm," Pia said. "Good. I'd hate to haunt this place."

She had made up the couch in her office with a sleeping bag and a plate of cold pizza.

I ate three slices standing up.

Then she opened her laptop on the desk and played me the video of the party.

I watched Rhett tap the bottle against the microphone.

I watched myself stand there holding a tray of cups.

"Again," I said.

"Nor, you don't need to see it twice."

"Again."

She played it again, and this time I didn't watch my own face.

I watched his.

When he got to the words I'm choosing her, he stopped, and his eyes went across the lot to the generator.

Morton stood there with his hands in his vest.

Rhett waited for something, and then he said it.

"He looked at Morton first," I said.

"Looked at him for what?"

"I don't know."

Pia pulled her chair next to mine and sat down hard.

"Okay," she said. "Here's what I know. You're legally dead, your husband dumped you on a stage, your father cashed a check, and your friend with the bat is on your side. What do you want to do?"

I thought about the motel room Rhett had booked through Monday.

I thought about quiet.

I could disappear the way they'd arranged it. I could take Pia's couch, change my name, and let them mourn me with their little lily cards.

I also thought about two hundred phones.

"The service is at noon," I said.

"Please don't say it."

"I'm going."

"Rhona."

"They're going to stand in a parking lot and say I'm dead," I said. "I want to be standing in the parking lot."

Pia looked at the ceiling for a while.

"Fine," she said. "But we do it properly. You don't walk in with a sign that says Surprise."

She went out to the garage and came back dragging a motorcycle helmet by the strap.

It was a full-face, matte black, with a dented visor.

"My old Sportster is in bay two," Pia said. "She runs. She's ugly. Nobody at that clubhouse has seen her."

"I don't have a bike license."

"You have a license. You just don't have a bike."

I did have a license.

Rhett had taught me on an empty airstrip in April, and I had been so proud I'd written the date on a sticky note.

Nobody at the club knew I'd kept riding after that, in the early mornings, on the back roads, alone.

At eleven the next morning I stood in the garage in Pia's black jeans and a borrowed jacket and zipped the helmet down over my braid.

"One rule," Pia said. "If it goes bad, you get on the bike and you leave. I'll be at the gate with the truck."

"Why the truck?"

"Because if somebody tries to stop you, I'm going to back a tow rig through his fence," Pia said. "It's a professional courtesy."

I laughed, and it came out wobbly.

She tapped the visor down for me.

We got to Kettle Road a little before noon.

I left the Sportster at the far end of the gravel behind a line of pickup trucks, where nobody would look.

The lot was full.

Two hundred bikers stood in rows in black leather, with their helmets under their arms.

Someone had set up an easel by the loading dock.

On it was a framed photo of me from last Christmas, laughing, in a red scarf.

A table next to it held the rest of the white cards with the lily.

One was missing, and I was holding it in my glove.

Mae stood by the bar door in a black dress.

Her eyes found the helmet across the whole lot, and she held it a moment, and then she looked at the ground.

She had known me in a second.

Dahlia stood at the front of the crowd by the easel.

She wore a black dress, and over it she wore a leather jacket with a patch of a green pine on the sleeve.

It was my jacket.

I had left it on the hook by the door of the house on Friday morning.

Rhett walked up the steps of the dock.

His face was a stranger's, and he didn't look at the easel.

He tapped the microphone, and the whole lot went still.

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