Page 2 of My Broken Biker

I should get back. The morning's work is still on the table.

"Sure," I say instead.

She falls in beside me and doesn't adjust her pace or make anything of mine, and by the time we're through the door of the coffee place neither of us has said anything.

Inside it smells like old wood and thirty years of coffee, and the air actually works, cool enough that you feel it when you come in from the street.

A ceiling fan turns overhead. She takes the table near the window and I take the chair across from it with my back to the wall, the way I always sit.

"Harper," she says.

"Jace."

The server comes and goes. Black for me, something with oat milk for her.

When the drinks arrive she wraps both hands around her cup and looks at me across the table with the expression of someone who's genuinely curious and isn't hiding it.

"I was picking up a birthday present," she says. "Before all this. A mug with a cat on it, for my coworker."

I wait.

"She collects them, the mugs and the cat as a general interest, and there's a whole shelf at her desk." She turns the cup between her palms. "I've counted. Eleven."

I look at her.

"Committed situation," she says, just explaining the dimensions of it to me.

My expression changes slightly, and I look at my coffee.

"You didn't have to stay," she says. "On the sidewalk."

"You didn't have to sit down," I say.

She thinks about this for a moment. "That's fair," she says, and means it.

She picks up her cup. Outside the window a delivery truck has parked across the street and two men are carrying boxes into the hardware store, unhurried.

"Have you always been here?" she says. "Bloomfield."

"Most of my life," I say. "Some time away in the middle."

"Good away or bad?"

I think about New Mexico, the apartment, four months waiting for civilian life to make some kind of sense. "Necessary," I say.

She nods. "I've been here a couple years," she says. "Before that, somewhere bigger."

"What made it Bloomfield specifically?"

She looks at the table for a moment. "I needed the leaving to feel real," she says. "Far enough, small enough, no shared ground with anything I was leaving behind." She looks up. "It worked."

The way she says it is the way someone talks about a thing they've processed rather than a wound they're still managing, and I find I'm looking at my coffee instead of at her.

The server comes by with a water carafe nobody asked for and fills both our glasses and goes away again.

"What do you do?" she says.

"Contract work. Intelligence. Finding things, tracking things."