Hands that had once guided Caleb’s tiny fingers over the chrome tank of a 1998 Harley-Davidson Road King.
“You treat a bike right, Cal,” his father used to say, “and it tells the whole world who you are.”
Caleb did not remember every word his father had ever said.
But he remembered that.
In the kitchen, Darla Whitmore was already awake.
She stood at the counter in a faded blue housecoat, pouring coffee into a chipped mug. At sixty-seven, Darla carried the weight of a life that had asked too much of her and offered very little back. She had buried a husband to lung cancer, then her son and daughter-in-law to a car wreck, and now she raised an eight-year-old boy on a fixed income that barely covered groceries, electricity, property taxes, and the endless medical bills that arrived in envelopes with polite language and cruel numbers.
Her knees hurt.
Her back hurt.