Hank rode first.
He’d brought a custom child seat his nephew welded for him on Thursday night — bolted to the rear of his Road King, padded, with a five-point harness like a race car. He’d brought a pink helmet two sizes too small that he’d found at a swap meet in Waterloo. He’d brought knee pads in case she had any balance issues from the chemo.
Rachel buckled Sophie in. Her hands were shaking so bad she had to do the chest strap twice.
Hank put one big leather-gloved hand on Sophie’s helmet and said:
You ready, little lady? We don’t go fast. We don’t go far. You tell me if you want to stop and we stop right now. Deal?
She gave him a thumbs up.
He started the engine.
That V-twin came alive low and steady, and Sophie’s whole body went stiff for one second — eyes huge — and then she laughed. Just laughed. Loud, real, alive. She turned her head to look at her mom on the porch and she yelled:
MOMMY I’M ON IT.
Hank pulled away from the curb at maybe eight miles an hour.
They went one block down, around the corner, up to the elementary school, around the cul-de-sac, and back. Four minutes. He pulled up to the curb where Rachel was standing and he killed the engine and Sophie said:
Again.
Hank looked at the line of forty-nine other bikes behind him.
He said:
Honey, you get to ride forty-nine more times today. Different bike each time.
She blinked at him. She did the math the way a five-year-old does math.
And she screamed.
Pure joy. The kind of sound that makes grown men look at the ground.
I want you to picture this for a second. Picture a little bald girl in a pink helmet getting unbuckled from one Harley, lifted by her mother and a giant tattooed stranger, walked four steps, and buckled into the next one. Fifty times. Four hours. From 8:30 in the morning to 12:42 in the afternoon.
She rode behind Hank. Behind Diesel. Behind a Vietnam vet named Pop who hadn’t smiled at anyone outside the club in eight years and who came off that block with tears running into his beard. She rode behind a woman named Margie who runs a bakery in Waterloo and brought cupcakes for Sophie that Sophie was too excited to eat. She rode behind a deaf biker named Quinn who communicated with Sophie entirely in thumbs-up.
The neighbors brought folding chairs out and set them up on lawns. Somebody made a cooler of lemonade. A man across the street brought out his garden hose to wash bird droppings off bikes between rides because he didn’t know what else to do.
The local police chief — a guy named Burrell — drove past three times and didn’t say a word about the noise ordinance.
Sophie waved to her mother on every single pass. Every single one. Fifty waves.