Part 2
Her name was Sarah. Cole’s wife. She died on a Tuesday in October, in a hospital bed in Johnson City, of the cancer they’d caught too late and treated too long. Cole was there. He held her hand. He didn’t cry then either. He waited until he got home and walked into their bedroom and saw her reading glasses still folded on the nightstand, and then something in him came apart so quietly he didn’t even hear it.
He’d met Sarah in 1998 at a gas station outside Knoxville. He was twenty-five, fresh out of his second stint in county, riding with a club he’d later leave because of her. She was twenty-three, working the register, and when he walked in she didn’t flinch the way other women did. She looked him in the eye and said, “You gonna pay for that pack of Marlboros or you gonna stare at me all day?”
He paid. He came back the next day. And the day after. Three weeks later, he was sitting on her mother’s porch in a borrowed shirt, learning how to eat shrimp and grits without his hands.
He proposed on the back of the Harley, pulled over on a shoulder of I-26, the engine still running because he was too nervous to turn it off. She said yes before he finished the sentence. They married in a courthouse with two of his brothers from the club as witnesses, and Sarah’s mama crying in the front row.
For twenty-five years, Cole came home. Every ride, every road, every long-haul run with the brothers — he came home. To her side of the bed. To the lamp she left on. To her hand on his back at 2 a.m. when he had the nightmares from his three tours that he never talked about, not even to her, but she knew anyway because old ladies always know.
When Sarah got sick, Cole sold the Road King. Bought a used Tahoe so he could drive her to chemo. The brothers showed up — Tank, Diesel, a quiet kid they all called Preacher — and they sat in that oncology waiting room in their cuts, scaring the receptionists, holding Sarah’s purse, fetching her ginger ale. When she lost her hair, Tank shaved his head in solidarity. Diesel learned how to crochet, of all things, and made her a yellow blanket. Preacher prayed over her every visit, even though Sarah was a lifelong agnostic and used to roll her eyes and squeeze his hand and say, “Thanks, baby.”
She died on a Tuesday. The brothers carried her casket. Cole didn’t speak at the service. He just stood at the front of the room with his vest on and his hand on the wood, and when it was time to leave, he was the last one out.