Page 23 of My Broken Biker

"Why Bucket?" I say.

"She decided," Angela says.

"What are they doing?"

She looks at the drawing with an evaluating eye. "A journey. There's a mountain." She points to something at the top of the paper I'd read as a scribble. "It's very cold. That's the snow."

I look at the mountain again. It does have snow. "That's a good mountain," I say.

"I know," she says. She studies me for a moment with the directness children have before they learn to soften it. "Did you hurt that man?"

"Angela," Harper says from the counter.

"I'm just asking," she says.

"A little," I say. "He'll be fine."

She nods. This seems to satisfy some internal accounting she was running.

"Gerald says thank you," she says, and picks up the drawing and takes it back to her room, and I can hear her telling Gerald something as she goes.

Harper is looking at me.

"She's six," she says.

"I noticed."

The corner of her mouth moves. She goes back to the potatoes.

I stay at the table. The kitchen does what kitchens do when someone is cooking in them, a domestic warmth building around the sounds and the smells, and I sit in it and I don't have anywhere I'm supposed to be and nothing that requires anything from me and that's a thing I haven't felt in a house with someone else in it for a long time.

I look at the row of dinosaur drawings on the wall, six of them, each one labeled in crayon with the name spelled several different ways across them.

Frank appears in two of them. Princess Bucket appears in none of them, which means she's newer.

Angela comes back at some point with a different drawing, this one of a bird, and sits across from me and tells me it's supposed to be a Quetzalcoatlus, which is technically a pterosaur and not a dinosaur, but it's in the encyclopedia so she's counting it.

She holds the drawing up and points out the wingspan, which she's indicated with a dotted line because the actual wings wouldn't fit on the paper.

I ask how big the real wingspan was and she says up to thirty-six feet.

"That's bigger than this house," she says.

"Most of this house," I agree.

She seems pleased by this confirmation. She goes on drawing at the table while Harper finishes the potatoes and the kitchen fills up with the smell of chicken and rosemary properly.

We eat at the kitchen table, the three of us, Angela between us with her fork and her considered approach to eating chicken, which involves cutting everything into pieces first before eating anything. Harper puts food on plates and sits down and the conversation finds its own level, which is mostly Angela's, which is mostly about pterosaurs and whether they had feathers, which she has opinions on from the encyclopedia.

"Did you know pterosaurs weren't actually dinosaurs before I told you?" Angela says to me.

"I didn't know that," I say.

"Most people don't," she says, which is both probably untrue and extremely characteristic of her, and Harper doesn't look up from her plate but something in her face changes briefly.

I eat Harper's food at her kitchen table under six dinosaur drawings and across from a six-year-old who has strong opinions about Mesozoic taxonomy, and at some point the recognition arrives that has been building since Thursday without announcing itself.

This is what I said yes to this morning. Not just Harper, not just the abstract idea of being in someone's life, but this: the ordinary of this house and this child and this woman who makes chicken with garlic and rosemary and knows where things go and holds your hand in a hallway without needing it to be anything more than what it is.