Page 4 of My Broken Biker

After dinner comes bath time, which involves a brief but serious disagreement about water temperature and then a dramatic period when the shampoo gets in her eye.

I handle that, and then two books, the short one and then the longer one because she negotiates well, and then a glass of water, and then a hug, and then she remembers something important she needed to tell me about a girl in her class named Priya who has a lunchbox shaped like a watermelon.

I hear the whole story about the lunchbox, and then she is finally, completely asleep.

It's quarter past eight.

I rinse the pasta pot and put the leftovers away and wipe down the spot on the table where she spilled something small and didn't mention it. Then, I go to my room and peel off the yellow dress, which has had a significantly longer day than I planned for it this morning, and pull on my soft black leggings and the old navy cardigan that's missing the middle button but is the most comfortable thing I own. I wash my face.

I look at myself in the bathroom mirror for a moment, the wide hips and the fullness through my chest and the softness through the middle that the open cardigan drapes around without minding, and I think about the way he looked at me across the coffee shop table, which was not adjusted.

The house is quiet in the way it only gets once she's down, that stillness, and I sit with it for a minute, just the refrigerator hum and the neighbor's dog saying something once to the evening and then giving up on it.

When my phone rings I pick it up before I've decided to, and it's him.

"Hey," I say.

"Hey," he says. A pause, and then: "Wanted to make sure you got home okay."

This is a reasonable thing to say and also not quite the full reason he called, and the honesty of that gap between the stated reason and the real one makes me feel like we can start there rather than somewhere more cautious.

"I’m good," I say. "Just finished bedtime with my daughter. You?"

"Fine," he says, and then, after a beat: "Leg's been better."

"I imagine the concrete didn't help."

"Didn't," he agrees.

He has a way of speaking, I noticed this afternoon, where he uses as many words as the thought requires and then stops, which keeps a conversation moving rather than letting it get stuck anywhere.

Most people fill silence because silence feels like something has gone wrong, but he seems genuinely unbothered by it, which I find more interesting than I probably should this far into the evening.

"The mug," he says. "Did you get it?"

"It survived the afternoon."

"What is it about them?"

"The cats?"

"The mugs."

"I've been thinking about it," I say. "They're cute. They’re intelligent. They seem like they're managing their own situations just fine without needing much from anyone." I stop. "Maybe it's not really about the cats."

"Maybe not," he says.

This is not where I expected a conversation about novelty mugs to end up, but I'm not sorry.

"How old is your daughter?" he asks.

"Angela’s six," I say.

"What's she into?"

"Right now? Dinosaurs. Specifically, the ones that most people think are dinosaurs but technically aren't, because she has opinions about the distinction." I pull my knees up on the couch. "Before the dinosaurs it was beetles. She had a period where she knew the name of every beetle in our county and would tell you about them whether you'd asked or not."

"And before the beetles?"