“Some people decide who’s worth saving and who isn’t,” I said. “They look at a person’s clothes, or their bank account, or the patches on their back, and they make up their mind about who matters.”
She nodded slow. “That’s why we ride together, isn’t it. So nobody we love ever gets decided against.”
I had to put my coffee down.
I’d been wanting her to understand that her whole life. Why I rode. Why I called these scarred-up old men brothers. Why we showed up for each other no matter what.
She’d figured it out on her own.
Doctor Hammond works at a urgent care clinic in another state now. The kind that can’t afford to check references too carefully. I hope he’s better than he was. I doubt it.
Patricia got the Nurse of the Year award the year after Mia got out. She framed it and hung it in the clinic.
Rachel is in medical school now. We paid for it, the brothers and I. She’s going to be a pediatrician. She’s going to be a good one.
The security guard, his name is Walter Henderson, retired six months after that night. The hospital tried to fire him for not removing me. The lawsuit made them give him a full pension instead.
He comes to our cookouts now. He’s a brother whether he rides or not.
People ask me sometimes why I still wear my cut. Why I still ride with the Saints.
I’m forty-seven years old. My back hurts. My knees hurt. There are mornings where getting on a bike feels like work.
I tell them about a night seven years ago.
I tell them about a doctor who looked at my child and decided she wasn’t worth saving because of what I was wearing.
And I tell them about forty bikes that came thundering into a hospital parking lot because one of their brothers needed help.
That’s why I ride.
That’s why I’ll keep riding until my hands can’t hold the bars anymore.
Because somewhere out there right now, there’s another father carrying a burned child through the wrong door. And somebody needs to be there. Somebody needs to come.
Mia turned to me last week and said she wants to ride her own bike when she turns sixteen.
I told her I’d teach her myself.
She’s going to make a hell of a Saint.
