Club Patch

Annie sits with her phone in her hands at a small table on the edge of a winery deck on the north shore of Nova Scotia. She is waiting for a man who has no intention of keeping his promise. He’d seemed to be what she was looking for: decent job, grown kids, a genuine smile. Stable.
         The Tidal Bay wine bottle is almost empty, but this guy has not messaged, not even to lie. A family emergency, car trouble or an abscessed tooth— any story would have been a kindness. Maybe she’d joined the wrong dating site. They call it a club, but come on. Perhaps other sites attract better humans, but the men she has met in exchange for $43.99 a month are like yard sale jigsaw puzzles. Always a few critical pieces missing, but no way for you to know that until you try to make the whole picture and end up with gaping holes.
         The best ones were okay, boring guys she had zero chemistry with, and the worst assumed your mouth would be on them in minutes. Or they bombarded her with unsolicited shots of their middle-aged schlongs. This seemed to be a new kind of pandemic, she and her girlfriends agreed.
         And then there were the disappointments. After a promising coffee date with great conversation about movies and books, and then a second hiking date, a well-mannered accountant offered to cook her dinner at his downtown Halifax condo. Before she even swallowed a cracker of supermarket hummus, he was requesting the temporary use of her freshly-manicured feet on his penis.
         Asked politely, then implored, and finally begged.
         This is what it’s like.
         Annie turns her phone face down on the table and raises the glass to her lips again. Wonders if she should bother to freshen up and reapply lipstick. She does not have the energy to move. Instead, she watches six groups of Harleys snake down the curving country road to the winery’s parking lot. They disrupt the quiet of the vineyard, its clusters of grapes organized in tidy rows. Each group of bikers has about a half-dozen riders. They follow in staggered formation behind a leader, filling the unpaved parking lot from back to front in tight, evenly spaced intervals.
         The winery restaurant pairs their reds, whites, and rosés with artisanal brick oven pizza and plates of local smoked pork that the menu calls charcuterie. The tourists and cottage country regulars who sit under matching umbrellas on the winery’s deck look up from their food and drink; they smile or raise their eyebrows. The people at the table next to Annie attempt witty comments about the motorcycles’ arrival.
         Some of the bikers ride solo while others carry a passenger. As they remove their helmets, they reveal grey hair, dyed hair, or no hair.
         It strikes Annie as too much leather and denim on a sunny, late-summer day.
         She had ordered the Tidal Bay and a charcuterie tray at noon. Over the next two hours, the bottle transitioned from full to half-full, reluctantly to half-empty, and then to undeniably empty. Piece by piece, the meat and cheese, baguette, olives, and gherkins disappeared from the wooden serving board. Even with all this food in her stomach, Annie knows she should not drive back to the cottage.
         The waiter adjusts the overhead umbrella to cover Annie. The sun is hot. She wears no hat and her freckled, bare arms have pinkened.
         An hour ago, the waiter told her that he’s a musician. Patio season is short, Annie knows, so he’s probably anxious to turn this table. And here he is, she thinks, tending to a middle-aged woman who has clearly been stood up and cannot ethically or maybe even legally be served another drink. But she has mentioned that she is a cottager, so he’ll understand that she’ll be back.
         She has just ordered another single glass of wine.
         “Someone will pick me up,” she says, more to save face and stall than out of any certainty. Reality: she is 30 miles from her parents’ cottage, which she has claimed this weekend while her mother watches the kids. Maybe a neighbour can retrieve her, maybe not.
         “Can I bring you an iced tea on the house? Made from scratch,” says the waiter.
         Annie looks at him and then across to the parking lot, where the riders have finished parking their gleaming motorcycles in neat rows. She feels lightheaded, regrets taking the antihistamine. Regrets the pointless worry about sneezing from autumn leaf spores on a first date. Regrets the money and self-respect poured into the dating app.
         “Real maple syrup, no sugar,” he says.
         Some of the machines in the parking lot look to Annie like giant tricycles. Trikes for aging toddlers with red-veined noses and high blood pressure. Later, she’ll learn that the third wheel stabilizes the bike and helps aging knees balance 1200 pounds of Harley, 225 pounds of man, and an extra 147 pounds of passenger on its padded seat.
         “We all need to be careful in this heat,” says the waiter.
         “Sure. Bring it on,” she says. It can be a great comfort when a stranger saves you from yourself.

                   ***

Annie doesn’t mean to knock over the iced tea and the empty wine bottle but when she stands up to go to the bathroom, a stray elbow sets off a chain reaction. The wine bottle falls first. She tries to catch it, but either the bottle or her hands hit the tall, narrow glass, leaving the table top a mess of cold tea, ice, and lemon slices. The glass, sticky with dregs, tumbles to the deck and shatters. The effort of her attempts takes out her knees, and as Annie lunges for the chair she steps unwisely and down she goes.
         Moments later, it seems, she hallucinates Lawrence from the office. This hazy version of her fellow economist wears a black leather vest with colourful patches and Frye boots with faded jeans. He leans over her, as does a bald man with bushy sideburns. This man has a patch on his leather vest that says “Smokey.”
         She lies in the shade on cool grass, legs bent. Lawrence places a rolled-up leather jacket under her head. The bald man with the sideburns holds her wrist and asks questions. Annie feels a cool, wet cloth on her forehead and the slight pressure of fingers on her wrist. A blood pressure cuff appears from nowhere and squeezes her upper arm forever before it suddenly releases.
         “It’s all good,” says Lawrence from the office. Not imagined, it turns out.
         “Smokey here is a doctor.”

                   ***

Annie’s job is to predict how much alcohol and legal weed people will buy so that the provincial government can project its revenues. Summer, autumn, winter, and spring, her quarterly forecasts are spot on. Her boss says it is uncanny, calls her president of an elite club of exactly one.
         At work, she is the odd man out in a team of odd men. She and Lawrence have worked together for months, but she doesn’t know much about him. The men on the revenue forecasting team set themselves apart as experts who shine their intellectual light in a cubicle sea of generic civil servants. Annie interprets this as self-preservation. Nerdy males with limited social skills protecting themselves from failing at basic, daily communication with their colleagues.
         Lawrence was a new hire from the private sector. He kept his mouth shut for the first few months and was rewarded with a work friendship with the two other economists. They opened ranks and accepted him into their plaid-button-down-shirt-and-khaki-pant club. Annie has yet to receive an invitation. She watches them walk past her cubicle together on their way to get coffee every day at ten and two. Sees them huddle in the office kitchen for a brought-from-home lunch, except for payday Thursdays, when they settle into a reserved booth across the street at the Celtic Nook. 
         Annie eats alone most days. She has salad at her desk or occasionally treats herself to a shawarma from a shop downstairs. Anyway, working through lunch, drinking thermos coffee at her desk, and taking her laptop home means she can leave on time. Aged ten and twelve, Noah and Julia don’t need a babysitter anymore, but she arranges her life to be home shortly after they get off the bus.
         She worries that Noah doesn’t seem to have any close buddies, and that Julia tries too hard to be everyone’s friend.

                   ***

The Monday after the winery visit, Annie leaves an envelope on Lawrence’s desk with money for the wine and food bill she knows he paid. They’ve agreed to call this her “unfortunate episode.” He has already refused the money but Annie wants a clean slate.
         A few weeks later, at 8:00 on a Sunday morning, she parks her Civic at the far end of the Walmart parking lot and waits. There’s a rolled-up yoga mat in the back seat; her mom and the kids think she’s at a Yin class. The yoga membership was an unrequested gift from her mother, who last year announced that she did not and had never felt at ease in her own home. Did not belong there. Now, liberated from a 49-year marriage, she spends a few nights a week with a man who is 180 degrees from Annie’s engineer father. But she still devotes every Sunday morning to her grandkids so that her Annie can “live a little.”
         Annie turns off the engine and sinks into the car’s quiet warmth. If Lawrence doesn’t show up, this should be enough, she thinks. This peace, she bargains, is surely worth the cost.
         Walmart has just opened for the day, with early birds parked near the front doors. The only other vehicles at this end of the lot are twin motor homes with South Carolina licence plates and RV Club of America bumper stickers. Two silver-haired couples sitting on lawn chairs share the space between the trailers. They face each other across a folding table, four bowls and two thermoses between them, and an awning overhead. They play cards and eat cereal, wear track suits and slippers. One of the women has a cat in her lap.
         Annie estimates the cost of the giant trailers, determines they sell for least $225,000 apiece. She calculates the age and net worth of the seniors, predicts how they vote, and what news channel they watch. They chose to spend the night here when they could have booked a prime spot by the ocean or in the quiet splendour of a national park. Why, she wonders, did they opt to hunker down side by side on the bare pavement?
         Now she sees the motorbike come around the curve of the parking lot, its engine cutting through the Sabbath silence. It is a clunky three-wheeled bike, a distant cousin to the chopper from Easy Rider, yet its silver paint and glowing metal still sparkle in the morning sun.
         Lawrence is on time. He arrived when he said he would arrive.
         Annie unbuckles her seat belt. Lawrence circles the parking lot but keeps on moving. He disappears behind Walmart, the sound of his motorcycle fading. Annie turns on her engine; air conditioning would feel good.
         Lawrence reappears and does a wide turn to steer toward the grocery store, but then vanishes again around the corner. Did he even see her, she wonders, dialling up the fan. She could have been stretching in the yoga studio, one woman lying on a mat surrounded by other women on mats, and that might have felt better, but here she is.
         Oh, but there he is, approaching from behind. The rumble of the engine grows closer as he pulls up next to her.
         Lawrence wears the same outfit he wore at the winery, the leather jacket that she used as a pillow, overlaid now with the same crested leather vest, and the faded jeans that tuck under his stomach. Same boots. He pulls off his helmet and knocks on her window, and she presses the button to lower it.
         “You’re here,” he says.
         “Yes,” she says. “This is me.”
         He gives her a guided tour of the bike, running his hands over the metal as he explains. This is a touring Harley, with a proper passenger seat rest, footrest, and handrails. A motorcycle with three wheels and a trunk.
         Someone who plans to always ride alone would not choose this model, Annie deduces. She admires the colour, which he tells her is called Gauntlet Grey.
         He asks Annie if she’s still up for a tryout.
         “Why not,” she says, though last night, in a failed attempt to head off rumination, she jotted down a list of reasons “why not.” She worries now that “why not” sounds like flirting and wonders if this is a situation where flirting is required, to what extent flirting would be unseemly game-playing, and what, in any case, would constitute flirting given their age and clear lack of effort to appear younger. However, observation and analysis of Lawrence’s prior behaviour gives her comfort. His abilities to pick up on verbal cues and body language have not proved a particular strength. This, at least, they have in common.
         Lawrence opens the hatch and pulls out a black leather jacket and a helmet. When he’d invited her, he had assured her that he had all the gear but told her to wear sturdy boots or sneakers.
         “I guess we should talk about safety,” he says.
         Lawrence tells her being a Harley passenger takes practice. To stay in the correct position, he recommends that she focus on the back of his helmet. The bike will lean as they turn, so it will work best if she looks over his shoulder slightly as they round corners. She can use the handrails after she gets a sense of how the bike accelerates, manoeuvres, and stops.
         Annie has read up on this online. She should hang on to him around his stomach, squeeze her thighs against his if she feels insecure. The closer she is, the safer they both will be, the article said. But Lawrence does not mention the hanging on or the squeezing. He instructs her not to grab him by his shoulders or arms.
         “Please don’t do that.”
         Instead, hold on loosely around his waist. 
         “Loosely,” he repeats.
         Also, he says, think counterintuitively.
         “Go against what your body wants to do. Relax like a sack of potatoes.”
         She zips the jacket. It is a ladies’ size small. It’s tight and she battles with the zipper. She worries about sweating and staining the lining under the arms. The helmet is a struggle too. Lawrence sees her frustration and offers to help. 
         “May I?” he asks. His fingers brush against her skin as he adjusts the strap, tightening until it grazes her chin but doesn’t dig in and irritate. It is heavier than a bike helmet and has a face visor. It makes her feel like an astronaut.
         The safety class continues. He explains the science of proper weight distribution and how to maximize balance and control. He points out that the exhaust pipes heat up.
         “Watch yourself,” he says. “People have been scalded.”
         He sits on the Harley, both feet on the ground, grips the handlebar, and applies the front brake so that it’s safe for Annie to lift her right leg and climb on the bike. She manages and they are finally ready to go.
         Not quite. He wants her to practice getting on and off the machine. “Mounting and dismounting,” he calls it.
         “Push yourself toward the machine,” he explains. “Do not grab, do not pull it toward you.”
         “Got it,” she says after the third round.
         He asks if she feels comfortable enough to ride. His view, he says, is that the passenger is in charge. The pilot controls the bike and the passenger controls the pilot.
         “Don’t be afraid to tap me on the shoulder if I can’t hear you.”
         He starts the motor. The bike’s movements are jerky and Annie’s helmet bumps into Lawrence’s helmet. As they turn corners, she remembers something he said about slow turns being more dangerous than faster turns.
         She squeezes her inner thighs subtly into his outer thighs but makes sure she isn’t too clingy around his waist. He doesn’t react, not that she can notice, so she assumes this must be okay, the correct pressure to be safe but not pushy. Is she having fun? She isn’t sure. It’s awkward but not awful. Being uncomfortable is a price she is willing to pay.
         After the third circuit of the parking lot, Annie briefly shifts her focus from the back of Lawrence’s helmet to the couples underneath the trailer awning. Do they see her on the back of this motorcycle? Are they watching? She can’t be sure, but believes yes, yes they are.
         “Bye, bye,” she thinks.

They never leave the parking lot. After seven passes of a circuit that includes Walmart, Mark’s, Sobeys, the mall, and the bus terminal, they’re back where they started.
         Lawrence stops the motor and pauses for a moment before saying, “Ready. Dismount.” Annie goes first. It all feels strange, but it’s her first time and she can learn. The main thing is, she survived the orientation and the practice ride and is ready to join him on the road. 
         “Where do we go next?” she asks. She might have to call home and tell them she’s having coffee with some yoga people.
         Lawrence takes off his helmet. The bandana on his head is damp with sweat.
         “This is it,” he says. “For today anyway.”
         The motorhome people have rolled back their awning; they’re folding up their table and chairs.
         Lawrence tells her he needs to leave now or he’ll be late. He has promised to meet the other Orphans’ Brothers at a deli on the Herring Cove Road. From there, they will travel as one column and cruise down a peninsula that juts out to the sea.
         Smokey is president of the Orphans’ Brothers club and road captain for today’s trip. He’ll be at the front, leading the other riders along the coastal highway. Lawrence is the designated sweep rider for the day, communicating by Bluetooth headset to Smokey in front. It is an important job. He’ll be the final bike, riding at the back to make sure no one is left behind. If someone runs into trouble, they can count on him. Jeff, the guy who used to do it, had a stroke, so Lawrence moved up.
         “I can’t let them down, so, no passengers,” he says.
         “A promotion. You can’t screw it up,” says Annie, handing back the jacket.
         “I mean, a passenger who isn’t experienced,” he says as he zips and folds. “It wouldn’t be a good idea. Not this time.”
         “Especially when it’s my first try,” Annie says. “I mean, if you’re riding bitch, you have to know what you’re doing.”
         She isn’t sure if this is an attempt at humour, or casual cool, or god-knows-what, but out it comes.
         Lawrence is about to put the tidy bundle back in the hatch, but he stops abruptly and looks at her.
         “What did you say?”
         Too late now to take it back.
         “My first time on the bitch seat?”
         “No,” he says. She sees what she interprets as disappointment in his eyes.
         “We do not say that. Nobody in the club says that.”
         He stows away the jacket and closes the lid.
         “Of course,” she says. “Of course. I’m sorry.”
         “Annie, you are a passenger. To get technical—a pillion. You sit on a pillion pad.”
         A pillion. That’s what I am, thinks Annie, pulling off her astronaut helmet.
         “But I prefer passenger. Or guest,” he says.
         Lawrence dips and tilts his head. He is roughly seven inches taller than she is, so a deliberate move is necessary to achieve eye contact, which is brief, but definite.
         “Or maybe we just call it riding double?”
         "Sure,” says Annie.
         Lawrence meets her eyes again. “Next time we ride, if you want to, it’ll be easier.”   
         “And we’ll go somewhere?” Annie says. “Not too far. But not a parking lot.” 
         “Right. No more shopping malls.” 
         It’s time for her to go home, she knows, and she doesn’t want Lawrence to be late, but she lingers, asks him about the crests on his vest.
         “Not crests. Patches,” he says. “Club patches.”  
         The patch on the left side of his vest shows two hands, connected palm to palm, bent at the knuckles and entwined. The logo is embroidered in sea blue on a black background.
         “Links in a chain,” Lawrence explains. He makes the same gesture with his own hands, showing how hard it is to pull them apart.
         He turns around. A large version of the logo covers most of his back, with Orphans’ Bros International in crisp white print above it, and Unbreakable Bond written below in crimson.
         On the right side of his vest, a Canadian flag patch, and below it, a patch that says “Seinfeld,” with simple white letters on a black background.
         “My road name. They gave me that a few months ago,” he says.
         “You’re Jewish?”
         “No, I’m funny. They think I’m funny.”

                   ***

That first summer afternoon at the winery, after the initial confusion had passed and Smokey had determined this was not a medical emergency, Annie rested in the shade of the bikers’ picnic tent. She liked it in the cool grass, sitting cross-legged in the shade of the open awning. Friendly women—wives and girlfriends of full-fledged club members—offered her cookies, watermelon, Coke, and mineral water.
         Annie rehydrated and snacked, and then, after the novelty of her presence had subsided, she laid back and closed her eyes. She imagined she was almost invisible, a creature protected by the camouflage of its coat. Pop cans and plastic containers snapped open. Chip bags rustled. She sensed footsteps as people trod carefully around her. Snatches of conversation drifted over and around her body. Laughter rolled in and out like ocean ripples on a calm day.
         Two couples discussed a plan to take their bikes to Freeport, Maine, and then hop a train to Manhattan to see some plays. Someone inquired if someone else’s mother had found a spot in a nursing home.
         She overheard Lawrence tell someone she was a friend from work.
         And then, a hand on her wrist, warm but light. She opened her eyes to see Smokey checking her pulse again and Lawrence sitting next to her, eating a sandwich. Woozy but now mortified, she began to apologize. An idiot with the antihistamine, she explained. Stood up by a friend, she said. Not one to usually have more than one glass, she assured them.
         “What happens in Vegas,” said Lawrence. He opened his arms to the vineyard. “Or on the North Shore.”
         Despite the heat, he was still wearing the leather vest over his white t-shirt. She remembered that the rolled-up jacket under her head was his.
          “Who among us,” added Smokey. He released the blood pressure cuff and Annie’s arm exhaled. 
         Her vitals were okay.
         “You’re good to go,” he said, “but welcome to stay.”

‍