The Longer Way

At the junction, Laura stopped with one foot on the pavement and looked up the road to the left. It climbed between two banks of dry grass, disappeared into the trees, and showed itself again much higher on the hillside. Beside her, Kate took a drink and followed her gaze.

“The car is the other way.”

“I know.”

Kate screwed the cap back onto her bottle. They had already ridden farther than they intended, partly because a road Laura remembered as paved had turned out to include a mile of gravel, and partly because neither of them had objected when the other suggested continuing to the next intersection. Now the afternoon was warming, and Kate had begun mentioning lunch with increasing precision.

Laura studied the climb. From below, it was difficult to tell how steep it became beyond the trees. There might be a view at the top. There might also be another hill.

“You’ve ridden it?” Kate asked.

“Years ago.”

“That sounded reassuring until you added the last part.”

Laura smiled and put her bottle away. At fifty-eight, she had learned to distinguish between a day when her legs were tired and a day when they were merely asking what she had in mind. Today they felt good. She had noticed it on the previous rise, where she had remained seated and let the pedals turn while Kate stood for the last hundred yards. It was an agreeable feeling, and she was reluctant to put the bicycle in the car while she still had it.

Kate looked uphill once more. “If there’s no lunch at the top, I want that understood now.”

They turned left.

The first stretch was gentle enough to let them talk. Then the road curved into the trees and steepened. Kate dropped behind, still close enough to offer an opinion about Laura’s memory. Laura shifted down and settled into the climb.

She liked this part of riding: the small adjustments, the search for a pace she could hold, the way a hill gradually occupied her whole attention. There was no useful answer to how much farther when the road was hidden ahead. She watched the pavement, listened to her breathing, and kept enough in reserve for whatever waited around the turn.

A patch of sunlight lay across the road beyond the trees. As she rode into it, she remembered another climb, in Southern California, and the back of her husband’s jersey moving away from her.

For the first few years they rode together, that had been the usual view.

He had introduced her to cycling after she was already well established in her practice. She had run for years and considered herself fit, which made the first rides with him more irritating than they might otherwise have been. On foot she knew what she could ask of herself. On a bicycle she spent too much effort in the wrong gear, charged into hills, and discovered halfway up that enthusiasm had a short working life.

Her husband would wait at the summit, one foot down, breathing comfortably. He was kind about it. Sometimes his kindness was the most aggravating part.

He taught her to shift before she needed to, to eat before she felt empty, and to begin a long climb at a pace that seemed almost disappointingly slow. Laura listened, tried it, and occasionally rode ahead too hard anyway. She had spent years learning to trust her judgment at work. It took some time to accept that on a bicycle his experience was worth more than her conviction.

They rode early on weekends, before traffic thickened and before either of them could find a reason to remain home. During the week she began going out when she could, fitting rides around appointments and paperwork. Some evenings she arrived at the office again with damp hair and a better disposition than she had left with. The bicycle became something she wanted for herself. She learned which roads gave her room to ride, which climbs rewarded patience, and how far she could go on a morning she had once thought too short to bother with.

Her husband noticed her improvement before she said anything about it. He waited less often. On rolling roads, she began taking longer turns in front. Once, at the end of a ride, he remarked that she had made him work.

She enjoyed that remark for several days.

The climb she remembered now came after years of riding together. It was a road they both knew, long enough to expose any mistake made at the bottom, with a steep final stretch that appeared just when a person might reasonably believe the worst was over.

That morning he had started ahead of her, as he generally did. Laura let him go. She had eaten, the air was cool, and her legs felt unusually willing. She kept her effort steady through the first turns, watching him draw away and then, gradually, stop drawing away.

For a while she assumed he had eased up.

Then the distance began to close.

She could hear him breathing when she reached his wheel. He glanced back, looked forward again, and moved slightly aside.

“You all right?”

She would have answered more fully if she had been able to spare the air. “Yes.”

There was room to pass. Laura rode beside him for a few seconds, aware of the familiar shape of his hands on the bars, the salt beginning to mark his jersey. Then she edged ahead.

It was such a small change in position that she almost laughed. After all the miles she had spent behind him, his front wheel was beside her leg.

He stayed close through the next bend. She heard him shift, then stand. Laura remained seated. The hill was steep enough now that she had to attend to each stroke, and she knew better than to look back. She expected him to come past at any moment.

At the final rise she stood too.

Her breathing grew rough. The summit was visible, though farther away than she wanted it to be. She fixed her eyes on a pale patch of pavement and rode toward it, unwilling to spend any part of her effort checking whether he was still there.

She reached the top first.

Beyond the crest, she coasted to the turnout and put a foot down. Her legs trembled. She bent over the bars, drawing air, and heard him arrive behind her.

Neither spoke immediately. When she could straighten, he was looking at her with an expression she had never seen at the top of a hill.

“You could have warned me,” he said.

Laura wiped her mouth with the back of her glove. “I didn’t know.”

He leaned over his own handlebars and began to laugh. She laughed with him, though it hurt to do it while she was still trying to breathe. When he reached across and touched her shoulder, she put her hand over his.

They stayed there a few minutes, drinking and looking down at the turns they had climbed. Before they left, he asked whether she intended to do that regularly.

“I’ll let you know.”

“I’d prefer some notice.”

He made her lead on the way home.

The Oregon road steepened beneath Laura’s wheels, bringing her attention back to the afternoon. She shifted into her lowest gear. The years since that ride had changed much, but she could still recognize the effort: the need to be patient with a summit that refused to arrive, the growing ache in her thighs, the temptation to stand too soon.

She heard Kate behind her, farther down the road.

“This better be a remarkable view.”

Laura had no breath available to make a promise.

At the top, the trees opened onto a broad stretch of country. Fields lay below them, divided by roads and scattered buildings. Farther out, the land rose toward blue hills. Laura rode into a gravel turnout and stopped.

Kate arrived a minute later, coasted beside her, and remained folded over the bars until she could speak.

“Well?”

Laura gestured toward the view.

Kate looked at it briefly. “Very nice. Can we eat it?”

Laura laughed and opened the pocket of her jersey. She had half a sandwich wrapped in paper, flattened somewhat by the ride. She offered it.

Kate examined the parcel. “You’ve had that the whole time?”

“I was saving it.”

They divided it and stood beside their bicycles, chewing. A breeze moved through the grass at the edge of the turnout. Below them, a car followed the climbing road, disappearing beneath the trees before it reappeared at the bend.

Kate brushed crumbs from her glove and looked across at Laura.

“Straight back now?”

Laura swallowed the last bite. “Straight back.”

Kate waited.

“Really,” Laura said.

Before starting down, she checked that the paper was tucked securely in her pocket. Kate had already rolled toward the road. Laura pushed off after her, gathered speed, and followed her into the first turn.