The Rules of Love & Grammar (22 page)

I hope that doesn't happen with Renny's bike. “What do you do? I mean, if you can't get it off?”

“Oh, I'll get it off,” he says. “With this.” He picks up a can of WD-40 from the table. “Sometimes, with a part that's stubborn, you've got to spray it, leave it for a while, loosen it a little, spray it again, leave it, loosen it. It can take a couple of days.”

“Just to get one bolt off?”

“Sure, sometimes,” he says, putting the WD-40 back on the table. “That's part of the challenge of taking something old apart and reassembling it as something new, something better. Sometimes you need a few days just to get one bolt off, but you've got to have a clean slate before you can put the bike back together.”

You've also got to have a lot of patience. My father might, at least if he had the mechanical inclination. I can see him in here, tinkering with a bike the way he tinkers with his puzzles. I'd never have the patience for it.

“So where do you start?” I ask.

“With the wheels,” Mitch says. He flips the quick-release lever on the front wheel, removes the wheel, and leans it against the wall. Then he does the same with the back wheel. “Next, I have to get the chain off. Once that's done, I'll start taking off the cranks so I can get to the bottom bracket.”

“The crankset is here, and the bottom bracket's there, right?” I point to the parts.

“Uh, yeah. That's right.”

“The bottom bracket connects the crankset to the bike and lets the crankset rotate,” I add.

Mitch gives me a curious look. “Yeah, right again. Are you taking a class at night or something?”

I laugh, feeling good that I've done my homework.

“Okay, so, now the chain,” he says as he picks up a metal tool that looks like a T. He places it around a section of the Paramount's chain. Then he turns to me. “Hey, why don't you do this?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. You're learning about bikes.”

I move closer. “What do I do?”

“Just turn the top of this tool a few times. Right here.” He points to the horizontal part of the T. “It will break one of the pins in the chain.”

“Okay.” I grab the tool and give it a few turns. The more I turn, the harder it gets.

“Keep going,” he says.

I turn the tool again, and suddenly, the old, rusty chain gives way. It breaks apart and falls to the cement floor, landing with a
clank.
I look at the broken chain and think about how many years it was on that bike. It could have stayed on there forever, but then the bike wouldn't work. It had to come off. There's something almost freeing in knowing this is the first step in turning around this bike, in taking it from something run-down and unusable to something vibrant and functioning. I think about what Mitch said.
You've got to have a clean slate before you can put something back together.

We pedal down Main Street. I'm on a rental from the shop, a black Trek road bike, and Mitch is slightly ahead of me, on his own carbon-fiber Trek. I overheard Kevin say it cost eight thousand dollars. Eight thousand!

“Really,” Mitch says, “all you'll need is a little training, and you'll be able to handle the Dorset Challenge. You don't have to do the fifty-mile ride. There's one that's twenty-five.”

Twenty-five miles. I'm not so sure I can do that, although the Trek feels pretty good, much lighter and quicker than my old Raleigh. I have a sudden sense of liberation being outside, my own legs propelling me, the freewheel making its soft ticking sound as I coast.

Downtown seems so much different on a bike than in a car—so much busier. Drivers whiz by, people cross in the middle of the street, other bikers race past, tourists move in packs on the sidewalk. But soon we're off Main Street, heading down quiet roads where graceful trees dip their branches and the air is cooler. These are roads I haven't seen from the seat of a bike in years.

We pass a field where a man is riding a lawn mower, and the sweet scent of green, fresh-cut grass fills my lungs. We ride by yards where golden day lilies and yellow coreopsis and purple hydrangeas climb through gardens. Passing a stream, I hear water gurgle over rocks and notice dappled sunlight falling through the trees. Farther on, a black Lab bounds toward me, tail wagging, and races me along the edge of a wide lawn. At the end of the property, he stops and barks, an invitation to return.

Mitch waves me forward, and I ride up beside him. “I think we'll do about ten miles,” he says. “Round-trip.”

“Are you crazy? That's too far.”

“No, it's not. You can do it.”

I give him a dirty look, and the image of Mitch as a drill sergeant comes to mind, with me struggling to lift a thirty-pound weight in each hand and him counting,
Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen…

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“You'll see.”

A chipmunk scurries along the shoulder and into the woods. “Just don't take me on a ton of big hills.”

“Oh, I won't take you on a ton.”

“Or any.”

“Grace,” he says as we go around a bend, “you can't avoid hills. This is Connecticut, remember. Not Manhattan.”

A half hour later we're somewhere just north of Dorset, on a road where houses are tucked back in the trees. I'm winded. We've been up and down a number of hills, some small, some not so small, and Mitch still refuses to tell me where we're going. I don't recognize the road we're on now, and I see another hill ahead of us. This one's big, very big, so big it looks as if it goes straight up. I downshift, and I downshift again, and pretty soon, I'm all the way down to first gear, and I'm still struggling. Mitch, who is ahead of me, finally turns, and when he sees how far behind I am, he rides down the hill to rejoin me.

“You okay?” he asks as he pedals alongside me. He's not even winded.

Huff, puff.
“Can I get off ”—
huff, puff—
“and walk it up?”

“No, you cannot get off and walk it up. What kind of trainer would I be if I let you do that?”

Huff, puff.
“A nice one?”

“Sorry. Keep going. You can do this, Grace.”

“You're a sadist,” I tell him, panting.

“Only on Wednesdays. You're good for this. I know you are. You're not going to let a little hill get in your way.”

A big mountain
is more like it. All I can see ahead of me is hill, hill, hill. My legs are on fire, but I keep pedaling.

Mitch pedals on ahead a little and circles back again. “Do you know where we are?”

Huff, puff.
“No idea.”

“Then it'll be a nice surprise when we reach our destination, because it's really pretty.”

The surprise for me will be getting there at all. When Mitch finally says, “Almost there,” I manage to pull out my last ounce of energy and make it to the top.

“Oh my God!” I straddle the bike and lean over the handlebars, trying to catch my breath. In the distance, through the trees, I can see the blue of Long Island Sound. I pull out my water bottle and take a long drink. Mitch does the same.

“Come on. You can coast the rest of the way there,” he says.

“Where is
there?
Where are we going?”

“You'll see.”

I let out a loud sigh, half fatigue and half frustration, and then we fly down the other side of the hill, the tires zipping along the pavement in front of me, trees whizzing by, my hands on the brakes, gently controlling my descent. I tilt back my head and let the breeze cool my neck, wet with perspiration. At the bottom, Mitch turns onto a dirt road marked by a sign: Bratton Point Lighthouse.

“I've never been out here,” I say, pulling up next to him.

He looks at me as though I've told him I've never eaten a potato. “How could you never have been to the lighthouse?”

“I don't know. I just haven't.”

We ride to the end of the road, where a long, grassy stretch of land juts into the water. An old two-story house stands in the middle of the land, its pristine, white walls blinding against the cobalt sky, its red roof like a brilliant smile. Attached to the right side of the house, and only slightly higher, is a white lighthouse. A driveway leads to the house, and a white picket fence runs around the buildings and part of the lawn.

We leave our bikes in the driveway and walk across the grass, past the house and lighthouse, to where the lawn recedes and turns to boulders and rocks and the water takes over. The sound stretches around us, a small chop licking up a bit of froth.

“You're right. It is beautiful here.” I can taste the salt in the breeze as it caresses my face.

“Was it worth the ride over the hill?”

“Every last breath,” I say. Then I realize I'll have to do the whole thing again. “But I'm not looking forward to the trip back.”

“Oh, we don't have to go the same way,” Mitch says. “We can avoid the hill.”

“What? Then why didn't we avoid it coming here?”

He smiles. “You needed to know you could do it.”

“So you've really never been here,” Mitch says as we sit down on a flat rock by the water, the lighthouse to our left.

“No. Maybe I'm just spoiled, growing up on the water and all. It's always been right there, in my backyard.”

“You must be a good swimmer then.”

“I'm okay. My sister was the real swimmer. She was on a team when she was a kid. She did a lot of team things, a lot of athletics.” I laugh. “She tried to coach me in some of the sports we did in school, but it didn't help—I was hopeless.”

A seagull glides over the water, its wings spread to catch the air current. “You must miss her,” Mitch says. “It sounds like you were really close.”

I reach down and pick up a handful of the broken shells that lie scattered among the rocks. “Yeah, I do miss her,” I say, studying the shards. We sit in silence, and I listen to the water lap against the rocks. “The thing is,” I finally say, “it never should have happened. She shouldn't have been driving. Not when she was upset.” I gaze at the water, so dark now, it's almost black. “And not when she'd been drinking.”

“What happened?” Mitch asks, his voice quiet.

It seems like such a simple question, but the answer is complicated. “It started with a guy,” I say. “Elliot Frasier.” I wipe my hands, and the shards of shell fall onto the rocks. “They dated all senior year, and then he broke up with her.” I glance at Mitch. “But that was only part of it. The other part was that Peter and I were kind of getting together. We'd been friends, but it was becoming more than that. And Renny didn't want to hear about it.”

“Because of her own situation.”

“Yes. She was angry with Elliot and jealous of me. And she'd been drinking. It was a very bad combination. The worst.”

A spray of salt dampens my hair; a breeze blows through the sedges. “I should have left her alone. You know…gotten out of her room and stayed out of her way. We got into a fight and said some pretty nasty things. The kind of things siblings say, I guess. But they usually get the chance to apologize.”

Mitch looks at me. “I'm sorry, Grace.”

“Yeah,” I say. “So am I.”

“Are we trespassing?” I ask as we walk across the grass and stop at the picket fence in front of the lighthouse. “Does somebody live here?”

“Not anymore,” Mitch says. “The light's been automated.”

“Oh, right.” I gaze at the lantern room, at the top of the lighthouse, and think about the lives it must have saved over the years, warning boats away from the shoals.

“People used to live here, though,” Mitch says as we walk around the perimeter of the fence. “There were lighthouse keepers here starting in 1827, when the owner of the land sold it to the federal government. The government built the original lighthouse and a little residence and hired the former owner as the first keeper.”

“Lighthouse keeper. That's a job you don't see advertised anymore.”

Mitch smiles. “No, you don't. There were probably eight or ten of them here over the years, including a woman who took over the job from her husband after he died.”

“A woman lighthouse keeper,” I say as we continue to walk alongside the fence. “She must have been ahead of her time.”

“I suppose so.”

“And when did the last keeper leave?”

“I think it was around 1987,” Mitch says. “That's when the Coast Guard automated the light.” He points to the lantern room. “But it still has the original Fresnel lens.”

I look at the lighthouse and the attached residence, with its clean white walls, fresh, gray trim, and bright-red roof, and I wonder what it would have been like to live here. “It's such a pretty place,” I say. “What a view they must have had.”

“Yeah. Incredible view,” Mitch says as his gaze goes from the lighthouse to the water.

“There's something so romantic about it, the idea of living by a lighthouse.”

“I've always thought so, too,” he says. He turns to me and smiles, and all of a sudden he leans in. He looks into my eyes, and I think he's going to kiss me. And I realize I want him to kiss me. I close my eyes, and, as I'm waiting for it to happen, someone calls out.

“Excuse me, are these your bikes?”

I open my eyes. A short, sturdy-looking man stands in the driveway by a green pickup truck. The name Anderson's Lawn & Landscaping is on the door. Three other men step out of the truck.

“Yes,” Mitch says. “They're ours.”

“You'll need to move them,” the short man says. “I've got to pull this truck in here.”

Mitch looks at me. “Guess we'd better go.”

“Right,” I say, but as we walk to the bikes, I'm scrambling to figure out what just happened, trying to wrap my head around it. Was he going to kiss me? I don't think I imagined that. Was I going to let him? I was. I know I didn't imagine that.