And he could sit at a dinner table with the Iron Ravens while half a dozen men argued about motorcycles without feeling the need to prove anything.
I liked him immediately.
Linda loved him.
Mara married him in a small ceremony outside Flagstaff, beneath cottonwood trees beside a narrow creek.
I walked her down the aisle.
She wore a simple ivory dress.
When we reached Evan, she leaned toward me.
“Remember when I was little and you said you'd always come if I called?”
I smiled.
“Still true.”
She squeezed my hand.
“Even after I'm married?”
I laughed.
“Especially then. Now I've got two of you to worry about.”
She kissed my cheek.
Then stepped toward Evan.
I didn't know that a few years later I'd be standing beside a wrecked vehicle, trying to keep one promise while another became impossible.
By then, Linda was gone.
Cancer took her when Mara was twenty-six.
She was fifty-one.
Too young.
Far too young.
The illness began quietly.
Fatigue.
A persistent pain.
A series of appointments we kept telling ourselves would produce ordinary answers.
Then the doctors explained the truth.
I spent the next fourteen months learning how helpless a man could feel when the person he loved needed something he couldn't repair.
I could rebuild a motorcycle in a weekend.
Could replace electrical wiring.
Could rescue a stranded rider in a snowstorm.
But I couldn't fix what was happening inside Linda's body.
She died on a Tuesday morning with Mara holding her left hand and me holding her right.
After the funeral, the house became unbearable.
Her coffee mug remained beside the sink.
Her reading glasses rested on the nightstand.
And every room seemed to contain some little piece of a life that was no longer there.
I spent more time on the road.
Mara worried about me.
She called every evening.
Sometimes I answered.
Sometimes I didn't.
I told her I was fine.
She knew I wasn't.
Evan eventually drove up from Arizona and spent a weekend helping me sort through some of Linda's belongings.
He didn't lecture me.
Didn't tell me to move on.
He simply sat in the garage while I worked on an old engine.
At one point, he asked whether I had eaten.
I told him coffee counted.
He drove to town and returned with enough food for three men.
That was Evan.
He rarely said the perfect thing.
He simply showed up.
I wish I'd told him how much I appreciated it while there was still time.
The accident happened during a storm in northern Arizona.