Lily Mackenzie could hear Abby, the ride leader, and Abby’s mother, Eileen, just behind her, talking companionably. She couldn’t make out words, but she could hear the low hum of their voices as they rode together, side by side. It made her heart ache. Will it ever be like that with us? she wondered. She tensed her muscles and lifted her head long enough to peer along the trail, trying to find Morgan, but her daughter was nowhere in sight.
Lily’s bike wobbled, and she struggled to straighten it out. She was gripping her handlebars so hard that her wrists and fingers ached. A droplet of sweat crept down her forehead and into her right eye. She tried to rub her stinging eye against her sleeve, but that made her bike wobble even more violently. You can do this, she told herself, keeping her eyes on the back of the elderly man just ahead, who was pedaling along confidently, smooth and steady and stable, not a care in the world, sometimes not even bothering to hold on to the handlebars as he glided nonchalantly along, past one of the stainless steel bollards that narrowed the path, like a belt cinching a lady’s dress. Lily panicked whenever she had to navigate past them. The other riders barely seemed to notice them at all. You can do this. You’ll be fine. People say it’s just like riding a bike when they mean it’s something you can pick right up again, no problem, so this is going to be okay. You won’t get hurt. Everything will be fine.
Lily tried to look past the man, still hoping to catch a glimpse of her daughter, wishing that Morgan had stayed back with her, that she hadn’t gotten so far ahead. She’s a teenager, Lily reminded herself. And Morgan was a good girl; sweet-natured, and kind, a diligent student, a talented artist. Oh, there’d been a few rough patches of back talk and boundary pushing when Morgan was thirteen and fourteen and she’d argued with Lily and Don at every opportunity. She’d broken her curfew. She’d made friends Lily and Don didn’t approve of. She’d purchased a push-up bra and a thong from Victoria’s Secret. Lily knew because she’d found these items tucked away at the back of Morgan’s underwear drawer.
She and Don had talked it over. They’d waited… and the curfew-cutting had ended, and the back talk had mostly abated. There was, still, the matter of Olivia. Morgan had met Olivia in her after-school art class and now claimed that she was her best friend. Olivia went to public school. She had two mothers, and she did not belong to their church, or any church at all. Olivia’s hair was brown, but sometimes dyed pink or blue. She wore overalls, with striped shirts underneath, and what looked like construction-workers’ boots with platform soles that added at least four inches to her height. When Morgan had brought Olivia home for dinner, Olivia had cheerfully told Don that she was an agnostic, that her family was “culturally Jewish”—whatever that meant—and that, if she got married—“to a man,” she’d blithely added—she wasn’t planning on submitting to her husband as head of the household.
“We’ll pray for you,” Don had said, his voice a little strangled, and Morgan had looked away, with a little smile—a very adult smile—playing at the corners of her lips.
Lily never thought she’d miss the arguments, the fights, the deliberate provocations… except, in the last few months and weeks, Morgan had gotten quiet and withdrawn. Maybe it was because she was growing up, Lily told herself. That, or missing her boyfriend. Brody had been Morgan’s first love. They’d dated last spring, when Morgan had been a sophomore and Brody was a senior. He was a polite young man who’d come to the house and asked Don’s permission before he’d taken Morgan out. Brody had enlisted in the army and left for basic training two weeks after high school graduation. Lily had expected Morgan to mope for a while, before her daughter’s usual sunny nature reasserted itself. She hadn’t expected weeks of her daughter retreating to her bedroom, with sad, dreary-sounding music filtering out underneath the door.
Morgan had kept up with her chores. She would do her laundry and take out the trash; she’d set the table before dinner and help with the dishes after. She’d gone to church with Lily, every Sunday. Her grades had been fine. But, at the table, she’d pick at her food and barely speak to her parents. For the past three Sunday nights she hadn’t come downstairs for their usual game of Uno or charades or Monopoly. “I’m tired,” she’d say, before drifting back to her bedroom. “I just want to lie down.”
“She’s a teenager,” Don had said, when Lily had told him she was worried. He’d had his back to her as he stood in their walk-in closet, standing barefoot in his suit trousers, pulling off his shirt. “Teenage girls have moods.” He sniffed at the shirt’s armpits before returning it to its hanger.
“I think this is more than a mood,” Lily said.
Don nodded absently, then went back to examining his ties. “Have you seen the blue and silver one? I was going to take it to Arizona.”
Wordlessly, Lily handed him his tie. The plan—at least, the original plan—had been for Don and Lily and Morgan to do the bike trip as a family. Every summer, they did some kind of trip—camping in Vermont or New Hampshire; hiking in Montana. The Breakaway trip was to be that summer’s adventure. But then the senior pastor of the church hosting a big men’s conference had gotten COVID, and Don had been asked to preach on Sunday morning. It was a big honor, one that came with a generous honorarium and lots of visibility. Don and Lily talked it over and decided he’d be foolish to pass it up.
At that point, the trip was nonrefundable. And so they’d discussed it and decided that Lily and Morgan would do the trip as a duo. Lily had agreed, thinking, privately, that the trip would be a chance for her to talk to Morgan, to find out what was really going on. She hadn’t wanted to explain to Don how hard being a teenage girl was; how a dozen different things could go wrong between the end of breakfast and the start of homeroom, and how many of those things had to do with boys and men. Morgan went to a private Christian school, a school affiliated with Don’s church… but bad things could happen, even there. This Lily knew from personal experience.
She’d been praying that the bike trip would help, even though cycling was something Morgan and Don did together. Lily could ride a bike, but her plan had been to pedal a few leisurely hours each day before hopping aboard the sag wagon and meeting her husband and daughter at the lunch stop or the hotel.
The morning after Don had gotten his phone call and they’d settled on the new plan, she’d gone to the garage to check out her bike, which she hadn’t ridden in… weeks? Maybe months, she decided. Her bike was slumped on two flat tires, with cobwebs ornamenting the brake levers. For a minute, Lily just stared, feeling like the bike was a version of what she’d become. Old. Forgotten. Sagging. Obsolete.
Lily knew that she looked fine for her age. She’d gained only a few pounds since she’d gotten married, but that weight had settled in her hips and thighs and belly, and not even the most stringent diet could budge it. Her hair had gotten thinner, her feet had gotten wider. The only glow her skin could boast, these days, came from cosmetics, and her breasts could only achieve their prematernity perkiness with the help of an underwire bra. Lily did her best to look nice for Don. She colored her gray hair, she exercised and watched what she ate, she wore clothes that were flattering and age appropriate without being matronly. Lily knew she looked good… but she also knew that she looked good for thirty-seven, while Morgan looked fifteen, like a rosebud still unfurling, its petals creamy and pristine. A flower, opening itself to the sunshine, certain that nothing in the world would hurt it.
Lily had wiped off the cobwebs, wrestled the bike into the trunk of her car, and driven it to the bike shop. There, the repair guy had inspected it, and her, without even bothering to hide his skepticism.