I sold my road bike and pretended I didn't care

The girl who bought my bike was named Kayla, and before she handed me the cash she asked why I was selling it.

"Don't have the time anymore," I said.

She was twenty-six, a night-shift nurse, and she had exactly the look I must have had at her age: a little afraid of the bike and a lot in love with it. She rode it once around my cul-de-sac in her sneakers, wobbling, and when she came back I said, "Raise the saddle about a finger's width," before I could stop myself. She did it right there with the multitool I handed her. I didn't need the multitool anymore either.

She counted the bills out on the hood of my car. Then she lifted the bike into the back of her hatchback, and I watched the rear wheel tick around once as the door came down, and I went back into the garage and looked at the hook.

Eleven years on a hook

There are two hooks in the ceiling of our garage. One holds my husband Doug's hybrid, which he has ridden four times in ten years and refers to as "my bike" with total confidence. The other held mine.

It was blue, a deep, almost navy blue, and I bought it the year I turned thirty-eight with money I'd been setting aside from overtime at the clinic. I'm a veterinary technician. I have been bitten by every size of dog there is. For eleven years I rode that bike every Saturday with a group that met at seven in a bakery parking lot and went forty miles out the river road and back, and I was the one who pulled on the stretch past the grain elevator, where the wind always comes straight at you. I liked that job. I liked being the one people tucked in behind.

The stoplight

Here's what I told people: work got busy, Doug's mother moved in with us for a while, I was tired.

All true. None of it was why.

My hip had started aching on the bike around mile twenty-five, and then around mile fifteen. My neck complained whenever I rode in the drops. I started skipping the second loop. Then one Saturday in May, rolling up to the red light at the bottom of the bakery hill with the whole group bunched together, I went to unclip my left foot and it didn't come out. My hip wouldn't turn the way it needed to, not fast enough, and I did the slowest, stupidest fall a person can do. I just tipped over. Sideways, still attached to the bike, at zero miles an hour, in front of eleven people and a man at a gas pump.

Everyone was kind. Somebody helped me up. Somebody said, "Everybody does that once." I laughed and said I was fine, and I rode home with a bruise on my hip the size of a saucer, and I didn't go the next Saturday, or the one after that.

A few weeks became a season, and a season became a year. The bike hung there and I walked under it to get to the recycling bin, and every time, I could feel it up there, like a person waiting for an apology.

So I listed it. It felt like the adult thing to do. I wrote Great condition, barely ridden lately, which was the only fully honest line in the ad.

Potting soil

After Kayla left, I hung a bag of potting soil on the empty hook so it wouldn't look empty. Doug came out, looked up at it, looked at me, and wisely went back inside.

About two months later I was in my car at that same light at the bottom of the bakery hill, on my way to buy dog food, and the group came through. Nine of them, two by two, in the grey light before eight, talking. I knew every jersey. I knew who was on whose wheel.

I slid down in my seat. I actually did that. I am a fifty-year-old woman who has held down a Great Dane for a nail trim, and I hid from a bike ride.

Then I sat in the dog food aisle for a while.

The part nobody posts

I'm not going to make this sound faster than it was.

I went to my doctor and said the word "hip" out loud, and she sent me to a physical therapist, who had me lying on a mat doing leg lifts a toddler could do and that made me shake. I did them on the living room rug while Doug watched baseball. I did the band exercises at the clinic on my lunch break, in the room where we keep the big kennels, and one of the vets walked in on me, nodded, and walked out.

I started sleeping more than six hours. I skipped the second glass of wine most nights. I took a spin class at the rec center full of women my age who all seemed to be coming back from something, which was oddly comforting. In the spring I practiced clipping in and out while holding the kitchen counter, a hundred times, left foot, right foot, like a very sad line dance.

One night I read about a contractor who'd quit coaching his daughter's soccer team and blamed his schedule, when it was really his knees. I read Marcus's year and thought it was the most honest thing I'd seen about any of this, and then I got down on the rug and did my leg lifts.

The hook

I didn't get the blue bike back. Kayla still has it, I assume, and I hope she rides it into the ground.

What I bought was a used grey one from a retired pharmacist across town, a size too long until I swapped the stem, with a scratch on the top tube shaped like Florida. The first Saturday I went back, I stayed at the back of the group the whole way and didn't pull once. At the red light at the bottom of the bakery hill, I unclipped half a block early. Nobody said a word about it. At the end, somebody handed me half a cinnamon roll.

When I got home I took the potting soil down and hung the grey bike on the hook. It had rained out on the river road, and it dripped onto the garage floor, a small dark spot on the concrete, right under the hook, where for a year there had only been the shadow of a bag of dirt.