“I never met a girl who rides Italian motorcycles,” he said. “It’s like you aren’t real.”

He looked at my helmet, gloves, my motorcycle key, on his bureau. The room seemed to hold its breath, the motel curtain sucked against the glass by the draft of a partly opened window, a strip of sun wavering underneath the curtain’s hem, the light-blocking fabric holding back the outside world.

He said he wished he could see me do my run, but he was stuck at the motel, retiling a rotten shower.

“It’s okay,” I said. I was relieved. I felt sure that this interlude, my night in Stretch’s bed, shouldn’t overlap with my next destination.

“Do you think you might come through here?” he asked. “I mean, ever again?”

I looked at the crates of tools and the jumbled stack of the owner’s son’s bicycle collection, some of them in good condition and others rusted skeletons with fused chains, perhaps saved simply because he had ample storage space in poor Stretch’s room. I thought about Stretch having to sit in a parking lot all night instead of lie in his own bed, and I swear, I almost decided to sleep with him. I saw our life, Stretch done with a day’s work, covered with plaster dust, or clean, pulling tube socks up over his long, tapered calves. The little episodes of rudeness and grace he’d been dealt and then would replay in miniature with me.

I stood up and collected my helmet and gloves and said I probably wouldn’t be back anytime soon. And then I hugged him, said thanks.

He said he might need to go take another shower, a cold one, and somehow the comment was sweet instead of distasteful.

Later, what I remembered most was the way he’d said my name. He said it like he believed he knew me.