kept asking if I was cold, if the helmet wasn’t too heavy.
I learned that he had been decorated for an intervention in which he saved two children from a burning apartment. That he volunteered to combat the isolation of elderly people. That he still did odd jobs for his neighbors “because his hands needed to be used for something.”
He fixed the leaky tap in my bathroom, changed the batteries in my smoke detector, and checked my heating system before winter.
“That’s what the family is supposed to do, isn’t it?” he said, shrugging his shoulders.
Sophie, for her part, came the same evening as our motorcycle trip, with a stack of brochures about nursing homes.
“Mom,” she began, “do you realize you followed a stranger on a motorcycle? You’re no longer in a state to decide for yourself, it’s not reasonable.”
