Page 2 of Road Queens
“You’re wrong.”
“I’m right.”
“You’re wrong, and you should just sit there and simmer in your wrongness and accept being wrong, because you’re super-duper wrong.”
“But—ow.”
Amanda Miller brandished the pen cup at her favorite customer. “Plenty more to throw where that came from.”
Dave Conner: indie bookshop aficionado, golf handicap of sixteen, tall women his kryptonite. “Y’know, some people go to their local bookstore every week and never get hit with anything.”
“Then it’s not a real bookstore.” Amanda Miller: proprietress of the Hobbit Hole, ride-or-die enthusiast, terrible basketball player. “And that’s what you get for casting doubt upon my tale.”
“I’m not—ah!—casting doubt.” Dave dropped his left shoulder, and the pen sailed over it. “I just don’t buy into your theory that all things motorcycle have always been—ah!—misunderstood.”
“Listen. The first motorcycle wasn’t even a motorcycle, it was a velocipede.”
“See, you’ve already lost me.”
“Shut up, please. Anyway, the inventor, a fine fellow named Pierre Lallement, called it the ‘boneshaker,’ possibly because it didn’t have brakes. Not that this deterred him in the slightest, because like all riders, he—”
“—had more nerve than brains?”
“Okay, that might be a fair point. Anyway, he was test-driving the thing down a hill—”
“With no brakes. My point stands.”
“Shush! Y’know, sixty years ago, you’d have been one of the people who insisted we’d never make it to the moon. Anyway, he realized he was about to smash into a horse-drawn wagon, so he bailed into a ditch. And the guys he almost hit, they took off running.”
“With or without the horses? Or the carriage?”
“How the hell should I know? Could you not get me mired in minutiae?”
“I ... think so?”
“Anyway, Lallement struggles out of the water-filled ditch that probably saved his life and limps into town and goes right for the tavern.”
“Understandable.”
“Who wouldn’t want two or five shots of rum after the morning he had? Here comes the best part: the men he nearly crunched beat him to the tavern and were in the middle of describing the first motorcycle and the first motorcycle rider as—get this ...” She picked upDriving Bitch: A History of Female Motorcycle Riders. “‘A dark Devil, with human head and body half like a snake, and half like a bird, just hovering above the ground which he seemed no way to touch.’”
Dave blinked. “They thought he and his bike were Satan.”
“Yes! And it stuck. Not just to Lallement. To bikers of all stripes. From day one, we were crazy and misunderstood.”
“Y’know, I really only came in to pick up the newGolf Digest.”
“Which you may have, not that you need it,andyou got a fabulous history lesson. No need to thank me. Though it would be nice.” She handed over the magazine. “Still looking for the One?”
“There’s a putter out there for everyone,” Dave replied, already flipping through the magazine. “And I will find mine.”
“Still can’t believe you went from zero toOh my God, I misplaced my range finderin five months.”
“Thought it was silly, all that putzing around with a little ball in rich people’s backyards. Hell, I’ve been on jobsites right next to golf courses, and I couldn’t believe some of the assholes walking around in pastels—”
“Don’t shade shame.”
“—and barfing Bloody Marys.”
