A bike ride taking hours; hills beyond the city limits—hills gilded in sunrise; hills like that picture in her son's Book of Mormon showing the Hill Cummorah where, according to the myth, these imaginary plates were once buried; hills like that idyllic Hill that recently provoked her to say that she would rather have him study a dirty magazine than these man made scriptures; the idea, as the wind blew through her hair and massaged her skin, that physical delusions were less deleterious than mental ones; the coolness of wind blowing in her face; the silent splendor of the ride; the hat blowing off her head; halted peddling to find it; the potholes and sharp rocks of rural roads; running over some type of shard; and then there was that flat tire. She walked the bicycle for an hour before finally coming across a filling station. A worker told her that he would patch her inner tube for twenty dollars. She called him a capitalistic pig. He pointed to her long, ostentatious diamond earrings and asked her what she thought that she was. Then there was an awareness that she knew that she was that too. A fixed bicycle; slapping against the winds within her movement; a new conviction to simplify her life; a rest at a convenience store; coins into the slot of the newspaper vending machine; headlines of a man in Albany who shot his wife's lover, his wife, the children, and then himself; headlines of an overworked postal employee from Albany who began to shoot people in the queue so as to reduce the amount of packages submitted into his window; a nice elderly woman smiling at her like sunshine and asking how she was but Gabriele's cold eyes turned her to ice; an awareness of having wronged the woman, a compunction, and a recalled analogy that she was that stuffed polar bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created; an elderly man wanting to change her quarter into two dimes and a nickel for the newspaper vending machine but Gabriele's cold eyes turned him into ice sculpture until he came to himself and quickly fled from the witch; and then at last a return home. Her son was there, brandishing his BB gun in late morning.
"Morning soldier! Aren't you a little old for this thing?" she asked as she got off her bicycle.
"Yes. Give me the real thing and this kid's gun can go into the trash," he said.
"No can do," she said, "or matches to an arsonist."
"I'm not an arsonist. It was an accident."
"I wouldn't know. I wasn't at your Aunt Peggy's."
"No, you were in Japan, weren't you? Where have you been?"
"Riding. It is a beautiful morning. Good exercise. And I was thinking: you know, we are living beyond our means. I've decided to sell the house. We'll look for a smaller place and we'll have money to travel around from time to time. You'll get to see other places. Maybe you'll get to see Japan too."
"You do that and I'll be gone."
"Gone? Gone where? Peggy would never take you back."