The bikers I spent three decades trying to run out of the neighborhood were standing in my kitchen at 7 AM, and one of them was cooking my breakfast.

I was seventy-nine years old, dying of stage four cancer, and I hadn’t eaten a real meal in six days. The smell of eggs and bacon made my stomach growl for the first time in weeks, but that wasn’t what made me cry.

It was the way the tattooed man with the beard checked the temperature of my coffee before he brought it to me, making sure it wasn’t too hot for my mouth sores.

It was the way his friend was quietly washing my dishes, the ones that had been piling up for two weeks because I couldn’t stand long enough to clean them anymore.

It was the way they moved through my kitchen like they’d done this before, like taking care of a dying old woman who’d spent thirty years hating them was just something they did on Tuesday mornings. Continues…