Megan demonstrated a comfort with urinating outside since joining the Saturday bike group. The rides were all-morning, forty- or fifty-mile adventures, and though bathroom breaks were regularly built into each of the many different routes that the group rode, if Megan was caught between bathroom stops, she was quite comfortable with asking a fellow biker to lookout for her while she relieved herself in the cover of bushes at the side of the bike trail, or at the edge of a deserted parking lot.
She was a sprightly, petite, firecracker of a fifty-two year old, with more energy than many in the bike group had when they were twenty-two; a time in the distant past for all in the regular assortment of urban and suburban cyclopaths who frequented the Saturday Morning Moderate Group Ride.
Often wearing a neon-pink bike jersey, or other attire than enhanced the undeniable femininity of her casual triathlete's body, Megan sought-out and converted the other members of the bike group into friendship with the ease that only the youngest child from a conservative, midwestern family of ten children in the pre-internet-era could have learned or mustered.
Megan was often late, and so one morning in the heavy heat of late August, she rumbled in several minutes after the appointed start time, gratified to see that the group had not yet left.
Stan and Bobby were there, and Megan smiled and waved to them from her Lexus crossover that she sped recklessly into the local park's parking lot, recklessly but safely given the parking lot's emptiness so early on so hot of a later summer morning.
"Hi guys you are so sweet to wait for me!" Megan bubbled in perfect narcissist good mornings. "I'm so sorry I'm late, I'm such a ditz." Megan climbed down from her Lexus and started pulling her bike off the crossover's rear bike rack.
"Did I say that right, 'Ditz'?" Megan asked again to Stan and Bobby.
"Ditz," Bobby agreed, with a smile and good cheer. "You got it right."
Stan chuckled.
"Okay I'mma hurry, you guys are always so patient with me I don't wanna hold you up any more," Megan called to them as she fixed her bike into readiness and fixed her car into secureness and fixed her bike kit on her into neon-pink feminine strength and adorableness.
"No rush," called Stan. "They say the day's not gonna get much hotter than this."
"Where is everybody else?" Megan asked when she was ready to ride.
"Vacations, trips," Stan said.
"Too scared of the heat," Bobby added.
"What's your husband doing today? What's he up to?" Stan asked Megan.
"Oh, he's golfing already," Megan said. "Colin goes out in any weather except thunderstorms."
"Hardcore," Bobby observed.
"Sure," Megan said, and then Stan started that Saturday's ride.
There was small talk and complaining about the heat and humidity and the August blahs as they made their way down Orange Grove Boulevard to the long sloping roads down the valley, to the rivers. Sleepy and empty of traffic, empty of all but the most serious and most serene, the wide streets were safe and easy for bicyclists to clock fast speeds for most of the way.
But they had only gone ten miles when Megan spoke up.