In this amusing, insightful, and nuanced memoir about building a new relationship in middle age, a tandem bike is both character and metaphor. The bike offers the new couple an ongoing physical challenge and an arena that requires cooperation and negotiation to assemble a new marriage on the detritus of multiple divorces, breakups, and a death. An entertaining meditation on coupling and the mechanics of bikes. It captures the complexity of creating a durable twosome while maintaining individuality, the convoluted art of integrating personal responsibility and shared accountability, and the need to not just negotiate but welcome differences when established adult lives are merged. All this occurs as two people suffer to push themselves and thirty-five pounds of bike up long hills, avoid encounters with a bike's most dangerous predators (cars), and learn to lean together into the curves life throws at them.
