“Does Brent make you wear sunglasses in the house too?”
My son Cody was seven, and he asked it across a Monday plate of fish sticks, three weeks after we buried his grandma Irene and two days before FOURTEEN motorcycles backed into the courthouse lot in Carthage.
I set my fork down and asked him what he meant, the way you’d ask about a spelling word.
He said his mother wore them all weekend, in the kitchen, with the blinds shut.
Then he went back to his fish sticks.
Irene’s husband Walt left behind the one thing her family had ever FOUGHT over, a 1979 Shovelhead Harley under a blue tarp in her carport.
Tammy and her brother Glenn hadn’t spoken in six years over that bike.
Tammy and Brent had moved in with Irene the spring before, to look after her.
The morning after the funeral, the tarp was folded square on the lawn chair and the bike was gone.
Brent was riding it to the tire shop. “Tammy gets the house,” he said. “The bike comes with the carport.”
I said nothing. I had a seven-year-old’s question, and a lawyer who’d told me a question wasn’t proof.
Tammy said Cody made things up. Her hand went to the doorframe when Brent’s truck came up the gravel too fast.
The will reading was two days after the fish sticks, in a room off the probate clerk’s window, and Cody was named in it, so I brought him.
Brent took the chair by the window with the Harley key on his belt loop.
Then the engines came up the street, one and then a string of them.
FOURTEEN riders from Irene’s club came up the stairs with their helmets under their arms and filled the hallway.
The front one had a gray beard, seventy maybe, and took his cap off in the doorway.
He held out an envelope. Brent’s name was on the outside in Irene’s handwriting.
“She told me you’d be the one on Walt’s bike,” he said.
Brent laughed and took it. “Title,” he said. “About time.”
He tore it open with all of us watching, Tammy and Glenn and the clerk, and Cody holding a fistful of my sleeve.
He read four lines.
The color went out of him from the forehead down.
“She was in the back room,” he said. “She COULDN’T HAVE SEEN THAT.”
Tammy put both hands flat on the table.
The rider didn’t move from the door. “Keep going, son,” he said. “She wrote the next one for the room.”
The Fifth Line
Brent didn’t read it.
He turned the page face down on the table and spread his whole hand on top of it, the way you’d hold a map down in wind.
“She didn’t know what day it was,” he said. “The last month, she called me Walt.”
Tammy slid the page out from under his hand. He let her. I don’t think he knew he’d let her until it was done.
She read the fifth line standing up, to the whole room, in the voice she used for reading Cody the lunch menu off the fridge.
“The notebook is in Hank Voyles’s saddlebag, and it goes to Cody’s father, who will read it to the last page.”
Then she folded the letter once and sat back down.
The clerk capped her pen. Glenn looked at the window. Cody let go of my sleeve and took hold of it again, higher up, near the elbow.
The rider in the doorway put his cap back on.
“Hank,” he said, and reached across two chairs to shake my hand. “I rode with Irene since before you could drive.”
His palm had a ridge of callus straight across it, right where a clutch lever sits.
The clerk read the will after that, in the same flat voice she’d have used for a water bill. It said about the bike what the letter said. The Shovelhead was Cody’s. The house and what was in it went to Tammy and Glenn, down the middle.
Glenn made a sound in his throat at that part. Tammy didn’t look at him.
Brent never said another word in that room. He sat with the key on his belt loop and his thumb going around the ring, around and around, like he was winding something.
When it was over, the riders went down the stairs ahead of us and stood by their bikes in the lot with their helmets resting on the seats.
Walt’s Harley was at the far end, parked crooked across two spaces where Brent had left it that morning.
Brent walked right past it. He got in the passenger side of Tammy’s truck and shut the door, and Tammy drove them out of the lot without looking at the bike or at me.
The key went with him.
“She’ll keep here tonight,” Hank said, looking at the Shovelhead. “A couple of us will sit with her. We’ll bring a trailer in the morning.”
Cody stood against my leg and looked at the fourteen bikes the way he looks at fire trucks.
Hank’s own bike was an old Road King with leather saddlebags gone gray at the corners. He unbuckled the left one and took out a spiral notebook sealed in a bread bag, the bag knotted at the top. It was the fat kind, the kind with a cardboard back.
“She wrote in it after the house went quiet,” he said. “She had me buy her the thickest one they had. I never read a line. I only carried it.”
He put it in my hands. It was heavier than a notebook ought to be.
“She said you’d want to skip page thirty,” he said. “Don’t.”
The Blue Tarp
I met Walt when I was nineteen and dating his daughter, and the first thing he ever did was hand me a rag.
The Shovelhead was up on its stand in the carport with the primary cover off, and he wanted to see if I’d wipe my hands before I touched anything. I did. He decided I’d do.
That summer he taught me to ride it in the gravel lot behind the feed store, walking alongside me with a cigarette in his mouth and his hand flat on the back of the seat.
He never let Glenn ride it. Glenn was sixteen and fast with everything he touched, and Walt said so, to his face, more than once.
Walt died the winter Cody was born, in his chair, with a ballgame on.
Irene put the blue tarp over the bike the week after the funeral and tied it down at all four corners. She said nobody was riding it and nobody was selling it.
Glenn wanted to ride it. Tammy wanted to sell it and put the money into the roof. They said things to each other across Irene’s kitchen table that a person can’t take back, and one of them was about Walt, and after that neither one picked up the phone.
It went on six years.
Irene kept the tarp tied down. At Thanksgiving she set Glenn’s plate at one end of the table and Tammy’s at the other, and ate in the middle.
Tammy and I split when Cody was three. It wasn’t loud. We ran out of things to say to each other at the same table, and one of us noticed first.
I got every other weekend, Monday suppers and my name on the pickup list at school. That was the arrangement. I kept it, and I didn’t ask about anything else.
Irene rode with her club till she was seventy-four. Retired people, mostly, who ran a toy drive every December and led funeral processions up the hill to the cemetery when a family asked. She made them chili every fall in a roaster the size of a washtub.
Brent came along two years ago. He changed tires at the shop out on the bypass. He had a laugh you could hear from the road, and the first time I met him he called me buddy and held onto my hand a second too long.
When Irene got sick, Tammy moved back into her mother’s house to look after her, and Brent came with the boxes.
I know that house. The hallway runs straight back from the kitchen, three doors. Cody’s room is the middle one. Irene’s was at the end.
Her door never latched. The whole house had settled toward the creek, and Walt had been meaning to plane that door for thirty years.
April 9, Irene called me at work.
I was on the counter at the farm supply, ringing up a man who wanted mineral blocks and a pair of gloves in a size we didn’t carry. I tucked the phone against my shoulder.
“I wish you’d come have supper some night,” she said. “Some night when Brent’s home.”
I said I’d think about it.
She waited. I could hear her TV, and something clicking on her side of the line, steady, like a turn signal.
“The boy asks about you,” she said.
I told her I’d see Cody Monday like always.
I told her the house wasn’t my business anymore.
Eleven Months of Hallway
I read it in the truck in the courthouse lot, with Cody in his booster seat behind me working on a juice box and the riders standing around Walt’s bike like it was a horse that had come up lame.
Irene wrote in pencil. Every entry had a date and a time, and most of them weren’t longer than a line.
“11:40. Truck in.”
“Kitchen. Loud. T. in the hall.”
“T. in the doorway of the boy’s room. Stayed there till after one.”
“T. wore the sunglasses to the pharmacy.”
“Boy’s light on at 2:15. T. on the floor outside his door.”
Some nights she only wrote “quiet,” and underlined it twice, like she’d earned it.
Irene never wrote what she heard through her door. She wrote where Tammy was standing.
I read the doorway line again. Then I looked in the mirror at Cody, who had his thumb over the straw and was squeezing the box to make the juice go up and down.
Hank tapped on my window. I rolled it down.
“Some of us could follow you home,” he said.
I thanked him and said I was fine.
The arrangement said Cody went back to his mother’s by six. I drove him to Irene’s house at ten till, with the notebook on the seat between us under my jacket.
Tammy was on the porch. Brent’s truck was in the carport, in the spot where the bike used to be. The lawn chair was still by the kitchen door, and the tarp was gone off it.
Cody got out and went up the steps with his backpack dragging on one strap. Tammy put her hand on the back of his head as he went by her, and she didn’t look at me. She had the sunglasses pushed up in her hair.
I sat there with the engine running until the porch light came on.
Then I drove home.
I went through the notebook at my kitchen counter from the front, page by page, and kept a tally on the back of a feed-store receipt.
The notebook had an entry for 212 nights.
T. was in the doorway on eighty-one of them.
The sunglasses showed up eleven times, once at church.
I folded the receipt and put it in my wallet, behind my license.
My phone buzzed on the counter at 9:52.
“Don’t come Monday,” Tammy wrote. “He says you’re done.”
April 9
Page thirty was near the front. I’d turned past it that first night without reading it, the way you step over a board you know is loose.
After Tammy’s text I went back.
It was the only page in the notebook that wasn’t about the hallway.
“April 9. Called the boy’s father. He said the house isn’t his business anymore. I’ll keep writing till it is.”
The refrigerator cycled on, ran, and cycled off. I sat there through it twice.
Irene had written it the way I’d said it. She hadn’t made it any worse.
Monday came. I bought fish sticks on the way home from work anyhow, and at five-thirty I drove out to the end of Irene’s road and sat in the truck by the mailbox with the bag going cold on the seat.
I didn’t turn in. I could see the kitchen light, and the blinds down.
Sheila Moss had her office over a dentist on the square, up a flight of stairs that smelled like cloves.
She was the lawyer who’d told me on the phone that a seven-year-old’s question at supper wasn’t proof. Courts want proof, she’d told me. Be patient.
I set the bread bag on her desk and told her who Hank was and how I’d come to have it.
She read for forty minutes without looking up. I sat in the chair across from her and counted the ceiling tiles, and then I counted them again the other way.
Then she asked for a retainer. I wrote her a check for $1,200, which was the truck payment and most of the light bill.
“This is more than a comment at supper,” she said.
She turned back to page thirty. I’d folded the corner down so I’d quit avoiding it, and the notebook opened there on its own.
She read it. She looked at me over the top of it.
“This one’s about you,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Anybody who reads this notebook reads this page too.”
“I know.”
She said she could copy every page but that one. She said the notebook told everything it needed to about that hallway without page thirty in it. She said it the way you’d offer somebody a chair.
Across the square the courthouse clock did the half hour.
“Keep it in,” I said.
Irene’s Porch
Hank’s number was on a card paper-clipped inside the notebook’s back cover. Irene had written on it in pencil: “Hank. He’ll come.”
I called him that night.
“Brent’s at the shop till four on Wednesdays,” I said. “I’m going out there at noon. I don’t need anybody in the yard.”
“We won’t be in the yard,” Hank said. “We’ll be on the road with the engines off.”
Sheila filed the next morning with every page in it, page thirty too. I drove out to Irene’s at noon.
They were on the shoulder when I turned onto the gravel, fourteen bikes nose to tail beside the ditch, the riders standing next to them with their hands in their vest pockets like men waiting on a train. Hank lifted two fingers off his handlebar as I went by.
That was the whole greeting.
Tammy opened the door in the sunglasses.
I didn’t go in. I sat on the top step with the notebook on my knees, and she stood in the doorway with the screen door propped against her shoulder.
I didn’t read her all of it. I read her the doorway ones.
“T. in the doorway of the boy’s room. Stayed there till after one.”
“T. on the floor outside his door at 2:15.”
“T. in the doorway again. Third night running.”
Her hand went up to the doorframe beside her head, the way it had the day Brent’s truck came up the gravel too fast. It stayed there this time. Her thumb pressed a dent into the old paint.
“She wrote that down?” she said.
“Every one of them.”
“She was supposed to be asleep.”
“Her door never latched,” I said.
Tammy looked past me at the road, at the fourteen of them standing in the ditch grass in the sun.
I told her Sheila had filed that morning. I told her it was all in there, page thirty too, and I told her what page thirty said, because she was going to read it one day anyway.
Then I told her there was a bedroom at my apartment with a bed in it, and it was hers and Cody’s for as long as it took, and I’d sleep on the couch.
She didn’t say anything. She went inside and let the screen door shut behind her.
I heard drawers. I heard the closet in the middle room, the one with the slider that sticks.
She came back out with a laundry basket of Cody’s clothes on her hip and his backpack over her arm, and the sunglasses still on.
It was twelve-forty.
Then Brent’s truck came up the gravel too fast.
Walt’s Key
He parked with two wheels in Irene’s flower bed and came out of the truck already talking.
“Brought them out here, did you?” he said, pointing at the road. “To a dead woman’s house? A bunch of bikers in the ditch like it’s a funeral?”
The riders hadn’t moved off the shoulder.
“A church-supper club,” Brent said. “I hauled their chili roaster for her every fall. Loaded it, unloaded it, washed it out in the yard with the hose.”
He said Irene didn’t know what day it was by the end. He said she called him Walt. He said he’d put a carburetor kit in that bike with his own money, $180, and a new battery, and nobody had thanked him for that either.
He said the house had a roof over it because of him. He said he’d cleaned the gutters and fixed the back step and sat up with her the nights she couldn’t get her breath. He said where was I in April, when the gutters came down. Where was I.
I didn’t answer that one.
He said Tammy wasn’t going anywhere. He said it to me, and then he said it up the steps to her, and she stood in the doorway with the basket on her hip and didn’t set it down.
He said a notebook was a notebook. He said anybody could write anything in pencil. He said he’d tell whoever asked that the old woman was out of her head at the end, and the pharmacy would back him up, all those bottles.
“Tammy,” he said. “Put that down and get in the house.”
She came down the steps with the basket.
He took one step toward her across the grass.
By the ditch, fourteen riders stepped off the shoulder onto the gravel, all at once, the same half step, and stopped there.
That was all they did.
Brent looked at them a long while. The fourteen of them didn’t say a word.
Hank came up the drive then, by himself, walking the way a man his age walks on loose gravel, and stopped at the bottom of the steps. He held his hand out, palm up, the callus showing.
“The key, son,” he said. “Walt’s.”
Brent said a lot of things then. He said it was his. He said he’d earned it. He said where Hank could go. He said some things about Irene I’m not going to write down.
Then he worked the ring off his belt loop, his thumb catching on it twice, and threw it into the gravel at Hank’s boots.
Hank bent for it slow, one hand on his knee.
“Thank you,” he said.
Brent stood in the flower bed. “She was in the back room,” he said, to nobody in particular. “She didn’t see a thing.”
Tammy put the basket in the bed of my truck.
“She heard the door,” she said.
We went to the school and got Cody out of class early.
The fourteen of them rode behind my truck into town at thirty-five, and not one of them passed.
Fish Sticks, Monday
Hank brought Walt’s bike to my apartment on a trailer that weekend and backed it into the space beside my truck. Glenn came the same afternoon with Irene’s lawn chair and the blue tarp folded square in the seat of it.
He and Tammy stood on the landing outside my door for twenty minutes. I stayed inside and ran the water so I wouldn’t hear. When he left, she came in and washed her face at my kitchen sink.
The hearing is in November. Sheila says it will take what it takes.
Page thirty is in the file with my name on it, and it stays there.
I’ve slept on that couch nineteen nights. My feet hang off the arm. The truck payment went in late, and the light bill after it.
Monday I made fish sticks.
Tammy set the table the way her mother did, with the plates a little too close to the edge. Cody ate all of his and half of hers and asked for more ketchup.
Her sunglasses were up on top of my refrigerator, folded, where she’d put them the first night. She hasn’t taken them down. I haven’t said anything about them, and she hasn’t either.
After supper Cody stood at the window looking down at the lot.
“Is it okay if I sit on it?” he said.
Tammy looked at me.
“Yes,” I said.
We went down together. I untied the tarp at the four corners, the way Irene had tied it, and folded it back off the seat. Cody climbed on and put both hands on the grips. His feet didn’t reach the pegs.
I stood beside him with my hand flat on the back of the seat.
Tammy stood on the bottom step of the stairs with her arms folded, in the sun, and watched him not reach the pegs.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who keeps a notebook nobody asked them to keep.
If you’re looking for more stories about family, loss, and the ties that bind us, you might like to read about My Sister Had Known Since Labor Day, and Kyle Was Driving Her Over or even Wade’s Mom Handed Me Her List on an Index Card at My Shower. And for another dose of courtroom drama, check out The Custody Hearing Was Set for Ten, and Kaylee Was Still on His Hip.
