For eleven years my own dispatcher called me Late Fee over the night radio, and every driver in three counties picked it up. “Return the damn book, Late Fee, it’s been due since Reagan,” he said once, with half the channel laughing. Then at 2:10 one Tuesday, a girl in pajamas walked up to my wrecker and tugged my sleeve.
“That man by the van isn’t my dad,” she said.
She said it to the dryers.
She was about eight, in long pajamas with little cartoon pancakes all over them and pink flip-flops two sizes too big.
I was at the coin laundry on Fourth Street in Kittanning, folding work shirts between calls, my wrecker idling at the curb with the book on the dash where it always sat.
Dryer six has eaten quarters since 2019. Nobody fixes it.
Out the front window a man in a gray hoodie leaned on a white van with no hubcaps, thumbing his phone, one sneaker up on the bumper.
“Where’s your dad, sweetheart?” I said.
“My dad doesn’t have a van.”
That was all she gave me.
Then she asked if the claw on my truck could pick up a whole car.
Florence, who has run the overnight counter since before I could drive, set her mop against the change machine and looked at me over her glasses.
“Wendy,” she said, and nothing else.
The nursing student in the corner, folding blue scrubs, took one earbud out.
Then the man came in.
He was maybe thirty-five, clean white sneakers, a smile that got there before he did.
“Let’s go, bug,” he said. “Your mom’s waiting at the hotel.”
The girl didn’t move. She put one hand flat on my dryer like it was base in a game of tag.
“What’s her name?” I said.
He looked at me for the first time. “Excuse me?”
“Your daughter. What’s her name.”
His eyes went to the little purple backpack on her shoulders first, where somebody had stitched a name in thread across the flap.
“Annabelle,” he said.
She didn’t look up.
“I’m Cory,” he said to Florence, like she managed something. “I’m her father. Is there a problem here?”
Florence said there wasn’t any problem at all and picked her phone up off the counter.
He saw that.
He said he’d grab her shoes from the van and went back out.
She was already wearing shoes.
I’ve hooked enough cars outside enough motels at that hour to know what a man does when a phone comes out. He starts the engine.
So I went out the side door.
I backed the wrecker across the tail of his van with my ambers going and set the brake.
He had a way out the front if he jumped the curb and took the planter with him. He hadn’t figured that out yet.
He slapped my window with an open palm.
“MOVE YOUR TRUCK, LADY,” he said.
I picked up the radio instead.
Inside, Florence had 911 on the line. County said twenty-five minutes. At two in the morning out here, everything is twenty-five minutes.
“This is Late Fee on Fourth Street at the laundromat,” I said. “I need somebody close. I’ve got a girl in pajamas and a van that isn’t hers.”
Jared came right back.
“Late Fee’s doing laundry with a library book,” he said. “Somebody see if she’s OVERDUE on her quarters.”
Two drivers laughed on the open channel.
I’d have cried if I’d had the time.
Then a voice I didn’t know came on, low, with road noise under it.
“Say your handle again.”
“Late Fee,” I said.
Static.
“The tow lady from 422? With the shop manual?”
My stomach went through the seat.
In 2015 I’d picked a bagger up off the shoulder of 422 after its rider laid it down in loose gravel. He walked away sore and mad and rode forty minutes to the shop in my cab.
He left a library book on my seat. A motorcycle repair manual, cloth cover, the due-date card in the back stamped MARCH 1987.
When I called him he laughed. “It’s twenty-eight years late already,” he said. “Hang onto it. I’ll come get it off you.”
He never came. NOT ONCE.
So it rode on my dash eleven years, and I wouldn’t take it back to the library, because it wasn’t mine to take back.
That was the whole joke. That was what the radio thought was so funny.
“That’s me,” I said.
“Keep him there,” the voice said. “We’re eight minutes out.”
Jared said, “Who the hell was that?”
Nobody answered him.
Cory got in the van and turned it over. He rolled forward a foot. Back. Forward. Measuring the curb.
Inside, the girl had climbed onto Florence’s stool behind the counter, and Florence stood in front of it holding the mop like a hockey stick.
“Hamza, honey, lock that door,” Florence said.
Hamza locked it and stood behind the glass with his phone up.
I heard them before I saw them.
A sound coming up Fourth Street like weather.
Headlights, two by two. I count everything I might have to write on a ticket.
THIRTEEN motorcycles.
They didn’t race in. They rolled up slow and backed in along the curb on both sides of that van, rear tires to the concrete, until a bike sat square in front of the planter.
Nobody revved anything. Nobody got off fast.
The first one off was about sixty, a silver beard cut close, old faded ink down both arms. He walked past Cory’s window without looking in it and came straight to mine.
“You still got it?” he said.
I handed him the book through the window.
He opened the back cover to the card in its paper pocket and ran his thumb down the names written there in pencil, one under another.
“Dean Roach,” he said. “Last name on the card. He told that story at every campfire for ten years. The tow lady holding his book for ransom.”
“Where is he?” I said.
“We buried him in April.”
Cory had his door open now, one foot on the street.
“This is a family matter,” he said. “I’ve got custody papers in the van.”
The silver-bearded man didn’t turn around. Earl, I’d learn later.
“Then go get them,” Earl said.
Florence unlocked the door. I don’t know why. Maybe the girl asked.
She came out in those pink flip-flops and walked straight past Cory to Earl and looked at the book open in his hands.
She read the card upside down.
“That’s Grandpa’s writing,” she said.
Earl went very still.
“Bug,” Cory said. “GET IN THE VAN. NOW.”
And the side door of the van rolled open from the inside.
Bare feet
A woman climbed down out of the dark in her bare feet.
She was around forty, in a motel bathrobe over jeans, hair pulled through a scrunchie, a lit cigarette held out to the side like that made it fine.
“Bug, come here,” she said. “It’s okay. Mommy’s right here.”
Annabelle didn’t move off the sidewalk. She looked at the woman the way you look at a dog somebody swears is friendly.
“That’s my mom,” she said.
She said it to Earl.
I got down out of the cab and stood at the van’s back corner, between that open door and the girl, with my flashlight in my hand and switched off. Thirty-one years on the roadside and I still don’t own anything heavier.
Earl closed the book on his thumb.
“Hello, Rena,” he said.
“Earl.” She smiled at him like he’d brought a casserole. “You came all this way for us. Dad would be so happy.”
“Where’s Kabir?”
Her smile didn’t move at all.
The tow ticket
Earl opened the book again, and the pink copy of my tow ticket slid out of the back where I’d kept it as a bookmark since 2015.
Dean had filled it out himself on my clipboard that night, because his hands needed something to do. DEAN ROACH. His number. All of it in capitals, pressed so hard the pen went through to the yellow copy.
I’d teased him about it. He said he quit school at fourteen to work the tannery and nobody ever made him learn cursive.
“Signed my marriage license like a ransom note,” he said. “Wife about killed me.”
The whole forty minutes he talked about his girl. She’d taken his pickup again, that was why he was out on 422 at midnight on a bike he had no business riding in the dark. He wasn’t mad. He sounded like a man who’d done that drive a lot of times.
Then he leaned over to look at my mirror at the wheel-lift folded up behind us.
“How much can that thing pick up?”
“A whole car, if I want it to,” I said.
He laughed so hard he grabbed his ribs.
Now Earl tucked the ticket back where it went and handed the book to me without a word.
Annabelle pulled her backpack around front and flipped up the purple flap with her name on it. On the underside, somebody had written a phone number in black marker, big and careful.
“That’s my dad,” she said.
Channel nineteen
“Cory’s my fiancé,” Rena said, to all of us. “He says father because people get weird. We’re going to the Comfort Inn in Indiana and she had to pee, so I let her in to use the bathroom. That’s the big crime.”
“I told you,” Cory said, to nobody.
I keyed the radio and asked Jared to patch me to county.
He didn’t. He came back on his own.
“Late Fee, county just rang me direct,” he said. There was no laugh in it. “The mother’s on scene, it’s civil, they’re downgrading. You’re blocking a mother’s vehicle with a county-rotation truck. Get off it or I take you off the list. I mean it this time.”
That list is about sixty percent of what I make in a year.
“She’s got thirteen bikers around her van,” Jared said. “How’s that going to read?”
Florence came out with her mop still in her hand.
“You move that truck,” she said to me, “and don’t bother coming back in here for quarters.”
Rena flicked her cigarette into the gutter and stepped toward Annabelle with her hand out, soft, the way you’d reach for a cat.
Annabelle stepped behind Earl’s leg.
“Really?” Rena said. She pointed at Hamza behind the glass. “You’re going to stand between a mother and her child with a camera on you? That’s what you want on the internet, Earl?”
Two of the riders took a half step back.
Earl didn’t.
So I tried it the reasonable way. I told Rena nobody had to do anything but wait for the deputy, and when he came, she could show him whatever she had.
“Fine,” she said. “Happy to.”
Then she looked at Cory, and Cory put the van in drive and nosed it at the planter until his bumper kissed the front tire of the bike parked there. The rider on it didn’t get off. He just put his boots down.
Rena went around to the passenger side and came back holding a manila envelope.
Ford City
She didn’t open it yet. She held it against her bathrobe with both arms, like it was cold out.
I dialed the number off the backpack. It rang six times.
“Yeah,” a man said. Asleep.
“Is this Kabir?”
“Who is this?”
I told him who I was and where I was, and that I was standing next to his daughter.
“No,” he said. “She’s in bed. I put her down at nine-thirty.”
“Sir.”
“Hold on.”
I put him on speaker. I don’t know why I did. We all stood on that sidewalk and listened to a man walk down a hallway in Ford City in his socks. A door. A light switch.
Then nothing for a long time.
“Bug?” he said, in the room, not to us.
Rena said, “Hang that up.”
“Her window’s open,” he said.
Annabelle looked at her flip-flops. They were his, I’d find out. The first thing by the window.
“Rena hasn’t had custody since Annabelle was two,” Kabir said, and he was moving now, I could hear keys. “Dean had her, and Dean put me back in it before he passed. She’s mine. There’s a protective order. Put Rena on.”
Rena didn’t take the phone.
“He’s lying,” she said. “Dad signed her over to me in March. I’ve got it right here.”
“I’m twenty minutes out,” Kabir said. “Don’t you let her in that van.”
Capital letters
Rena opened the envelope and held out one sheet to Earl, not to me.
“Read it,” she said. “Notarized. Temporary guardianship to me if anything happened to him. He knew he was sick. He wanted her with her mother.”
Earl held it out toward me without looking, and I clicked my flashlight on over it.
It looked right. A stamp. A notary’s seal that might’ve been real. Typed lines about the best interests of the minor child.
And at the bottom, in blue ink, a signature that went across the line in loops, slanted like somebody’s grandmother wrote it.
Dean A. Roach.
Annabelle got up on her toes in those big flip-flops and looked.
“That’s not Grandpa,” she said.
“Baby, it’s his name,” Rena said.
“Grandpa doesn’t do the curly kind.” She said it like everybody knew. “He said that’s for people with nice pens.”
Earl opened the book in my other hand to the card in the back, and put his finger under the last line on it. DEAN ROACH, in pencil, in capitals, under some 1986 kid’s name.
I slid out the pink tow ticket and held it next to the guardianship paper in the flashlight.
DEAN ROACH. Pressed through to the yellow.
“He signed his wedding license in block letters, Rena,” Earl said. “You were at the second one. You were the flower girl.”
Rena took the sheet back out of the light.
Annabelle was still looking at me.
“Grandpa said if you’re ever lost, find a tow truck, because they’re up all night and they know everybody,” she said. “And they can pick up a whole car.”
She looked at the white van.
“Can it pick up that one?”
The wheel-lift
“Cory, go,” Rena said. “Just go, go around them.”
There was no around. Cory knew it. He revved it anyway and the front bike rocked on its stand.
I walked back to my truck.
An old Chevy Express is rear-wheel drive. Most people don’t know that about their own van. I dropped the wheel-lift, ran it under his back tires and took them up off Fourth Street about four inches.
Cory floored it. The back wheels spun in the air and screamed and went nowhere.
My radio was already going.
“Late Fee, you just lifted a civilian vehicle with no call number,” Jared said. “Do you hear me? You’re DONE. You’re off county as of right now.”
I keyed it.
“Log it, Jared. Two thirty-four, Fourth Street.”
Rena came at me then, not at the girl, which I’ll give her.
“Who do you think you are?” she said. “You’re a joke on a CB. Everybody in three counties knows that. He didn’t leave that book in your truck for some reason, he forgot it. He forgot everything at the end. He forgot my birthday. He forgot I’m his daughter. You think a dead man’s library book makes you somebody? Put my van down. Put it DOWN. You’re stealing my van in front of a camera.”
I didn’t say anything. I had the controls in my hand.
Cory shut the engine off. He got out and stood in the street looking at his back tires hanging there.
“You said he signed it,” he said to Rena.
“Get back in the van.”
“You said your lawyer did it all. You said it was legal, you said they’d thank us.”
“Cory, get back in the van.”
“It’s up in the AIR, Rena.”
He sat down on the curb next to a front tire with his hands on top of his head and didn’t get up again.
Rena turned to Annabelle. Her voice dropped, sweet again.
“You did this,” she said. “You and his stupid stories.”
Earl stepped in front of the girl and opened his hand back toward her, and Annabelle took two of his fingers.
The deputy pulled in at 2:41 with no siren. Kabir’s truck came in right behind him, half up on the sidewalk, door left open, a man in socks.
The deputy walked the length of the van, looked at the rear wheels four inches off the street, looked at the bikes, looked at me.
“Who lifted this van?” he said.
“Me,” I said.
Twelve dollars
Three weeks later, the library on Jacob Street opened at ten and we were there at ten.
Kabir drove. Annabelle wore real shoes. I brought the book, and the tow ticket stayed in the back of it, because it’s his handwriting and it goes where he goes.
I’m still off county rotation. Jared never put me back on, and I didn’t ask him to. Earl’s club has since called me for every bike that’s gone down between here and Punxsutawney, and they pay cash and tip, but it isn’t sixty percent of anything.
Jared still calls me Late Fee. Nobody laughs on the channel when he does.
The woman at the desk was named Monika and she’d never seen a 1987 date card come back. She looked up the account for a while.
“It’s capped at the replacement cost,” she said. “Twelve dollars.”
Annabelle had a sandwich bag of quarters. Florence had finally taken a screwdriver to dryer six and found eleven dollars and fifty cents in it, and gave her all of it, and I made up the rest.
Monika asked whose card it was for the record.
Annabelle pushed the bag across the desk with both hands.
“It’s from Late Fee,” she said.
If this one got to you, pass it to somebody who works nights and keeps an eye out for the rest of us.
For another story where a biker’s past collides with an unexpected bond, read “The Biker on My Patient’s Bike Lock Was Riding Behind His Mom When She Died”. And for another tangle of old loyalties and family history, there’s “I’m the One Who Talked the Old Owner Into Selling to My Ex-Wife”.
