“Daddy, why does Mama make me practice CRYING before your bike comes up the road?”
Lacey was seven, and she asked it over a paper plate of spaghetti at our club’s fall supper, in the same voice she used for spelling homework.
SEVENTEEN Harleys sat on the apron outside the Bell Township fire hall, and most of their riders were in earshot. Tara kept her eyes on her plate, but her fingers squeezed her foam cup until it creased.
As late as August, I’d have sworn we were an ordinary family.
I drove a forklift ten-hour nights at the cheese plant off the state route, and Lacey was the whole reason I lasted till the whistle.
Tara had her days. That was the deal from the week Lacey was born, my paycheck and her hours, and I never checked her end of it, same as nobody checks a floor before stepping on it.
It started small.
Lacey began jumping when I hollered at a race on TV. I put it down to a phase.
Then she fought me leaving for work. She locked both arms around my boot at the door and said “don’t go, don’t go,” and it wasn’t how a kid sounds when she only misses her daddy.
Then the marks. Purple ones on her arm she said came from FALLING, and I’d never once seen her fall.
Her teacher, Ms. Ochoa, kept me after pickup over a crayon picture: a little girl crying in the corner of a house, and a tall lady standing over her with a zigzag mouth.
I showed it to Tara that night.
“She’s dramatic, Kyle,” she said. “She gets it from your side.”
A few days later Lacey brought me her stuffed pony with red marker lines up its front leg. “The pony got time-outs,” she said.
Mama had helped her get the lines RIGHT.
I had to sit down.
I started clocking out early after that, never on a pattern, just often enough.
Early that Saturday I cut the engine at the end of our road and walked the last quarter mile, thirty-five minutes ahead of my usual time.
Through the screen door I heard Tara, low and fast, feeding Lacey the EXACT story to tell about her leg if I asked.
That evening at the fire hall, with somebody’s raffle quilt hung crooked behind the coffee urn, I knew her question hadn’t come out of nowhere.
Lacey had been REHEARSING FOR DADDY.
I laid my plastic spoon on the plate and turned to my daughter instead of her mother.
The aisle went quiet.
Old Gus at the next table had his coffee halfway up, and he left it there.
“Baby,” I said, “let me see how you practice.”
Lacey’s chin started to wobble. She checked her mother’s face first, waiting to be told she could, and Tara finally lifted her eyes to me with a look I hadn’t seen on her in nine years of marriage.
“Lacey,” Tara said, “honey, not right now.”
The bay door
Lacey didn’t wait for her mother after all.
She slid off the bench and took three steps toward the open bay door, where the bikes sat nose-out on the apron. She stood there with her back to the whole supper.
“Mama counts,” she said. “She goes one, two, three. Then Mama says here he comes, here comes Daddy.”
She scrunched up her face and made a sound like a pup somebody left in a hot car.
It was good. That was the part I couldn’t stand. It was GOOD.
Then she turned around, eyes still wet, and held both hands up in front of her face with the thumbs together, like a woman aiming a phone.
“And Mama holds it like this,” she said. “And I have to look at the road the whole time.”
I got up and went and got her.
I lifted her the way I take a pallet I don’t trust off the top rack, low and close and slow, and I carried her back and sat her on my knee.
Across the table, Tara’s phone lay beside her creased cup.
She reached out and turned it face down on the paper tablecloth.
Gus finally set his coffee on the table. A man down at the dessert end kept cutting a pie, because nobody had told him to stop.
“Such a ham,” Tara said. She said it to the table, not to me. “She’s been working on that for the school play.”
“It’s not a play,” Lacey said.
She wiped her nose on my sleeve and leaned into my vest.
“Only the good ones go,” she said. “Mama sends the good ones.”
The hiccup
The bike is a 2003 Heritage.
I bought it the summer Lacey was born, off a man in Uniontown who’d quit riding after his hip surgery. It cost $6,400 cash, which was two summers of overtime on the dock and most of what I had.
It has a lifter that ticks at idle. When you roll off the throttle at the bottom of a hill, it catches once, like a kid with the hiccups.
That’s what Lacey named it. The hiccup.
From the time she could stand at the glass, she’d hear it at the bottom of Hoover Road and run for the front window. By the time I killed it in the driveway she’d have both hands flat on the glass, and her mouth open around a word I couldn’t hear yet.
Tara never liked the bike. She said it would wake the baby.
I offered to put quieter pipes on it. She said don’t bother, it’s the only time all day you’re on time for anything.
That was a joke, the way she told it.
The house was her grandmother’s, a two-story on Hoover Road with a porch that leans toward the creek. It came to Tara when the old lady died, the year we got married.
I put the roof on it. I paid the taxes on it every November and the electric every month, and the phone bill on autopay, two lines, for nine years.
I never once opened that bill. It took out what it took out.
That was the deal, like I said. My paycheck, her hours.
My hours were nine at night to seven in the morning: a forklift and a headset and a pick sheet, cheese in forty-pound blocks going onto trucks for places I’ll never see.
I’d be home by 7:25 and asleep by eight behind blackout curtains Tara hung herself. She kept that house so quiet I could sleep till three.
Folks at the club liked her. She brought the sloppy joes to every supper and ran the raffle table, and half the riders’ wives had her number in their phones.
She was the one who knew where the permission slips were. I was the one who knew where the bike keys were.
That night at the fire hall I held Lacey on my knee till the pie was gone, and Tara didn’t say another word to me.
Then Tara stood up and got Lacey’s coat off the hook by the coffee urn and held it open.
Lacey looked at my face first. Then she went to her.
Gus met me at the bay door with his helmet under his arm.
“Want somebody riding behind you?” he said.
I said no. I should have said yes.
Tara’s taillights were already at the end of the apron, and Lacey’s hands were flat on the back glass.
Bev’s covered dish
Tara had it ready by morning.
“It’s for the spring play,” she said over coffee. “Ms. Ochoa’s class is doing a thing about feelings. Lacey wants the crying part, and I’m helping her, Kyle. Helping is all I’m doing.”
“Then why film it?”
“So she can watch herself. They do that now.”
She said it easy. She’d had all night.
Her mother pulled in at one o’clock with a covered dish of halushki. Bev took one look at me at the kitchen table in my sock feet and knew what kind of day it was.
“Tara told me about the supper,” Bev said. “In front of the whole club, Kyle.”
“Lacey asked it. I didn’t.”
“That girl’s dramatic. Tara was the same at seven. Tara cried if you looked at her sideways.”
Tara put the dish in the oven and didn’t turn around.
I tried it the straight way, then.
“I want to see your phone,” I said.
Tara dried her hands. She unlocked her phone and held it out to me without a word.
I went through it standing at the counter.
Pictures of the candles she sold out of a tote bag. Lacey on the swing at the township park. A recipe for buckeyes. Her sister’s beagle in a sweater.
The texts were the school, her mother, the candle ladies and me.
It was clean.
“Satisfied?” Tara said.
“He works all night and sleeps all day,” Bev said to her, like I’d left the room. “And then he wants to know what goes on in the house.”
I went to the fridge for milk, and the photocopy of the drawing was gone.
Ms. Ochoa had given me that copy. She’d kept the original in a folder in her desk with the date in the corner in green ink, because she said she dates everything a kid hands her.
The magnet that had held my copy was holding the lunch menu now.
I took Lacey out on the porch after that with the pony. She was making it walk along the rail, the red lines on its leg turned toward the yard.
I sat on the top step so I’d be lower than her.
“Baby,” I said, “who gets the good ones?”
She walked the pony a few more steps.
“The purple folder lady,” she said. “She comes when you’re sleeping. Mama says shh, so you won’t wake up mad.”
Line three
I went back to the plant Sunday night, because the forklift doesn’t care.
At my 2:10 lunch I sat in the break room under the clock and opened the phone company’s app. I had to reset the password twice.
Three lines.
Mine. Tara’s. And a third one, $15 a month, that went live September 24.
I’d paid for it twice.
The vending machine in that break room has had the same bag of sour cream chips hung up in B4 since spring. I looked at that bag a long time.
September 23 was the green ink.
I’d stood in Ms. Ochoa’s room after pickup and read the date upside down while she talked. I’d shown Tara the copy that same night at the kitchen table.
She got a new phone line the next day.
I told my lead I was sick at 5:50, and he looked at me like he believed it.
I cut the engine at the bottom of Hoover Road at 6:20 and pushed the Heritage the last stretch on the grass shoulder, so nobody in that house would hear the hiccup.
The kitchen was dark. Tara’s alarm goes at 6:45.
I didn’t know where to look, so I looked where I never go.
The laundry room.
A white cord came out of the outlet behind the dryer and ran down into the box of dryer sheets. At the bottom of the box, under the sheets, was a phone in a pink case I’d never seen.
The passcode was Lacey’s birthday. 0611.
Forty-one videos.
The front window in early light. Lacey in her nightgown with the curtain pushed behind her shoulder. Tara’s voice behind the phone.
“Again.”
“Bigger, baby. Bigger.”
“Wait for the hiccup.”
And then, small and far off at the bottom of the road, my bike.
In some of them Lacey couldn’t keep her face straight. She’d start laughing and cover her mouth and look right at the lens. Then Tara would say her name, once, low.
And Lacey would stop laughing.
I held my own phone up over that one and filmed the screen. I did eleven of them that way, both hands up and thumbs together, the way she’d shown the whole fire hall.
Then I opened the messages.
One thread. A contact saved as M.B.
Nine videos had gone to M.B. since September 24. Four pictures of Lacey’s arm had gone too, and I didn’t open those all the way.
Upstairs, the floor creaked over the bathroom.
The last message from M.B. sat at the bottom of the screen.
“Received, thank you. I’ll stop by the same time, while he’s asleep.”
Room 114
I put the phone back under the dryer sheets with the cord the way I’d found it.
I went out the back, walked the bike up to the road, and rode in at 7:25 like any morning. Lacey was at the window. She didn’t cry, because nobody had counted to three.
That evening, before my shift, I gave Tara one chance to say it herself.
“Line three on the phone bill,” I said. “Whose is it?”
She put the lid on the pot.
“Candle orders. I told you in September.”
She hadn’t.
I woke up at two the next afternoon to a quiet house, Tara’s car gone, and a voicemail from a woman named Michelle Bartek at the county.
Room 114, she said. Four o’clock. Bring ID.
She was maybe fifty, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a badge on a lanyard. The folder under her hand was purple.
She didn’t make small talk. She turned her laptop around.
The front window. The curtain behind Lacey’s shoulder. Lacey crying, really crying, her shoulders going. And from the bottom of the road the hiccup, then my motor coming up the hill.
Tara’s voice came in soft as a nurse.
“It’s okay, baby. He’s almost here. Mama’s got you.”
Michelle stopped it.
“Is that your motorcycle?”
“Yes.”
She opened the folder and turned a typed sheet toward me and put her finger on a line.
Child states that Daddy grabs her arm when he comes home from work.
Then she moved her finger down.
Mother reports child is too frightened to tell father the truth and tells him she fell.
The story about the leg. The one I’d heard through the screen door, low and fast, the EXACT story for if I asked.
She’d written me a part in it too.
I got my phone out and found what I’d filmed and held it across the desk. Lacey laughing at the window. Tara’s voice saying again.
Michelle watched all eleven. She didn’t hurry me, and she didn’t look away from them once.
“That’s a video of a phone screen,” she said when it ended. “I can’t tell what day that is, or whose phone, or what came before it. I’m not saying it’s nothing.”
“It’s on my bill.”
“Then bring me the phone.”
She shut the folder.
“Your wife called this morning, Kyle. She’s asked that you not come home tonight. I’d do what she asks.”
Seventeen engines
I slept on Gus’s couch that night. Or I lay on it.
At four in the morning he came out in his robe and put a cup of coffee on the end table next to my head and went back to bed without asking me a thing.
The next afternoon I stood outside Ms. Ochoa’s room at pickup, where I wasn’t allowed to stand anymore, as far as Tara was concerned.
“I need the original,” I said.
She didn’t ask why. She went to her desk and pulled the folder, and there it was: the tall lady, the zigzag mouth, the little girl in the corner, and 9/23 in green ink.
“I’ll bring it myself,” Ms. Ochoa said. “Just tell me what time.”
Then I sat at Gus’s kitchen table and told him the rest.
“The county building,” I said. “Can you bring everybody past at ten-fifteen? Slow, and park in the side lot. Nobody comes in.”
“How many you want?”
“All of them.”
The meeting was nine days after the supper.
Room 114. Michelle behind the desk. Tara in the chair across from her, and Bev by the radiator with her pocketbook on her knees. Ms. Ochoa sat by the door with the folder flat on her lap.
Lacey was across the hall in a room with a toy kitchen and a big window over the side lot. An aide was with her, and the door was propped.
Tara talked first and talked longest.
“Twenty-five after seven, every morning,” she said. “I hear that thing at the bottom of the hill and she starts shaking. He comes in wound up off ten hours with no patience, none, and I’m the one who puts her back together. And then he sleeps all day, and I keep her quiet so he won’t get up mad.”
She took the pink phone out of her purse and set it in front of Michelle.
“Go ahead,” she said. “I’ve got nothing to hide from this office.”
She played one herself. The window. The hiccup. Lacey’s face.
Bev put a hand over her mouth.
“Open Recently Deleted,” I said.
That was all I said for a while.
“Absolutely not,” Tara said. “It’s my personal stuff on there.”
“Then I’ll write down that you declined.” Michelle uncapped her pen.
Tara pushed the phone the last inch.
Thirty-two.
Michelle turned the sound up and played one.
Lacey at the window, giggling into her hands. “Mama, my face won’t do it.”
“Again,” Tara’s voice said. “Bigger. Wait for the hiccup.”
Michelle played two more. Then she scrolled to the top of the M.B. thread, which was her own number, and read the date on the first message out loud.
“September twenty-fourth.”
“Now the ones of her arm,” I said.
Michelle opened them. Four pictures in the thread, the same purple on Lacey’s arm in all four. This time I looked all the way, at every one.
Then she went back to the deleted ones and scrolled till she found the kitchen table.
Tara’s makeup bag sat open by the sugar bowl. Lacey had her sleeve pushed up, and Tara’s hand came into the shot with a little sponge brush and a compact of purple eyeshadow.
“It’s cold,” Lacey said.
“Hold still. Up the front, the way we did the pony.”
“Can I do my leg tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s the leg. And when Daddy asks?”
“I fell off the porch.”
“Good girl. Now look at me and say the sad one.”
Lacey looked right into the lens. “Daddy grabs my arm when he comes home.” Then she lost it and giggled into her elbow. “Mama, it tickles.”
Michelle stopped it there.
She turned the typed sheet around on her desk, drew one line through Daddy grabs her arm, slow, and initialed the margin.
Ms. Ochoa got up and laid the drawing on the desk with the green ink corner turned toward Michelle, and sat back down.
Tara looked at the tall lady for a long time.
“It comes off with a baby wipe,” Tara said. “Fine, I filmed her. Nine years he’s been asleep. Nine years I’ve done every single thing in that house while Kyle snores behind my curtains. And who’s going to hand a little girl to a man who’s never been awake at noon? I’d have kept the house and Kyle would have paid. Kyle pays. Kyle never looks.”
Bev stood up.
She got her pocketbook off her knees and walked out of room 114, and she didn’t look at her daughter on the way.
“Tara,” Michelle said, “I’m keeping this phone.”
It was ten-fifteen.
It came up from the light at the bottom of the hill, one motor and then the rest. Seventeen Harleys rolled into the side lot single file, slow, nobody on the throttle. They parked in a line, and the riders took their helmets off and stood by the bikes and didn’t come in.
Across the hall, Lacey was already at the window. Both hands flat on the glass.
Then she turned around and looked at the doorway, looking for a face.
Tara didn’t get up.
Lacey found mine. And she waited, the way she waits.
I nodded.
She turned back and waved both arms at seventeen motorcycles.
Michelle stood in the hall doorway with Tara’s pink phone still in her hand.
The rental behind Yingling’s
The first snow came the week before Halloween.
I’m on days now. Six to four-thirty, the same forklift, $1.60 an hour less than nights, and Lacey goes to the after-school room at the township building till I get there.
We rent two rooms behind Yingling’s Feed for $650. The township building sits at the top of the hill past it, and the after-school room has a window that looks down the road.
The house on Hoover Road is Tara’s. So is my roof on it.
She sees Lacey two Sundays a month at the county building, in a room with a window. Michelle or somebody like her sits by the door with a folder.
Lacey still checks my face before she cries. A skinned knee, a dead goldfish, a shoe that won’t go on. She looks up first, waiting.
I nod every time. I don’t know how long it takes for a kid to stop doing that.
That afternoon I came up from the bottom of the hill at 4:50 in the snow, and I didn’t cut a thing.
I rolled off the throttle right where the road dips, on purpose.
The hiccup.
She was at the after-school window with both hands flat on the glass. Then she wasn’t. Then the side door banged open, an aide hollering after her about her hat, and she came across the lot with one boot on and the other in her hand.
“It did it TWICE,” she said. “I counted.”
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who rides home tired at the end of a long shift to a kid waiting at the window.
For another story about a kid and some Harleys, check out Fifteen Riders Lined the Courthouse Doors. I’d Signed the Plan Sending Her Home. or even The Rider My Foster Son Ran To Had a Subpoena in His Vest. If you’re in the mood for something a little different, you might like I’d Waved to the Man in the Split-Level Each Morning for Months.
