When I was seven, my father came in from the hospital parking lot, dropped his keys in the dish and said, “Your mother’s dead, Court, and we’re not doing a funeral.” Ten years later I rode her motorcycle back to the town he’d dragged me out of, and the woman begging outside the drugstore turned her head at the sound of it.
She’d been at the hospital since school started, and every night he said soon.
Soon never came.
Eleven days later we were in a rented truck, and he kept saying clean slate like it was a place.
The one thing of hers he kept was the motorcycle.
It went under a blue tarp in the garage, which smelled like cat litter, and we had no cat.
The second weekend, a woman knocked on our door holding a crockpot of chili.
“Court, this is Tammy,” Dad said. “She’s a friend from the plant.”
By spring they’d come home from the courthouse married.
I called her Mom once, because he asked me to.
Tammy didn’t try at all.
On the phone with her sister I was THAT KID, something that came with the lease.
And she hated the motorcycle almost as much as me.
“Eight grand rotting under a tarp,” she said. “Sell it or I will.”
“Leave it,” Dad said, the ONLY time I ever heard him tell her no.
Every year the screaming got WORSE and he got quieter.
At seventeen I found her listing for the bike on the family iPad.
“Nobody’s coming back for it, Courtney,” she said.
That night I found the key taped under the seat and rode four hours to Decatur.
I didn’t have a plan.
I rode loops past our old house and the drugstore where she bought me grape gum.
A woman sat out front in a filthy navy coat, a purple bag in her lap.
When the engine idled at the curb, her head came up FAST.
She looked at the bike first. Her lips moved around a word I couldn’t hear.
Gray hair, a face gone hard from weather, and the SAME CHIPPED FRONT TOOTH I used to poke.
It was my mother.😳👇
Twenty to ten
She said it again, and this time I could hear it.
“Rick?”
It was my father’s name. Nobody had said it to that bike in ten years, not even him.
She said it to the bike. Then her eyes came up the length of it, over the tank and the bars, to the helmet, and stopped there.
I killed the engine and pulled the helmet off. Four hours inside it had pasted my hair to my head. I held it against my stomach with both hands, like I’d been sent to deliver it to somebody.
“It’s Court,” I said.
She didn’t get up. She took hold of the purple bag by the strap, the way you hold your purse on a city bus, and looked at the bike again. At the front wheel. At the dent low on the left side of the tank, which I’d seen every time I lifted the tarp and never once asked about.
“You came on that,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“By yourself.”
“Yeah.”
A man came out of the drugstore with a plastic bag and stepped around her feet. She pulled her shoes in to let him by without looking up. She did it the way you do a thing you’ve done a few thousand times.
On the highway I’d had things to say. I’d practiced them at eighty miles an hour with nobody to hear. Every one of them was for a woman in the ground somewhere, and not one was any use on this sidewalk.
“Are you hungry?” I said.
She didn’t answer. She looked up the street and then down it, slow, the way you look for a car you’d know anywhere.
“Is it the first already?” she said.
The litter pan
The first thing I learned about the new garage was that the bike leaked.
One brown drop at a time, from somewhere under the engine, onto the same spot of concrete. Dad set an old roasting pan under it and filled the pan with cat litter. That was the smell. Tammy said cats were filthy and we were never getting one.
The litter stayed fresh. I never once saw him change it.
Some nights after Tammy went to bed I’d hear the side door to the garage, and the tarp crackle, and then nothing for a long time. When I got up for water I could see the light under the door. In the morning his coffee cup would be on the workbench, full and cold, next to the roasting pan.
Dad worked nights at the plant, four to midnight, and the plant made everybody leave their phones in a locker. If you called him on shift you got the phone company lady, because he never recorded a greeting. But one Saturday a month he worked what he called overtime. The first Saturday. He left in the dark and came home in the dark, and on those nights there’d be a pack of grape gum on the counter next to the key dish.
The purple pack, from the drugstore in Decatur. Nobody sold it in our town. I asked him once where he found it, and he said a gas station off the interstate.
Tammy brought chili to every new family on our street for ten years. People loved her for it. She did the bills at the kitchen table on the family iPad, and she made lists for the fridge in block capitals, every 7 with a line through the middle. TRASH OUT BY 7. COURT BATHROOM SAT. She kept a cordless phone on the wall by the fridge for calling her sister Sharon in Kentucky, so she wouldn’t eat her minutes. Sharon was the one who heard about THAT KID.
The night I found the listing, Tammy took her shower at six like always, twenty minutes with the radio on. I went out to the garage with my phone light and pulled the tarp back.
Fresh litter. A battery charger clipped to the bike, its little green light on.
I ran my hand under the seat and found the key, taped to the frame with electrical tape gone soft. Under it, folded into a sandwich bag with a tire gauge and a wrench, was the title. The name on the owner line was my mother’s.
It started on the second try.
Now she pushed herself up off the sidewalk, one hand flat on the drugstore window, and stood next to the bike. She was shorter than me. I hadn’t thought about that.
She put her hand on the seat. Then she slid her fingers under the edge, right to the spot where the tape had been.
Olivares Drug
There was a paper sign taped in the window over the drugstore. ROOM FOR RENT. $650. INQUIRE WITHIN.
Inside, I bought two turkey sandwiches out of the cooler, a quart of chocolate milk and the grape gum. The man at the register wore a brown cardigan with a pen clipped in the pocket from a bank that had closed so long ago its building was a Dollar General now. His name tag said OLIVARES.
He rang me up and looked out the window at the bike, then at me.
“You’re Denise’s,” he said.
“Yes sir.”
“You used to sit right up on this counter.” He tapped it. “I rode with that bunch two summers. Eighty-nine, ninety. Your mother took the curve out by the quarry like it owed her money.”
He counted my change into my hand and didn’t say anything about the woman out front. I didn’t either.
She ate half a sandwich standing up, leaning on the window. The other half she wrapped back in its plastic and put in the purple bag. I gave her the gum, and she held the pack in her palm and looked at it.
“He gets you this,” she said.
“Who?”
“Your dad. He buys it in there after.” She pointed at a bench by the bus stop. “He sits there. First Saturday. He gives me the envelope and he tells me about you, and then he goes in and buys you a gum.”
I looked at the bench. There was an ad on the back for a personal injury lawyer.
“Seven hundred,” she said. “That’s the room on Water Street. Mrs. Bellini’s. She won’t let you smoke.”
“Every month?”
“Since you were eight. You broke your wrist on a trampoline. Left one.”
I held up my left arm. I don’t know why. She nodded at it like it was the right answer.
“Why would he tell me you were dead?”
She put the gum in her coat pocket.
“I told him to tell you I was gone,” she said. “I wasn’t any good to you. I’d have been in and out of that place your whole life.” She looked down the street toward the hospital end of town, which you couldn’t see from there. “He’s the one who picked the word.”
“So when’s he coming?”
She zipped the purple bag shut.
“April,” she said. “He hasn’t come since April.”
The house phone
I walked out to the curb and called my dad.
The phone company lady. It was a Friday. He’d been on since four.
So I called the house, and Tammy picked up on the first ring.
“Where is the bike,” she said.
“Decatur. Tammy, Mom’s here. She’s alive. She’s sitting outside the drugstore with a bag.”
I waited for her to say something. The light over the bus stop came on.
“Don’t put her on it,” Tammy said. “Don’t give her anything. Not a dime. You stay right where you are and you don’t talk to anybody.”
She hung up.
I stood there with the phone. Then I looked up the Motel 6 by the interstate and called and asked for one room, one night, under Denise. The girl ran my debit card and said it was declined. I said to run it again. She did.
The card was on Dad’s account, with my birthday money in it. I opened the bank app. CARD LOCKED. Tammy had the password. Tammy had every password in that house.
I had eleven dollars in cash and a quarter tank. Not enough for a room. Not enough to get home either, if home was still the word for it.
When I got back to the window, my mother had pulled her coat up to her chin and shut her eyes.
Mr. Olivares came out at ten with a ring of keys and pulled the grate down over the door. He had a blanket from the back, the kind that comes in a plastic zip case, and he handed it to her without asking. She took it without saying anything. They’d done that before.
He stood next to me and looked at the bike for a while.
“Your dad left me a number,” he said. “Years back. Said if she got bad, call him. She’s been bad since about July.”
“Did you call?”
“Every week. A woman picks up. Tells me I’ve got the wrong number.”
He took out his wallet and unfolded a pharmacy receipt, gone soft as a dish rag, and handed it to me. He said he’d be back at five-thirty to open. He didn’t sleep much anyway.
The number on the back was in my father’s printing.
It was the house phone. The cordless on the wall by the fridge.
The purple bag
Around one she woke up and saw I was still there, sitting on the curb with my back against the front tire.
“You’ll get cold,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
She unzipped the bag. There was a hairbrush in it, and socks, and a toothbrush in a sandwich bag like the one the title had been in. Under all that was a stack of envelopes with two rubber bands around it. She held the stack out to me.
“Those are yours,” she said. “They’re about you.”
Every envelope had a D on the front in Dad’s printing. Inside each was a scrap of paper. The back of a pay stub. The corner of a pizza box.
Court lost a front tooth. Wants the dollar.
Court made JV swim.
Broke her wrist on the neighbors’ trampoline. Left one.
She’s taller than T now.
She won’t call T Mom. I don’t push it.
I read them under the drugstore sign. I quit counting somewhere past sixty.
Some were three words. One was a whole page about a science fair volcano that never went off, and how I didn’t cry until the car.
The one on the bottom was different. It had a stamp, and a postmark from our town, May 3. My mother’s name and Mrs. Bellini’s address were on the front in block capitals.
“He never mailed one before,” my mother said.
There was no money in it now. There was a sheet torn off a notepad.
THIS IS THE LAST $700. HE HAS A FAMILY. DON’T CALL THE HOUSE.
The 7 had a line through the middle.
I folded it back on its crease. My mother watched my hands do it.
“I called anyway,” she said. “Once. After Mrs. Bellini set my stuff out on the porch.”
“Who answered?”
“Some woman. Said I had the wrong number.”
I put the stack back in order and put the rubber bands back on and gave it to her. The May one went in my jacket.
My phone had a text from Dad, sent at 12:06. Coming. That was all of it.
At ten after four my father’s truck came down Main Street, and Tammy was in the passenger seat.
Five-thirty
Tammy got out before the truck quit rocking. She had Dad’s plant jacket on over her nightgown, and her house shoes.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Rick. Get the ramp.”
Dad didn’t get the ramp. He came around the front of the truck and stopped at the bike and put his hand on the tank, the same place my mother had. Then he looked at her.
“Hey, Neecy,” he said.
“It’s not the first,” my mother said.
“I know it.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Tammy said. “Look at this. Look at what she does. Ten years, Rick. Ten years you sneak up here like a dog that got out of the yard, and now she’s got your daughter on the sidewalk at four in the morning. This is what I said. This is exactly what I said would happen, standing in my own kitchen.”
I took the May envelope out of my jacket and gave it to my father.
He read it under the drugstore sign. He read it longer than it takes to read three lines.
“You said you’d mail it,” he said.
“I mailed it.”
“I gave you seven hundred cash on the first. June. July. August. September. I gave you October in the kitchen, Tam. In the kitchen.”
“And who do you think paid for the roof?” Tammy said. “Who paid for her braces? Who paid for the transmission on this truck you drive up here in? Me. I am not paying rent on your first wife for the rest of my natural life. She’s a grown woman. She has two hands. I’m the one who stayed. I’m the one who put dinner on that table every night while you sat in the garage with your little pan.”
“Where’s the money?”
“Where it belongs.”
The grate on the drugstore went up with a bang that made all four of us look. Mr. Olivares, five-thirty on the dot, same cardigan.
I went to the bike and took the sandwich bag out from under the seat. I walked the title over to him.
“Is the room upstairs still six-fifty?” I said.
He looked at the paper. He looked at my mother on the curb with his blanket around her shoulders.
“Utilities in,” he said.
“A year of it. For the bike.”
“Is it yours to give?”
I handed the title and his bank pen to my mother. She read her own name on it for a long time. Then she signed it on her knee.
“That is eight thousand dollars,” Tammy said. “Rick. That’s OUR eight thousand dollars. Do you hear what she’s doing? RICK.”
Dad didn’t say anything.
“If that bike goes in that store, I’m taking the truck,” Tammy said. “I mean it. I’m going home, and you can find your own way.”
He worked the truck key off his ring. It took him a while, his thumbnail picking at it. Then he put it in her hand.
She stood there holding it. Then she got in on the driver’s side, backed out without looking and went up Main the way they’d come.
Dad picked up the purple bag.
“It’s the back stairs,” my mother said. “I’ve been looking at that sign since July.”
The first Saturday
We came over on the bus the first Saturday in December, Dad and me. Six hours with the change. Tammy kept the truck.
Out back of Olivares Drug, the bike sat under the same blue tarp, with the same roasting pan under it. Mr. Olivares had asked for the pan. He took the bike out Sundays if the roads were dry, toward the quarry, and my mother said she could tell from the second floor it was him by how early he shifted.
The stairs out back were wooden and steep, and she went up them slow, one hand on the rail, Dad a step behind with his hand not quite on her back.
Inside her door there was a little table with a dish on it, a cereal bowl really, with a chip out of the rim.
I dropped my keys in it.
She was at the window, looking down at the tarp.
“Is it the first?” she said.
Dad set a pack of grape gum on the table and pulled out a chair.
“It’s the first,” he said.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who’s still keeping something under a tarp for someone.
For more stories about family memories that refuse to stay buried, read the voicemail kept for seventeen seconds and the bike started every Sunday for eleven years. Then follow the seven motorcycles on Level Three into another family reckoning.
