My son sold my motorcycle for $11,400 while I was in rehab for my hip, and when I asked why, he said, “Dad, you’re seventy-nine, the only thing you ride now is the bus.” So I sat outside the feed store with a sign asking for ten minutes of talk, and the last of the seven riders to shut off his engine was sitting on my bike.
That bike was the cream-and-black ’77 I bought the summer Lola married me, and she rode on the back of it for forty-one years.
She’s been gone three summers.
While I was still on the walker, Brent moved me into a one-room unit across town in Kearney and kept the key to my house.
He said it was for the insurance.
He picked me up Sundays at four for groceries. He honked from the lot. He didn’t come in.
The rest of the week, nobody came.
Marlys from two doors down used to bring a pie on Thursdays.
The last time, back in April, she stood on my step holding her purse flat against her stomach, and she wouldn’t come past the door.
I figured it was the walker. People get strange around a walker.
So that Sunday in September I tore a box flat, wrote on it with Lola’s old laundry marker, taped a note to my door telling Brent where to find me, and took the bench outside the feed store.
The sign said NO MONEY in big letters. Under that, smaller, it said I’d be glad of ten minutes of anybody’s time.
People read the big part.
By noon there were nine dollars in a coffee can by my shoe, and a woman in scrubs said she was sorry it was only a five.
“Keep it,” I said. “Sit a minute instead.”
She looked over at her car and said she was running late.
The feed store’s pop machine still took sixty-five cents. I don’t know why that stuck with me.
I heard them before I saw them.
Seven motorcycles came off the highway in a line and backed in at the curb, rear tires to the concrete, and the engines quit one by one until the whole lot went quiet.
The one in front was about sixty, a silver beard cut close, old ink on both arms down to the wrists, a black leather vest with nothing under it in that heat.
He read the sign. Then he read the small part.
Then he sat down on the curb by my shoes.
“There’s room on the bench,” I said.
“Ground’s better for my back,” he said. “Gilberto. That ten minutes still open?”
“That’s all it’s for,” I said.
The other six came over and sat along the curb, big men in old leather with their knees up, like boys waiting for a school bus.
Gilberto asked how long I’d been out there.
“Since nine,” I said.
“When’s the last time somebody sat down with you on purpose?”
I had to count.
“Easter,” I said.
He didn’t say anything to that. He just stayed where he was.
But I wasn’t looking at him anymore.
I was looking at the last bike.
Cream tank.
Black fenders.
A dent the size of a quarter on the left side of the tank, where Lola dropped it in our driveway in 1983 and wouldn’t speak to it for a week.
And a little bluebird sticker on the back fender that she pressed on there with her own thumb.
“Whose is that one,” I said.
“Sameer’s,” Gilberto said. “The kid.”
The kid was maybe thirty. He hadn’t sat down with the others. He was standing next to that bike with his helmet hanging from two fingers.
“That’s MY bike,” I said.
It came out louder than I meant. A man coming out of the feed store with a sack of dog food stopped on the step.
Sameer walked over slow and crouched in front of me.
“I bought her in June, sir,” he said. “Eleven thousand four hundred. Cash.”
“Off who.”
He pulled his phone out and turned it around so I could see.
A bill of sale. Brent’s name at the bottom, with that lazy B he’s made since third grade that looks like a 3.
“He said she was his father’s,” Sameer said. “Said he was clearing out the estate.”
“Estate,” I said.
Sameer looked at Gilberto. Gilberto didn’t help him.
“Sir, he told me YOU DIED IN APRIL.”
Nobody on that curb moved.
“He said you went downhill fast at the end,” Sameer said. “Said you got mean. Said you threw things, and that’s why nobody from your church came around.”
He rubbed the back of his neck.
“He said it like he wanted me to feel sorry for him.”
“Threw things,” I said.
I thought about Marlys.
Marlys on my step, holding that purse up in front of her like I might grab for it.
Gilberto stood up. The six men on the curb stood up with him, all at once, the way a congregation does.
At ten till four a gray pickup turned into the lot.
He was early. Brent was never early.
He got out with the engine still running and came across the lot fast, and he didn’t look at anybody but me.
“Dad. What is this,” he said. “Get in the truck.”
“I’ve got four minutes left,” I said.
“These people don’t know you,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re saying half the time.”
Gilberto took one step and was standing between us.
“He’s been making sense for forty minutes,” Gilberto said.
Brent pointed past his shoulder at me.
“He gets confused. He gets like this. I’m his SON.”
Then he saw the last bike in the row.
His hand came down.
Sameer stood up off his heels with the phone still lit in his hand.
“Afternoon, Mr. Chapman,” he said.
Ten till four
Brent looked at Sameer for one long second, and then he looked at the phone.
“Paper’s signed,” Brent said. “That’s done. You got your bike.”
“I got a bike,” Sameer said. “Without a title.”
He turned the phone toward Brent the same way he’d turned it toward me.
“You said the courthouse had it. Probate. Two weeks, you said, maybe three. That was June. I’ve texted you eleven times.”
Brent didn’t look at the screen.
“These things take time,” he said.
“Not when the man’s sitting on a bench,” Gilberto said.
I got my cane under me and stood up. My hip let me know about it. I picked the sign up off the bench leg and folded it once, and when I bent for the coffee can, one of the riders on the curb handed it up to me before I got there.
Nine dollars. I put it in my shirt pocket with Lola’s marker.
“There’s no courthouse,” I said. “There’s no probate.”
“Dad.”
“The title’s in my house,” I said.
Brent smiled at that. It was the smile he used to give the umpire at Little League when the call went against him and he wanted everybody in the bleachers to see how patient he was being.
“Which you don’t have a key to,” he said.
Lola’s sewing box
Lola kept every paper that mattered in a sewing box. A wicker thing with a padded lid and roses on it that had gone brown.
The title to the ’77 went in there the week we brought the bike home, folded in thirds under the tray of spools.
“A man won’t look under thread,” she said.
She was right about that for forty-nine years. I never once looked. I didn’t have to. She knew where everything was, and then she was gone, and I still didn’t open it, because it was hers.
Brent was always the one good with paper. He did Lola’s taxes after her eyes went. He did half the church’s. People after service told me what a good son I had, and he stood there and let them.
When he came to the rehab place in March he had a blue folder with little yellow flags sticking out the side.
“Insurance, Dad,” he said. “For the house while you’re out. Sign where the flags are.”
I signed where the flags were. I was on the good pills that week. I remember the nurse brought butterscotch pudding and I remember the flags, and not a lot in between.
The other thing about Lola is she gave Marlys a key.
That was 1996, the summer I had my gallbladder out and Lola slept in a chair at the hospital, and somebody had to feed the cat. Marlys fed him nine days. When she tried to give the key back, Lola told her to keep it, in case.
“In case of what,” Marlys said.
“In case of Richard,” Lola said, and the two of them laughed at me in my own kitchen.
The cat was named Pumpkin. He’s got nothing to do with this. He was just a good cat.
So standing in that lot with Brent smiling at me, I knew two things he didn’t.
He’d never found the title.
And his wasn’t the only key.
Brent’s passenger seat
Brent turned to Gilberto like the two of them were the grown-ups.
“I don’t know what he told you,” Brent said. “But I’ve got paper on him. You want me to call the police, I’ll call them right now and they’ll see the paper.”
“Call ’em,” Gilberto said.
He said it the way you’d tell a man the coffee’s fresh.
Brent got his phone out. He held it. He didn’t dial.
“Give me my key,” I said.
“It’s for the insurance.”
“Then give me the insurance.”
“Dad, you’re making a scene in a feed store parking lot.”
The man with the dog food was still on the step. A woman had come out behind him holding her receipt. Six leather-vested riders stood along the curb with their arms folded, and not one of them said a word, which was worse for Brent than anything they could have said.
Brent put his hand out for my elbow, the way the nurses did.
“Get in the truck. We’ll talk about it at your place.”
“My place is on Fourth Street,” I said. “Drive me there.”
He thought about it. I could see him do the math. A lot full of people, or his father alone in his passenger seat with the windows up.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. Get in.”
I put the folded sign and the coffee can in the truck bed. He didn’t ask why.
Gilberto leaned down to my window before we pulled out.
“We’ll be right behind you,” he said.
They were. Seven engines came on at once, and Brent checked his mirror the whole way across town.
“You’re going to embarrass yourself,” he said at the light on Second Avenue.
I didn’t answer him. I hadn’t seen my own street since March, and I wanted to see it.
We turned onto Fourth.
There was a sign in my yard.
Marlys’s key ring
Red and white. COMING SOON. A woman smiling in the corner, Stefanie Cooper, and a phone number.
There was a gray box hung on my front doorknob, the kind real estate people use.
Brent parked and shut the engine off and didn’t get out.
“It’s under contract,” he said. “Closing’s the twentieth. Nice couple from Grand Island. They’ve got a baby coming, Dad.”
“It’s my house.”
“It’s a house with basement stairs you’d fall down. I’m paying nineteen hundred a month for that unit. Did you know that? You think your Social Security covers that?”
The bikes came up the street one after another and backed in at my curb, same as at the feed store. Somebody’s dog went crazy behind a fence.
And Marlys came out on her porch two doors down.
She had the purse. She held it up flat against her stomach, the same as in April, and she came down her steps and up the sidewalk slow, past seven motorcycles, and stopped at the truck on my side.
I rolled the window down.
“Richard,” she said.
“Hi, Marlys.”
“Go on inside, Mrs. Yao,” Brent said across me. “He’s having a bad day.”
She didn’t go inside.
“You told me he threw a coffee mug at you,” she said to Brent. “In April. You said it cut your hand, and you had a letter from his doctor that said I shouldn’t come by, for my own safety. You stood on my porch and said that.”
“Marlys,” Brent said.
“I brought pie to this man for eleven years,” she said. “He never threw a thing at anybody in his life. He can’t even throw a ball. Lola used to say so.”
She opened the purse.
Her key ring came out heavy, a dozen keys on it, and one of them had a dot of pink nail polish on its head.
Lola’s polish. I’d have known that pink across a parking lot.
“She told me never to give it back,” Marlys said.
The blue folder
The gray box was on the knob, but nobody had changed the lock.
Marlys’s key went in and turned like it had been waiting.
My house smelled like cardboard. There were boxes in the front room stacked to my shoulder, and every one of them said DONATE in black marker, in writing I’d know anywhere, with the B like a 3.
Lola’s coats. My tackle box. Our wedding album on top of a box with the tape not even finished.
The sewing box was on the kitchen table with a strip of masking tape across the lid. DONATE.
I peeled the tape off. I lifted out the tray of spools.
The title was there, folded in thirds, gone yellow at the creases. Richard and Lola Chapman, 1977, in typewriter letters.
Sameer was in the doorway. Gilberto was behind him. Brent came in last and stood by the refrigerator with his arms crossed.
“Well, there it is,” Brent said. “Congratulations.”
On the counter by the coffee maker there was a folder from Stefanie Cooper’s office. Brent moved toward it. Gilberto got there first.
He didn’t open it. He set it in front of me.
Listing agreement. The house, the lot, a price of $214,000. At the bottom was Brent’s lazy B, and after it, typed out, as attorney-in-fact for Richard Chapman.
Behind that, stapled, was the paper the whole thing hung on.
Durable power of attorney. Dated March 11th. A yellow flag still stuck to the edge of the last page, right where somebody had pointed for me to sign.
It was my own name, with the loop on the R that Lola taught me.
The back of the sign
Brent talked first, and Brent talked longest.
“You signed it,” he said. “You were sitting up in that bed and you signed it, and you knew what you were signing.”
“You said insurance.”
“It IS insurance. It’s insurance that when you go down those stairs somebody can make a decision. You know what rehab cost? You know what Mom’s last month at Good Samaritan cost? I covered the copays. I covered the unit. I covered all of it and you never once asked.”
“Where’d the eleven thousand go,” Gilberto said.
“That’s none of your business.”
“It was my business in June,” Sameer said. “I paid it.”
Brent turned on him.
“You got a good bike for a fair price.”
“You told me he was dead,” Sameer said. “You told her he was dangerous. You’ve been telling everybody today he’s confused.” He put his finger on the folder. “So who signed this?”
Brent opened his mouth, and for a second nothing came. Then it all did.
“I told people he was gone because it was easier than this,” Brent said. “Than standing in a kitchen with a bunch of strangers while my father explains himself. You want to know where the money went? A credit card. Mine. The copay was three hundred dollars. Okay? There. Mom left everything to him. Everything. Like I was the help.”
Nobody said anything.
Marlys had her hand over her mouth.
I went out to the truck and got the sign out of the bed. Sameer held the screen door for me. I laid it on the kitchen table brown side up, the side nobody had read.
I took Lola’s marker out of my shirt pocket.
I wrote that I, Richard Chapman, was taking back any power of attorney I’d ever given Brent Chapman, as of that day, and I put the date. I wrote that I was not dead and I was not confused. Then I signed it with the loop on the R.
“That’s not legal,” Brent said. “That’s a box.”
“Then I’ll take it to the bank Monday,” I said. “Marlys.”
She signed under me. Gilberto signed. Sameer signed. The other six came in off my front step one at a time and signed, and I didn’t know one of their names till I read them off the cardboard.
Then I read Stefanie Cooper’s number off the yard sign and called it on Gilberto’s phone, and when she answered I told her who I was.
It was quiet on her end a while.
“Mr. Chapman,” she said. “I was told…”
“I know what you were told,” I said.
When I hung up, Marlys found me a pen in her purse. I turned the title over, signed on the seller’s line, and held it out to Sameer.
“Sir, no,” Sameer said. “I can’t. She’s yours. You take her back and I’ll figure out the money with him.”
“You paid for her,” I said. “And you sat down on the curb after.”
Brent looked at the title in Sameer’s hand.
“You’re giving it to HIM?”
I held my hand out, palm up, the way Lola used to for the car keys when I’d had two beers.
Brent stood there a good while. Then he worked my house key off his ring and set it on the lid of the sewing box.
“Find your own ride Sunday,” he said.
The first Sunday in November
I was back on the bench outside the feed store. No sign. Just me and a grape pop out of the machine, sixty-five cents.
The woman at the bank had stamped the back of the cardboard on a Monday. Stefanie Cooper came and pulled the sign out of my yard herself on the Wednesday and said she was sorry twice. The couple from Grand Island found another house. I hope the baby’s fine.
I was on Fourth Street again. Marlys brought pie on Thursdays, and she came all the way into the kitchen and sat.
Brent hadn’t called. At four o’clock on a Sunday nobody honked for me from any lot.
The bus stopped across the highway at 3:52. I knew the time by heart now.
At ten till four I heard them before I saw them.
Seven came off the highway and backed in at the curb. The last one in was cream and black, a dent the size of a quarter on the left side of the tank, a bluebird on the back fender.
Sameer shut her off and came over with a second helmet, an old open-face one, scuffed white.
“Gilberto says your doctor says yes to the back,” he said. “I asked.”
I hooked my cane over his handlebar and put my good leg over.
If this one stayed with you, share it, and then go sit ten minutes with somebody you haven’t sat with since Easter.
For more stories about loyalty, family, and unexpected help from the riding community, read the nine bikers who rode up while a brother fined a grandson and the thirteen motorcycles that answered a radio joke. There’s also the boy who saved half his eggs at his stepmother’s counter.
