I still owed $3,140 on my husband’s headstone, and the only thing I had worth that much was his motorcycle in our garage. Then the man next door drove fence posts seven feet into my driveway, right across the garage door, and said, “Rick’s not around to argue the line anymore, Nancy.” The buyer was due Saturday.
The stone was gray granite with both our names on it and only one date filled in.
Diane at the monument office had held it for me since July.
“End of the month, hon,” she said on the phone. “After that it goes back in the line, and the price goes up.”
So Rick had a metal marker from the funeral home. A little card in a plastic sleeve.
The rain had gotten into it twice.
He rode that bike thirty-one years. A black bagger with a cracked lid on the left saddlebag that he kept meaning to fix.
He bought it the year we got married. He rode it to my mother’s funeral and to every charity run in three counties.
I didn’t want to sell it.
I didn’t have a choice.
Allen Eckert moved in next door four years ago, and he complained about the bike the first week.
“Some of us sleep in on Saturdays, Rick,” he said over the hedge, holding a leaf blower.
Rick laughed at him. Rick laughed at most things.
On Thursday I came home from the monument office and there were six wooden posts in my gravel.
Orange ribbon on the end ones. A string pulled tight from his mailbox to the back corner of my garage.
The garage door still opened.
The bike would never fit through what was left.
I knocked on his door with my car keys still in my hand.
Allen came out holding a coffee mug with a joke about golf on it.
“I had it surveyed,” he said. “That strip’s been mine the whole time. Rick just parked on it.”
“Thirty-one years, Allen.”
“And nobody ever checked.” He shrugged. “Take it up with a lawyer, if you can afford one.”
Then he said the thing about Rick not being around to argue.
His wife Shawna was standing in their front window. She let the curtain drop.
That night I sat in the garage on Rick’s old stool next to the bike and didn’t turn on the light.
The chrome on the pipes had gone dull. He’d have hated that.
Friday morning I called Troy Ferris.
Troy had ridden with Rick for nineteen years, and he was the one buying the bike. He’d offered more than it was worth, and we both knew it.
I told him the sale was off. I told him why.
He was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped.
“Don’t touch the posts,” he said. “Don’t talk to him. We’ll be there at nine.”
“We?”
He’d already hung up.
Saturday I was standing at the kitchen sink when the window over it started to hum.
They came down our street in a line.
I counted them because I couldn’t do anything else.
Twelve.
They backed in along the curb one after another, rear tires to the grass, and shut off one by one until it was so quiet I could hear the dryer buzzing in the basement.
Troy got off first. Silver beard cropped close, a black leather vest with nothing under it, old faded ink down both arms.
He’d left Kokomo before six to get there.
Behind him an older man climbed off slow, a gray horseshoe mustache and reading glasses hooked in his vest.
Troy walked up my driveway and stopped beside me at the string.
He didn’t say a word to me. He just stood there, half a step in front.
Allen’s door opened.
He had his phone up, already recording. Same mug.
“This is PRIVATE PROPERTY,” he said. “Every one of you. I’ve got a survey.”
“Then call somebody,” Troy said.
“I already did. The sheriff’s on his way.”
“Good.”
The older man wasn’t listening to either of them.
He was walking the string from the mailbox, slow, eyes on the gravel, like he was reading it.
At the back corner of my garage he stopped and scraped the gravel aside with the edge of his boot.
Then he got down on one knee, which took him a while.
There was a rusted iron rod in the ground with a yellow plastic cap on top. I’d lived in that house thirty-one years and never once seen it.
He rubbed the cap clean with his thumb and put his glasses on.
“Kurt,” Troy said. “That it?”
“That’s it.” Kurt stood and brushed off his knee. “I set this pin. Spring of 1994. County job.”
Allen laughed. It came out too high.
“YOU DON’T EVEN LIVE HERE,” he said.
“No,” Kurt said. “But I MEASURED it.”
He walked back down to his bike, opened the left saddlebag and took out a folded sheet in a plastic sleeve, just like the card on Rick’s marker.
A cruiser turned onto our street.
The deputy was young. He looked at the twelve bikes first, then the posts, then Allen with his phone still up.
Kurt handed him the sheet.
The deputy spread it on the hood of his cruiser and read it for a long time.
Then he looked up.
“Mr. Eckert,” he said. “Who drew your survey?”
Allen opened his mouth.
Behind him his front door opened, and Shawna came out onto the step in her robe with her arms folded.
“Allen,” she said. “TELL HIM ABOUT THE LETTER.”
Allen didn’t look at her.
He looked at the yellow cap in my gravel.
The white envelope
Shawna came down the step with something in her hand, and for a second I thought she was going to throw it.
It was an envelope. Long and white, slit across the top with a thumb. She held it out to the deputy and not to Allen, and she held it in both hands, the way you carry a plate.
“It came certified,” she said. “Two weeks ago Monday. He signed for it at the door.”
The deputy slid out two pages. He read the first one standing next to Kurt’s sheet on the hood, looking from one paper to the other. Then he turned it so I could see the letterhead from where I stood. A surveying company in Kokomo. A signature in blue ink. A little drawing the size of a playing card, and in the corner of it a square that was my garage.
“This is a boundary letter,” the deputy said. “It says the iron pin at the corner of the Foley garage is the line. It says Mr. Eckert’s property starts on the other side of it.” He looked up. “Seven feet on the other side.”
So that was the letter. Allen had paid somebody to measure, and the somebody had told him he was wrong.
I put my car keys in my cardigan pocket. My hand had been shaking them and I’d only just heard it.
“Mr. Eckert,” the deputy said, “the date on this is the second of September. The posts went in Thursday.” He tapped the page. “So what were you telling these folks about a survey?”
Allen lowered the phone. He didn’t say anything.
Shawna did.
“Ask him why he waited five weeks,” she said.
The stool in the garage
Rick would have known what to say. He always did, with Allen.
The first week Allen lived there he came across the hedge about the gravel. It ran a hair past where his grass started, he said, and the bike was loud, and did Rick really need to park it nose-out like that.
Rick had a wrench in his hand. He didn’t put it down.
“Go talk to Kurt,” he said. “Kurt measured it in ’94.”
“Who’s Kurt?”
“Fella with a transit. Go fight him.”
Then Rick laughed, and Allen went home, and I took it for one of Rick’s jokes. He had a friend for every problem and half of them didn’t exist. I’d never met a Kurt. In thirty-one years of Christmas cards there was no Kurt.
That was the only time Allen asked. After that he complained about everything else. The bike, the oil stain on the apron, the Fourth of July run when twenty of them came through the neighborhood and he stood in his yard with his arms crossed.
In June, after the funeral, Shawna brought a casserole and a pie plate. I told her over the hedge about the stone. I didn’t mean to. She had asked how I was holding up and I said, “Fine, I just have to sell Rick’s bike for the headstone,” and she said, “Oh, Nancy,” and I stopped talking.
Allen was the kind of man who kept things. Old receipts, spare bolts, the box a toaster came in. He had a camper too, thirty feet long, white with a brown stripe, that he kept at the curb in front of his house since the day he bought it. In September a city man put an orange sticker on the window. Allen peeled it off and left it on the street.
That’s what I knew about him. A leaf blower, a golf mug, a camper at the curb with a notice on it.
I knew Rick better. The garage was his. A pegboard of wrenches outlined in black marker so he’d know what was missing. The stool. A pry bar as long as my leg hanging on two nails next to the door, because in 1998 he got locked out of a crate of parts and never forgot it.
I sat on that stool Thursday night and my feet didn’t touch the floor, which they never did, which he teased me about.
Now it was Saturday and I was standing in the driveway, and the deputy was telling Allen that the thing in his hand was not a survey.
“It’s a letter about a survey,” Allen said. “It’s a draft.”
“It’s got a seal.”
“That’s a different thing.”
The deputy folded the pages and held them against his chest.
“Ma’am,” he said to me. “Do you want these posts out?”
Civil matter
I said yes. It came out smaller than I meant.
The deputy’s name tag said Easton. He had a pen behind his ear and a face that hadn’t finished deciding what kind of face to be.
“Then I’m going to be straight with you,” he said. “I can read this. I believe it. But I can’t tell a man to pull a fence on a piece of paper. That’s civil. That’s a judge and a lawyer and a court date.”
“How long?” Troy said.
“Six weeks. Eight.”
“The monument office gives me until the end of the month,” I said.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry.”
Allen heard it before I did. I watched it go through him, the way a man’s whole body gets taller when he finds out the rules are on his side.
“Then we’re done,” he said. “I want these people off my street. I want that curb cleared. I’ve got trespassers.”
“They’re parked on a public street,” Easton said.
“Then I want them filmed.”
He raised the phone again.
I walked to the nearest post. I didn’t decide to. I put both hands on it and pulled, and it moved about the width of a finger, because gravel packs hard around a post once it’s been in for two days, and I’m sixty-three years old.
“Touch that and I’ll file,” Allen said. “I mean it. I’ll put your name on it. Destruction of property.”
“Mrs. Foley,” Easton said, very quietly. “Please let go.”
I let go.
Allen had it on his phone. He turned the screen toward me, grinning, a little video of an old woman in a gray cardigan yanking at a stick. He played it back at me twice.
Nobody moved. Troy had one hand open at his side like he was holding something that wasn’t there.
“The bike stays behind that string,” Allen said, “until you come to me and we talk about the strip. That’s how this works, Nancy. You’ll come over with a number.”
“A number.”
“You need three thousand dollars for a rock in the ground. I’m a reasonable man. Come over Monday.”
How did he know the number?
I had told Shawna the amount over the hedge in June, standing with a pie plate in my hands. I hadn’t told her the date of the buyer. I hadn’t told anybody the date except Diane, and Diane doesn’t talk to the neighbors.
I looked at Shawna on the step.
She was looking at the pie plate she must have left on their kitchen counter in June, because I could see it through the open door. She looked at it the way you look at a stain.
What Shawna said on Tuesday
She came down to the string.
Allen said, “Shawna,” and she didn’t turn her head.
“Tuesday,” she said to me. “You were out at the mailbox. I was watering the geraniums. You told me the buyer was coming Saturday at nine and that you had to have the check by the end of the month.”
“I remember.”
“I told him. That night. At dinner.” She said it to the gravel. “He didn’t say anything. He asked me what day. I told him again.”
“Shawna, stop,” Allen said.
“And Wednesday he went out and bought the posts.”
The deputy had his pen out and wasn’t writing.
“He got the letter two weeks ago,” she said. “He read it at the kitchen table. He said the man was an idiot. He said the pin must have moved. Then he made me put it in the drawer with the warranties.” She finally looked up. “Today I took it out of the drawer.”
“It’s a draft,” Allen said.
“You told me to burn it.”
I thought about the timing and couldn’t make it come out any way but one. Nobody fenced me in by mistake. Nobody was confused about a line. A man had been told in writing, with a seal, that the strip belonged to my husband, and then he’d learned the one day a year that I couldn’t afford to fight him. The posts had gone up the morning after Shawna told him the date.
Rick wasn’t around to argue. He’d said it to my face and I’d heard it as a cruelty, and it was a plan.
Kurt took his glasses off.
“Well,” he said. He folded them into his vest. “That’s a different matter than I came here for.”
Three thousand one hundred forty
The deputy used the radio. He walked a few steps off to do it, and Allen watched him go the way you watch a dog get taken out of a room.
Then Allen started to talk, and he didn’t stop.
“All right. Look. Okay.” He turned his back on the bikers and spoke to me alone. “I had the letter. I’m not going to pretend. The man made an error on the drawing, and I was going to have it corrected, and in the meantime I’d have been out the use of the strip, and that’s real money, Nancy, I’ve got a camper out there collecting fines. Do you know what the city does to you for a camper? Forty dollars a day. They’ve got it on a calendar. I needed a pad. Your gravel’s flat and it’s right there. It’s not like Rick used it.”
“He parked the bike on it,” I said.
“Once in a while. That’s all.”
“Thirty-one years.”
“And I’d have paid you for it!” He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and then, remembering something, put it back and walked to his truck and came back with an envelope, a bank envelope, thick. “Here. I went to the bank Friday. It’s thirty-one forty, I did the math. That’s the stone. That’s the whole stone. You sign a piece of paper that says the strip’s mine and I put that in your hand right now, in front of everybody, and nobody has to get filmed.”
He held it out. His hand was steady. It was the first time that morning he’d looked me in the face.
“I was going to bring it over Monday,” he said. “I’m not a monster. I’d have made it right.”
Behind me the riders had stopped breathing.
I looked at that envelope and thought of Diane. Of the card in its sleeve, and the rain. Of the one date on the stone and the blank where the other one would go. I’m not going to tell you it wasn’t the stone, because it was.
“No,” I said.
“Nancy.”
“No, Allen.”
“You’re going to lose it all on a point of principle? The bike’s behind a fence, you’ve got no money, the deputy just told you six weeks.”
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t have to. Troy had walked past me while he was talking, past the string, to the garage wall. He went into the garage through the door that still opened and came out holding Rick’s pry bar.
He held it out to me, handle first.
“I can’t touch it,” I said. “He’ll file.”
“He’s going to file anyway,” Troy said. “It’s your post. I’d like to watch you.”
Deputy Easton had come back. He looked at the pry bar, and at me, and at Allen with his envelope, and he took the pen from behind his ear and put it in his shirt pocket.
“Mr. Eckert, a city code officer is going to be at your curb Monday morning. I just talked to dispatch, and your camper’s on a list.” He cleared his throat. “As for the posts, I didn’t see anything. I was looking at the bikes.”
I took the bar.
It was the lightest it had ever felt, and I’ve never lifted it before. I set the claw behind the first post, the one nearest the mailbox, the one with the orange ribbon, and leaned my whole weight into it.
The post came up out of the gravel with a sound like a tooth.
Both dates
I sold Rick’s bike to Troy that afternoon, at the price he’d offered the first time. I signed the title on the hood of my own car and he counted it out into my hand in the driveway, twelve riders in a half circle and one old surveyor sitting on my garage step, drinking Shawna’s coffee.
It was the same money Allen was holding. I had to look at that for a while.
The bike went out through the gap where the posts had been, pushed by two men at first because it didn’t want to start. Troy kicked it over and the sound filled the street. The cracked lid rattled once on the left.
Allen’s camper was gone by Monday. I don’t know where. Shawna came over on Tuesday, without the pie plate, and stood on the porch and didn’t come in. She said she’d be at her sister’s for a while. I said all right.
Diane called on the twenty-eighth.
“Both dates are in, hon,” she said. “They set it this morning. You’ll want to see it before it settles.”
I drove out alone. The stone was gray, with both our names and both dates, and the cutting still sharp enough to catch light. The marker with its card in the plastic sleeve was gone. I’d put the card in the drawer where Rick kept his receipts, next to a wrench with no home on the pegboard.
Troy was at the cemetery gate when I got there. He had the bagger idling. He’d ridden it from Kokomo and parked it at the curb the way Rick used to, nose out.
“You said I could,” he said.
“I did.”
He lifted the cracked lid on the left saddlebag. He had a roll of black tape in his hand.
“Kurt says he’ll fix it for nothing. Takes ten minutes.”
I looked at the lid. I looked at the stone.
“Leave it,” I said. “He kept meaning to.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who is still waiting on a stone.
The motorcycle at the heart of this story echoes the one in Logan’s story, while the biker who lay down beside a little girl offers another moving look at the people behind the leather. For a family moment that brings nine bikers into the picture, there’s also the tablet my mother-in-law took back.
