Every Halloween my brother texted me a drop-off time for his kids, free childcare he never bothered to book. He called it “the family tradition” and told me, “You don’t have a no in you.” This year I said no, and he pulled up anyway to a curb lined with motorcycles.
Year one, his sitter came down with the flu. Year two, he and his wife had a work party they swore they couldn’t skip. By year five he’d quit giving reasons at all.
Last October he rolled in an hour late, dropped a heap of backpacks on my porch, and laughed when I asked why he hadn’t called first.
“Why would I call? You always say yes, Amy.”
Then came the line I carried around for twelve months.
“You don’t have a NO in you.”
The kids were never the issue.
Addison would frost cookies until more of it was on her than on the tray. Wyatt had to stop and score every jack-o’-lantern on Delmar Street out of ten. Paisley, five years old, still grabbed two of my fingers whenever a grown-up in a mask got too close.
I loved those kids.
That didn’t make my calendar his.
So this year I filled the night before he could.
The riding club I’d joined in the spring does a candy-and-toy run every Halloween, out to the children’s ward at the county hospital. Costumes over the leathers, saddlebags stuffed shut. I’d backed out of it twice already for his kids.
This year I paid my entry, bought a black jacket with the club’s rocker stitched across the back, and promised the women who’d waited on me twice that I’d be in the pack.
On October 26, Travis texted.
Usual deal. 5:45 sharp. Go easy on candy before they eat.
Not a question mark anywhere.
I wrote back: I have plans this year.
The dots showed up. Went away. Came back.
Good one. See you at 5:45.
I called him.
“Travis, I’m not going to be HOME.”
He laughed. “Sure. Wait till you see Paisley in the bee suit. You’ll fold.”
“Find somebody else.”
“Don’t turn this into a whole THING over one night.”
One night.
Seven Halloweens had a way of shrinking down to one night whenever he needed them to.
I told him once more that I wouldn’t be there, and I hung up.
A couple more texts came through.
The first said the kids would be crushed.
The second said 5:45, still.
That was where I quit arguing with him.
I made one more call instead.
Halloween came in cold and clear, leaves skittering down the gutters, half the porches on the block lit before the sun was even down.
Just before five the first bikes rumbled up the street and backed in along my curb, one behind the other, until ten of them sat there nose out with my own in the driveway making ELEVEN.
One had a rubber chicken zip-tied to the back rest.
At 5:12 I pulled on the new jacket in my bedroom and tied my hair back under a bandana. The leather creaked every time I lifted an arm.
For once I didn’t look like the aunt parked next to the candy bowl.
I looked like somebody with a place to be.
At 5:35 my phone lit up. Ten minutes out. Knew you’d cave.
I put it face down on the dresser.
At 5:45 on the dot his truck rolled up. He had to stop in the middle of the street, because there was nowhere left to PARK.
Down below my bedroom window, Addison climbed out in a firefighter coat, Wyatt straightened the antenna on his robot head, and Paisley tugged her bee stripes even.
Travis left the engine running.
He stared at the bikes for a long second. Then he herded the kids up the steps, leaned on the bell, and glanced back at his truck like a man dropping off a package.
The bell went again.
And a third time.
Then he pounded on the door.
“Amy. The kids are HERE.”
The deadbolt turned.
He put on the grin I knew best, the one that said every no I’d ever given him was just me taking the long way around to yes.
The door swung open.
But I wasn’t the one behind it.
A man about as wide as the doorframe stood there in a worn leather vest, a bowl of candy in one hand. On the entry table beside him sat a clipboard, a first-aid kit and a stack of little reflective vests, each with a name across the back in marker.
The kids lit up.
Travis didn’t.
The grin slid right off him, and his eyes went past the man, down my hallway, to the foot of the stairs.
“WHO ARE YOU?”
The man held out his hand. When Travis didn’t take it, he raised the clipboard instead and turned it around until Travis could see the sheet clipped to the front.
“Rudy Mendez,” he said. “Amy signed me up as the—”
The clipboard
“—van driver,” Rudy said. “Chase van for the toy run. Three kids on my list, and the hospital wants a parent’s name next to every one of them before they set foot on that ward.”
He tapped the sheet. Three lines. Addison. Wyatt. Paisley. A blank beside each one that said PARENT OR GUARDIAN.
“So if they’re riding with us tonight,” Rudy said, “that’s you. And you’re in the van.”
I was standing at the foot of the stairs in the new jacket with my helmet in one hand. Travis found me there and stayed on me.
“You signed my kids up for a biker thing.”
“A toy run,” I said. “To the county hospital.”
Wyatt had already found the rubber chicken out at the curb. “Whose is THAT?”
“Mine,” Rudy said. “His name’s Gerald.”
Paisley reached past her brother and took the smallest vest off the stack, the one that said PAISLEY in my handwriting, and held it up against her bee stripes.
Travis took it out of her hands and put it back on the table.
“Not tonight, bug.”
Three backpacks sat in a heap at his feet. He’d carried them up the walk himself, the way he always did.
Then he looked over his shoulder at the truck idling in the middle of Delmar Street. The dome light was on. Somebody was in the passenger seat.
“Kristen doesn’t hear one word of this,” he said. “You understand me?”
Seven yellow notes
Kristen never came to the door.
Seven Halloweens, she sat in that passenger seat with her phone lit up under her chin and waved at me through the windshield. Every year Travis brought the backpacks up himself. The kids never carried their own, not even Addison, who was eleven now and carried everything.
And in the front pocket of one of those backpacks, every year, there was a yellow sticky note.
I kept them. They live in the drawer under the microwave with the takeout menus and a dead nine-volt battery I keep meaning to throw out.
Thanks for asking for them again, H! You’re a lifesaver. —K
That was most years. Year three it said: A little something extra in Addison’s bag for your trouble. Don’t argue!! —K
I went through Addison’s bag that night. A juice box, a granola bar, a sweatshirt with a hole in one elbow. I figured the juice box was the something extra.
I figured “asking” was just how Kristen talked. She thanked the mailman. She thanked the drive-through speaker.
I never asked for them. Not one year. But Travis taught me early that correcting him cost more than going along. When we were kids he told Mom the broken lamp was my idea, and I went to my room, because arguing with Travis was like arguing with weather.
I met Rudy in April, in the lot behind the Methodist church where the club teaches new riders. I’d bought my bike off a man two streets over whose knees had quit on him, and I’d dropped it twice getting it home. Rudy walked beside me in first gear for an hour. Then he showed me how to pick a dropped bike up with my back to it. By June he was my riding partner.
He was the one who told me how the run works. Toys to the ward, costumes over the leathers, and kids can come along in the chase van as long as a parent signs at the ward door.
“Hospital’s rule,” he said. “Not ours. No parent, no kid. They don’t bend it.”
So on October 26, after the second text said 5:45, still, I called Rudy. I told him there’d be three kids on my porch whether I was home or not.
“Then they ride in the van,” he said. “If their dad signs.”
“He won’t.”
“Then he takes them home,” Rudy said. “Either way they don’t sit on your steps in the dark.”
I wrote their names on the vests that Monday night with a laundry marker.
Now Travis stood on my porch telling me what his wife wasn’t going to hear.
Down at the curb, the passenger door of the truck opened.
The Hendersons’
Kristen came up the walk in a coat thrown over a flapper dress, the fringe swinging at her knees, a headband with one black feather in it.
“Is something wrong? We’re supposed to be at the Hendersons’ at six.”
The Hendersons. Travis’s boss. That was year two’s work party, the one they swore they couldn’t skip. It turned out they’d been going every year since.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Travis said. “Amy’s got a thing with her club. She wants to drag the kids to a hospital on the back of a motorcycle.”
“In a van,” Rudy said.
“Nobody asked you.”
Rudy set the candy bowl down on the table and didn’t say anything else. Outside, one of the women from the club had pulled her helmet off and was standing beside her bike with her arms folded, watching the porch.
Kristen looked at the bikes. She looked at me in the jacket.
“Amy, honey. You could’ve said something before tonight. We’d have gotten somebody.”
“I did say something.”
“She said she MIGHT have plans,” Travis said. “Might. She says that every year.”
I took my phone out of the jacket pocket and pulled up the texts. I have plans this year. I held it out to Kristen.
She put her hand up flat, the way you’d stop a door.
“I’m not reading your texts. I don’t get in the middle of you two. I never have.”
“Kris,” Travis said. “Truck. We’re late.”
Kristen didn’t move yet. She was looking at the reflective vests on the table, the names in my handwriting, and her face softened a little, like she felt bad for me.
“It’s one night, Amy,” she said. “And it’s not like you do it for nothing.”
Two hundred dollars
I didn’t know what she meant. I said so.
Kristen laughed a little, the way you laugh when somebody’s being modest at a party.
“The envelope. Two hundred. Every year.” She looked at Travis. “He said you’d never take it to your face, so we tuck it in Addison’s bag. Don’t tell me you’ve been giving it back.”
I’ve done Halloween for those kids seven years running. I’ve bought the candy, fed them dinner, washed frosting out of a firefighter coat in my bathroom sink. I’ve never seen an envelope.
Fourteen hundred dollars.
“Okay,” Travis said. “Kids. Inside. Aunt Amy’s got you.”
He picked up the heap of backpacks and pushed them past Rudy into my hallway. They slid across the floor and stopped against the bottom stair. Wyatt went in after his. Paisley stayed on the porch with her pumpkin bucket.
“Travis,” I said. “The van leaves at 6:15. They can go if one of you signs. Or you can take them to the Hendersons’.”
“Nobody’s signing anything.”
“Then take them with you.”
“To my boss’s house? In costumes?” He laughed, but nothing in his face did. “They’re staying. You’ll go to your little ride next year. Kris, come on.”
He had his hand on her elbow. She let it stay there.
Out at the curb the first engine turned over, and then another. The woman with her arms folded put her helmet back on. It was 6:02 by the clock in my hallway.
Rudy picked up the clipboard and held it against his chest. “Pack leaves at quarter after,” he said to me, quietly, the way he said it in the church lot when I was about to drop the bike. “With them or without them.”
Travis was already turning Kristen down the steps.
I didn’t go after him. I went into my kitchen and opened the drawer under the microwave.
The drawer under the microwave
I brought them back in my fist and laid them out on the entry table next to the clipboard. Seven yellow squares, in order, oldest on the left. The first one had curled at the corners.
“Kristen,” I said.
She came back up one step. Then the rest of them.
She read the first one standing, and the second one she picked up. Thanks for asking for them again, H!
“I didn’t ask for them,” I said. “I never asked.”
“He said you called. Every September.” She was still holding the note. “He said you’d be hurt if we got a sitter.”
She went down the row. When she got to year three she stopped. A little something extra in Addison’s bag for your trouble. Don’t argue!! —K
“I put it in her bag myself,” Kristen said. “This afternoon. Same as always.”
Travis was at the bottom of the steps. “Kris. Let’s go.”
I crouched down in the hallway and unzipped Addison’s backpack, the purple one with the broken pull. A juice box. A granola bar. Her sweatshirt. And in the front pocket, a yellow note in Kristen’s handwriting.
Thanks for asking for them again, H! Enjoy your night in. —K
No envelope.
I held the note up so Kristen could see it. She looked at the pocket. She looked at the note. Then she looked at her daughter.
Addison was standing by the door in the firefighter coat, helmet pushed back on her head. She’d been quiet the whole time. She was always the quiet one when the grown-ups got loud.
“Dad takes it out at the light,” Addison said.
Nobody said anything.
“The long one,” she said. “By the gas station.”
Kristen turned around on my top step and looked down at her husband.
Travis put his hands in his jacket pockets.
“It’s gas money, Kris.”
Quarter after six
“It’s gas money,” he said again, louder, like the first time hadn’t counted. “You know what it costs to drive across town and back twice in one night? And she’d never have taken it anyway. You heard her. She’d have handed it right back, that’s how she is, she makes everything a whole thing.”
Kristen didn’t answer. She was holding the note.
“Two hundred bucks, Kris. Once a year. You want me to write her a check? Fine. Amy, you want a check? I’ll write you a check right now, fourteen hundred, is that what this is? You set this up with your biker friends so you could stand there and get paid?”
I didn’t say anything. Rudy didn’t either.
“And for the record,” Travis said, and he was turning red the way he did when we were kids and Mom found the lamp, “somebody had to give her something to do on Halloween. Look at her. She’s forty-one. She’s got a cat and a dead battery in a drawer. You think anybody else was knocking on this door? I gave her the kids. That was the favor.”
He stopped there. I think he heard it.
Kristen folded the yellow note in half, and then in half again.
Then she took the pen off Rudy’s clipboard.
“Kris.”
She signed the first blank. Then the second. Then the third. Her signature got bigger each time.
“Where’s the van?” she said to Rudy.
“White one at the end of the block.”
“I’m riding with them.”
“The Hendersons are expecting us,” Travis said. “Don’s expecting us. I told him we’d—”
“So go,” Kristen said.
She handed Paisley the vest with her name on it. Paisley put it on over the bee stripes, upside down, and nobody fixed it.
Travis looked at me then, really looked, for the first time since the door opened.
“You did this in front of my kids,” he said. “On purpose. You could’ve called me.”
I had. Twice.
“You’re done,” he said. “You hear me? You don’t get them next year. You don’t get them at all.”
“Okay,” I said.
It was the only thing I said to him.
I put the helmet on and walked out past him to the driveway, and my bike started the first time, which it doesn’t always. Rudy walked the kids down the block with Kristen behind them, her fringe swinging, the folded note still in her hand. The pack pulled out two by two at 6:15, Gerald the chicken bouncing at the front.
At the stop sign I checked my mirror.
Travis was still standing in the middle of Delmar Street, his driver’s door open, the engine running.
Saturday, November 14
Travis hasn’t texted since. Mom says he’s telling people I made a scene in front of his kids. Maybe I did. I went to her birthday dinner and he left before the cake.
I haven’t seen a dime of the fourteen hundred. I don’t expect to.
On the second Saturday of November my phone lit up on the dresser.
Hi Amy. Would it be okay if I brought the kids by today? Paisley won’t stop talking about your bike. Totally fine if you’re busy?
It had a question mark on it.
I read it twice. Then I wrote back: Two o’clock. Bring her a sweatshirt.
They came up the walk at two. Kristen carried nothing. Every one of them had their own backpack on.
Wyatt went straight for the jack-o’-lanterns still rotting on the neighbor’s steps and gave them all a four. Addison wanted to know how much the jacket cost.
Paisley stood next to my bike in the driveway, very serious, and when I turned the key and the engine caught, she reached up and grabbed two of my fingers and held on.
She didn’t let go.
“Again,” she said.
If you’ve got somebody in your family who has never once had to ask, send this to the one who always says yes.
