My dead son-in-law’s mother had filed to take my granddaughter away from me, and in the courthouse lobby she told the bailiff, “Get her off that biker trash before she catches something.” Ainsley had five rings off the stranger’s hands by then. He lifted the other one, palm out, toward the bailiff. “Let her finish. She needs all ten.”
Ainsley was seven.
She had slept in my spare room for nineteen months, ever since her daddy laid his motorcycle down on a wet curve and didn’t get up.
Elizabeth never forgave the motorcycle. Or the men he rode with.
Or me, for letting Ainsley sit on his gas tank in my driveway when she was small.
Now she wanted her.
She had a lawyer in a gray suit and a letter from her pastor about a stable Christian home.
I had a spare room and a part-time job at a pharmacy counter.
The hearing was set for 1:30 on a Thursday, upstairs in Courtroom 2B of the courthouse in Decatur.
We got there early. Elizabeth got there earlier.
She stood at the lobby windows looking out at the curb, where ten motorcycles were backed in along Main Street in one long crooked line.
“Of course,” she said. “Even here.”
I didn’t know whose they were. Neither did she. She knew the type, and for her that was plenty.
The vending machine by the elevators had nothing left in it but pretzels.
Then an ambulance came up Main with its siren wide open and went right past the front doors.
Ainsley dropped her juice box.
She folded down onto her heels with both hands clamped over her ears and started saying “no siren, no siren, no siren,” flat and fast, the way she said it the week of the funeral.
I got down on the tile with her. My knees are sixty-one and they let me know.
I tried singing. Elizabeth tried telling her people were watching.
People were watching.
A clerk brought over a paper cup of water. Ainsley knocked it across the floor.
Then she saw him.
He was on the bench by the elevators, alone, a big man in his fifties with a short silver beard and old faded ink running down both arms to the wrists.
Black tank top. A leather vest so old the edges curled.
And a heavy silver ring on every finger, thumbs included.
Ainsley quit saying it.
She got up out of my lap, crossed the lobby in her light-up sneakers, and planted herself between his knees.
He went still as a fence post.
She took hold of his left pinkie with both hands.
He looked over her head at me, and something went out of his face. Then he said, “Go ahead, Bug.”
Nobody had called her Bug in nineteen months.
She twisted the first ring loose and set it on the bench beside his leg.
“That’s one,” he said.
She went for the next finger.
“Two.”
Elizabeth’s heels came across the tile behind me.
“Carol, you’re going to sit there and let her do that? He’s a STRANGER.”
The third ring came off. Then the fourth.
He kept both hands out flat in the air between them, palms down, like a man at a traffic stop showing he had nothing.
Elizabeth marched to the security desk.
The bailiff, Maurice, was a heavyset man near retirement, and he came over hitching up his belt.
“Sir, keep your hands where I can see them.”
“They’re right here,” the biker said. “She’s on five.”
The fifth came loose.
Elizabeth said it then, loud enough for the whole lobby.
“Get her off that biker trash before she catches something.”
Ainsley pulled the sixth.
Maurice reached past me for her arm.
The biker lifted his right hand an inch off his knee. Not at Maurice. Just up.
“Let her finish,” he said. “She needs ALL TEN.”
“Needs them for what?”
He didn’t answer that.
Maurice’s fingers touched her shoulder, and Ainsley screamed and grabbed two fistfuls of the man’s vest.
He never put a hand on her. He kept them up and open and bent his head down close to hers.
“Whose hands are these?”
“Yours,” she said into the leather.
“And whose are those?”
“Mine.”
“Then we’re fine.”
Maurice took a step back. So did I.
Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
The last one sat on his left thumb, and it didn’t match the rest. Thinner. Plain steel, no skull, no eagle, scratched dull.
She had to work it over the knuckle a little at a time.
When it came free she turned it toward the windows and held it right up to her eye.
Inside the band was a speck of pink.
Nail polish.
The Easter before he died, Dariusz let her paint his fingernails bubblegum pink, and he wore it all week on the line at the plant and told anybody who asked that his daughter did it.
His rings got painted too. She was little and not careful.
Ainsley slid the steel band onto her own thumb. It hung there like a bracelet.
“This is Daddy’s,” she said.
Nobody in that lobby moved except Elizabeth’s hand, which went to her purse strap and stayed there.
Because I had stood next to her at the graveside when she told the whole family his rings were going into the ground with him. EVERY ONE of them. She said those people weren’t getting a thing of his.
Ainsley turned around between the man’s knees and looked straight at her grandmother.
“You said he was WEARING IT.”
Elizabeth’s lawyer stepped off the elevator right then with his briefcase and stopped.
The biker reached into his vest and took out a folded court notice. Our case number ran across the top. Stapled behind it was a small yellow ticket with a dollar amount written on it in pen.
He held it out. Not to me, and not to Maurice.
To Elizabeth.
“Ma’am,” he said. “You want to tell her where I got it, or do I?”
The yellow ticket
Elizabeth didn’t take it.
Her lawyer crossed the tile in about four steps and put his hand flat on her arm. “Elizabeth. Don’t.”
So the biker turned the paper around and held it out to me.
“Buchanan’s Pawn,” he said. “Out on Route 9.”
I took it. The paper was soft from being folded and unfolded a lot of times.
The yellow ticket said PLEDGOR: E. VANHORN. Under that, in blue pen: 10 rings, men’s, silver and steel. $340. The date was March 3rd.
We buried Dariusz on March 4th.
She had hocked his rings the afternoon before she stood at that grave and told us they were going in with him.
I read the date twice. Then I looked at Elizabeth, and she looked at the elevator buttons.
Ainsley had her fist closed around the thumb with the ring on it. She wasn’t looking at the ticket. She was looking at her grandmother’s purse.
I unfolded the court notice.
It was a subpoena. Vanhorn v. Gunn, our case number, and under it a name: JAMES NAVA, commanded to appear in Courtroom 2B on Thursday at 1:30 p.m. At the bottom was the attorney who issued it.
Brayden Tien, for the petitioner.
The man in the gray suit, who still had his hand on Elizabeth’s arm.
“She called you here,” I said.
“Her lawyer did.” He set his hands back down on his thighs, bare now except for the white bands where the rings had been. “I’m her witness, ma’am.”
The gas tank
I should say who Dariusz was to me, because Elizabeth would tell you he was nothing to me at all.
My daughter Karina brought him home when she was twenty-three. She left when Ainsley was two, for a man in Phoenix and a job that didn’t last, and she calls on birthdays. She signed the guardianship papers at a notary’s office out there and mailed them back the same week Dariusz died. That’s all I’ll say about Karina.
Dariusz stayed. He had Ainsley every other week and Sundays, and Sundays meant my driveway.
He’d ride over after church let out, which was Elizabeth’s church, which he did not go to. He’d back the bike in by my mailbox and leave it ticking while he ate whatever I’d cooked.
Ainsley was scared of thunder back then. Sirens. The dishwasher when it drained.
So he made up the rings.
He’d sit sideways on the seat and hold his hands out flat, and she’d stand on the driveway and pull them off one at a time. She had to count out loud. Every ring went on the gas tank in a row, and if one rolled she had to start over.
By ten she’d forgotten what scared her.
Then he’d hold his empty hands up. “Whose hands are these?”
“Yours.”
“And whose are those?”
“Mine.”
“Then we’re fine.”
He wore ten. Nine were the heavy kind, skulls and eagles, the kind his mother called jailhouse jewelry. The tenth was the steel band on his left thumb. He bought it at a truck stop outside Chattanooga for six dollars the week Ainsley was born, and it was the only one he wore to the plant because the others caught on the line.
When I want to hear his voice, I hear him counting with her. Eight. Nine. That’s my girl.
Elizabeth handled the funeral. She was his mother, and I didn’t argue. She cleaned out his apartment in one weekend with a box of black trash bags and her pastor’s truck.
At the cemetery the funeral director came over and spoke to some men by the gate, and they stayed out on the road with their motorcycles idling the whole service. I counted them without meaning to. Ten.
I didn’t go over. I had Ainsley by the hand and she was saying “no siren” at a hearse.
There’s a check now. Survivor benefits from Social Security, $1,140 a month, paid to me as her guardian. It goes into a savings account at the credit union with Ainsley’s name on it, and I take out shoes and the dentist. Once I took four hundred for my transmission and put it back over two paychecks. There’s a sticky note about it in the folder with the statements.
At Thanksgiving Elizabeth asked me, over the sweet potatoes, “Who signs for that check, Carol?”
I told her I did. She said, “Hm,” and passed the rolls.
That was the woman in the camel coat at the window. Prayer list on Wednesdays, a casserole for every funeral in the county, a letter from her pastor with a cross on the letterhead.
In the lobby, she let go of her purse strap and held out her hand to Ainsley, palm up.
“Give that to Grandma, sweetheart. Before you lose it.”
Ainsley put the hand with the ring behind her back.
Mr. Tien
Mr. Tien moved first. He stepped between Elizabeth and the bench and spoke to Maurice, not to me.
“Officer, this man is under subpoena by my client. He should not be speaking with the respondent before he testifies. And he certainly shouldn’t be handing her documents.”
“He handed it to your client,” Maurice said. “She didn’t want it.”
“I’ll need that paper back.”
“It’s his paper,” Maurice said.
Mr. Tien turned to me then and smiled the way a man smiles at a pharmacy counter when his insurance won’t go through.
“Mrs. Gunn, you should know why Mr. Nava is here. He was served at his place of work to testify about the environment at your home. The gatherings. Who comes and goes around this child.” He let that sit. “Mr. Nava has a felony conviction. Aggravated assault.”
“Ninety-seven,” the biker said. “I was twenty-six.”
“It’s a conviction.”
“Yes, sir. It is.”
Elizabeth found her voice behind him. “He’s been in your house, Carol. With her. Don’t you dare say he hasn’t.”
He had. Twice, both times with Dariusz, both times eating my potato salad on the porch steps. I couldn’t have told you his name. I’d have told you the big quiet one.
I picked up Ainsley’s juice box off the floor and stepped away to the vending machine and called my lawyer.
Her name was Lakisha. She came from legal aid and she had forty cases, and I had been told I was lucky to get her. It went to voicemail. Thirty seconds later she texted.
In 3A on another matter. Do NOT talk to their witness. Do NOT bring up any ring or any jewelry, the judge hates a sideshow. Be outside 2B at 1:25.
I read it twice standing at the pretzels.
By then I had already been talking to their witness for five minutes with the whole lobby watching.
Mr. Tien had a yellow legal pad out on his briefcase. He was writing in it, and he turned it a little so I could see.
1:04 p.m. Respondent conferring with petitioner’s witness.
Buchanan’s
I did what Lakisha said. I sat at the other end of the lobby, by the windows, with the ticket and the subpoena in my lap and my purse on top of them.
Ainsley would not come with me.
She sat on the bench beside him with the steel ring on her thumb and the other nine rings in a row between them, and every so often she straightened the row.
Maurice stood at the end of the bench with his thumbs in his belt. He had made himself the wall, and nobody asked him to.
I couldn’t talk to James Nava. But nothing said I couldn’t hear him talk to Maurice.
“Fella named Buchanan runs the pawn on Route 9,” he said. “Rides a Road King. Last November a loan went past its date, and when he opened the bag he knew the skull rings. Everybody knew those rings. He called me.”
“And?” Maurice said.
“I was two days getting there. Nine of them had gone to a scrap buyer by the pound. Silver’s silver.” He nodded at Ainsley’s thumb. “That one’s steel. It was in a dish by the register with key chains. Six dollars.”
Six dollars. The same as the truck stop.
“He gave me a copy of the ticket because I asked for it,” he said. “I’ve had it in my vest eleven months.”
“Why not take it to the family?” Maurice said.
The biker looked down the lobby at Elizabeth, who was at the window again with her back to all of us.
“At the cemetery gate she came out and told us the girl’s other grandmother didn’t want a single one of us near her. Said she’d call the sheriff if one bike came down her street.” He turned and looked at me for the first time since I’d walked away. “So we stayed off your street.”
I got up. I couldn’t help it.
“I never said that. I never said one word to her about you.”
“We figured, after a while.” He held up the subpoena’s twin, his own copy, and tapped the line with our case number. “This is the first paper in nineteen months that had your name on it.”
The ten bikes at the curb were his. Everybody who rode with Dariusz and could get off work on a Thursday.
Elizabeth said to the window, “You’d have said it if you’d had any sense.”
The elevator opened. Lakisha came out of it with a file under her arm and her phone in her hand, and she looked at me sitting next to their witness.
“Carol,” she said. “Did you get the amended petition?”
Courtroom 2B
I had not.
It was filed Monday and mailed to my old address across town, which Elizabeth had, and which I had not lived at in six years. Lakisha found it on the court’s system at 1:20 between two other hearings.
We sat at the table on the right. Elizabeth and Mr. Tien sat on the left. Ainsley sat in the second row behind me with a woman from the court’s family office, coloring on the back of a form, with the ring on her thumb and nine rings in a sandwich bag in my purse because he had asked me to hold them.
He sat in the back row by the door with his hands flat on his legs.
The judge was a woman about my age with reading glasses on a chain. She had our file open and she was not smiling at anybody.
Mr. Tien stood.
He talked about the stable Christian home. He talked about the pastor’s letter. He talked about a motorcycle that killed a young father and a household that kept that crowd coming and going around a grieving child. He held up a photograph from Elizabeth’s phone of Ainsley at three on the gas tank in my driveway, and the judge looked at it a long time.
Then he turned a page.
“The petitioner further asks the court to appoint her representative payee of the minor’s Social Security survivor benefits, effective immediately,” he said. “And to order the respondent to account for every dollar received since the father’s death. Approximately twenty-one thousand dollars, Your Honor, over which Mrs. Gunn has had unsupervised use.”
Lakisha slid the amended petition over to me and put her finger on page six.
Elizabeth’s financial affidavit. Monthly income: $1,310. Outstanding debts: none. Petitioner has never experienced financial hardship.
On my lap, under the table, was a yellow ticket for $340, dated the day before the funeral.
Elizabeth sat with her coat on and her purse in her lap, both hands on the strap.
Lakisha leaned over so close her hair touched my ear.
“Carol. Did you know she wanted the check?”
The witness chair
Mr. Tien called James Nava at 1:52.
He walked up the aisle wearing the vest and his bare hands and sat in the witness chair like it might give.
Mr. Tien asked him everything. How long he had known Dariusz. Whether he had been to my home. Whether alcohol was served. Whether the girl had been present. Whether he had been convicted of a felony in this state. Whether he had approached the child in the lobby today.
“Twelve years. Twice. Beer, yes, sir, two each. She was. Yes, in 1997. No, sir. She approached me.”
“She approached you.”
“She needed all ten.”
Mr. Tien said, “Nothing further,” and sat down fast, and Lakisha didn’t stand.
I had the ticket in my hand under the table. I pushed it across to her.
She looked at it and then at me. “If I use this, he gets to ask you about every dollar in that account. Every one. With her sitting right there.”
I thought about the sticky note.
“Use it,” I said.
Lakisha stood. “Mr. Nava, the ring the child is wearing. Where did you get it?”
“Objection. Relevance.”
“Her affidavit says she has never been in financial hardship, Judge,” Lakisha said. “This goes to that.”
The judge took off her glasses. “Overruled. I’d like to hear it.”
He told it the way he told Maurice. Buchanan. The bag. The scrap buyer. The dish by the register. Six dollars. Lakisha handed up the yellow ticket and the judge read the date and turned it over and read it again.
That was when Elizabeth stood up. Nobody had called her.
“Do you know what that funeral cost? Eleven thousand four hundred dollars. Do you know who paid it? Not her. Not THEM.” She pointed at the back row without looking at it. “That boy owed me since he was nineteen years old. Every bike, every fine, every lawyer. That check is his money. It’s my son’s money and it should come to his mother, not to a woman who rings up cough drops part time—”
“Elizabeth, sit down,” Mr. Tien said.
“I paid for that box. I paid for the ground he’s in. I could put what I wanted in it.”
“Mrs. Vanhorn,” the judge said. “Sit down.”
She sat.
Then it was my turn in the chair, and Mr. Tien had found the folder. He was good at his job.
“Mrs. Gunn, in August of last year you withdrew four hundred dollars of the child’s benefits for a car repair. Your car.”
“The transmission. I put it back in two paychecks.”
“Did any court approve that withdrawal?”
“No.”
“Nothing further.”
The judge wrote for a long time. Then she denied the emergency motion. Ainsley stayed with me. She set the full hearing for sixty days out, ordered a home study of both houses, and ordered every dollar of the survivor money moved into a restricted account that neither one of us could touch without coming back to her. Me included.
“And the ring stays with the child,” she said.
In the aisle on the way out, Elizabeth stopped beside Ainsley and looked down at the thumb.
“You’ll lose that by Christmas,” she said.
“No I won’t,” Ainsley said.
The driveway
The home-study lady came on a Tuesday in December and sat on the edge of the spare-room bed and wrote down that the window locked. The credit union sent a letter about the restricted account that I put on the refrigerator under a magnet from the pharmacy.
I can’t buy shoes out of it anymore without a form. I buy them out of my own check now, a size up, so they last.
The Sunday before Christmas a single motorcycle backed in by my mailbox and sat there ticking.
James Nava had nine rings on and a bare left thumb.
Ainsley came down the porch steps with the steel band on a chain around her neck. I bought the chain at work for four dollars.
He sat sideways on the seat and held his hands out flat.
She pulled the rings off one at a time and counted out loud and set them in a row on the gas tank, and when one rolled she started over without being told.
At nine she stopped and looked at his thumb.
Then she took the chain off over her head, slid the ring off it and worked it onto his thumb, over the knuckle, a little at a time.
She took it right back off.
“Ten,” she said, and set it on the tank with the others.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who is raising a grandchild on a part-time paycheck.
For more stories about bikers who show up when it matters, read about the deputy, the bus lane, and the stop paddle, the old photograph tucked in a little girl’s pocket, and the blue helmet that changed one family’s safety ride.
