My husband’s mother took over our guest room on a Thursday and unpacked eighty-four years of her life onto the bed before I got home from work. “Oh, Sherman didn’t tell you?” she said, not even looking up. “Somebody in this family has to make decisions.” I believed her flood story for about seven hours.
Thirty-one years married, and my husband had handed his mother a key without one phone call to me.
I came in through the garage after a ten-hour shift, wanting a shower and one quiet hour.
My spot was taken.
Gustavo’s old motorcycle stood there on its kickstand, the black one my father-in-law rode until the spring he died, a ratchet strap still hooked to the fork.
Carole had kept that bike locked in a storage unit for six years. She wouldn’t let Sherman so much as sit on it.
Boxes lined the hallway, taped and stacked two high, a lamp sticking out of one.
The trail ended at the back bedroom.
Carole was inside.
My good quilt was buried under her blouses, and Gustavo’s brown riding jacket already hung on the closet door.
An empty sleeve of my saltines sat on the dresser.
“Carole, what is all this?” I said.
She kept folding a cardigan. “Pipes burst under the sink. The first floor’s soaked, so I’m here till they dry it out.”
Flooded.
Her condo in Amarillo was ELEVEN MONTHS old. I’d helped her pick out the faucets.
Sherman came in behind me, hands in his pockets, studying the carpet.
“Just for a while, babe,” he said. “Till it’s fixed.”
Nobody tows a DEAD MAN’S motorcycle across town for a while.
I smiled at them both, went and took my shower, and stood under it until the water ran cold.
At 2:10 my mouth was dry, so I headed for the kitchen.
The kitchen light was on, and they were talking low, her at the table in her robe, him leaning on the fridge.
I stopped in the dark hallway with one hand on the wall.
“She still thinks it’s ONLY THE PIPES?” Carole said.
Sherman put his glass down. “And she’s going to KEEP thinking that, Mom.”
2:10
Carole turned her coffee cup a quarter turn on the table.
“Goldberg’s girl called at four. It closed Tuesday. That condo belongs to a dentist from Lubbock now.”
There were no pipes. There had never been water on any floor.
“Mom,” Sherman said.
“Well, it does. I’m not going back to a box with a man running a treadmill over my head. I told you that in August.”
“Go to bed. Monday it’s done.”
I took my hand off the wall and backed down the hall the way I’d come, past the boxes, past the lamp, past the seashell nightlight my sister mailed us in 2009 that has never once been bright enough to see by. I never did get my water.
In our bedroom, Sherman’s phone was charging on his nightstand, face up. It lit while I was pulling the sheet back.
GOLDBERG TITLE: Funds received. Payoff set for Mon 10:00 AM. Both signatures required. Please bring photo ID.
The screen went dark again.
I lay on my side and kept my eyes on the place where it had been. Payoff of what. Both of whose.
Sherman came in at 2:40. He felt along the nightstand for the phone, picked it up, and set it back down face down before he lay down.
In thirty-one years he had never once turned his phone face down.
The boot box
There is a Justin boot box on the top shelf of my closet. The boots wore out in 2003. The box didn’t.
In it are sixty carbon copies of checks, two hundred dollars each, March 1995 through February 2000. Every memo line says the same thing in my handwriting. Loan, C. Contreras.
The twelve thousand was Gustavo’s idea. We’d found this house on Fourteenth Avenue and couldn’t make the down payment, and he came over one Sunday and wrote the check at our kitchen table without sitting down. Carole wrote the number on a napkin and put the napkin in her purse.
Sherman told me later what his dad said on the drive home. “Your mother thinks a favor is a mortgage.”
Carole cashed every check I sent. She never once told me it was paid off. I never once asked her to.
The other thing in the box is a Texas certificate of title.
Six years ago in April, Gustavo was on the fourth floor of the hospital where I work, two floors up from my unit. I spent my breaks in his room. Carole went home at eight every night for her programs.
On his last good night, his riding buddy Dang came up the back stairs in his vest with the title in an envelope and a notary from admissions behind him. Gustavo signed the back of it over to me with a pen he could barely hold.
“She’ll sell it to the first man who says sorry for your loss,” he said. “Sherman can’t say no to her. You can.”
At the funeral, twenty-some bikes rode in front of the hearse. At the cemetery Dang shook my hand and didn’t let go of it.
“If she ever lets go of that bike, you call me,” he said. “Eleven-five, cash, any day.”
The week after, Carole put the bike in a unit off Amarillo Boulevard and kept the key on her own ring. I put the title in the boot box and never filed it. A motorcycle wasn’t worth what Carole would have made of it, and Gustavo was dead either way.
At five-thirty that Friday I stood on a kitchen chair in my closet, took the box down, made sure the title was still in its envelope, and put the envelope in my work bag.
Carole was already in the kitchen in her robe. My coffee can sat on the counter by the sink.
“I moved your coffee,” she said. “Nobody keeps coffee over the stove.”
Goldberg Title
Yoon has worked next to me for nineteen years. She heard the whole thing in the supply room before seven, holding a box of gloves.
“Eleven months,” she said. “My condo’s thirty years old and it’s never flooded once.”
“She sold it.”
“So where’s the money going?”
I told her about the text. Payoff. Both signatures.
Yoon put the gloves on the shelf. “Your name’s on whatever it is. Call them. They have to talk to you.”
The mortgage has been Sherman’s since we refinanced in 2019. It comes out of his account and I pay the groceries and the light bill out of mine, and that’s how we’ve done it. In June he switched everything to paperless. “Saving trees, babe,” he said. I didn’t think about it again.
I called Goldberg from the break room at ten-fifteen with my lunch still in the fridge.
A girl answered with the voice of someone reading off a sticky note. I gave her my name and said I was calling about Monday.
“Oh, sure. Let me pull it up.” Keys clicked. “Yes, ma’am, you’re on the file. Mr. Contreras is our contact, though. He asked that Ms. Goldberg go over everything with you both at the table.”
“What am I signing?”
“I really can’t get into the documents over the phone. Ms. Goldberg likes to walk people through it.”
“Can you tell me what’s being paid off?”
More keys. She was quiet long enough that I thought she’d put me on hold.
“It’s the payoff on 4410 Fourteenth Avenue,” she said. “Is that not—”
She was reading me my own address.
The gas station on Western
At 11:40 my phone buzzed in my scrub pocket.
Goldberg’s office called me. Why are you checking up on Mom? She is trying to do something nice for us for once.
For us.
Yoon read it over my shoulder. “Lunch. You’re driving. I’m not eating that yogurt again.”
We went to the gas station on Western for the breakfast burritos they keep under the lamp until two. I pulled in at 1:05.
Sherman’s truck was parked at the side by the ice machine.
He was supposed to be across town until four. He was in the cab with the seat leaned back, his blue lunch cooler open on the dash, doing the crossword with the pencil he keeps behind his ear.
I got out. Yoon stayed in my car.
I knocked on his window and he jumped so hard the pencil went into the floorboard. He rolled the window down about four inches.
“They let me go in May,” he said, before I’d said anything.
Five months. Every morning since May he’d kissed me at six-forty and left with that cooler.
“The mortgage,” I said.
“I got behind.”
“How far?”
He looked at the ice machine. “Some.”
I walked around and got in his passenger seat and called the number on the back of my debit card’s sister account, the one for the loan, because my name’s on that loan as much as his. I gave the man the last four of my social and my date of birth. Sherman held the crossword in his lap.
The man was polite. Five payments behind. A notice of default in August. A notice of acceleration in October. Both sent by certified mail and by email.
Sherman had been home every afternoon to get the mail before I could.
“The substitute trustee sale is scheduled for the first Tuesday of December, ma’am,” the man said. “To reinstate, you’d need to bring the loan current. Through the end of this month, that figure is $8,912.40.”
I wrote it on the back of a gas receipt from Sherman’s cupholder.
The first Tuesday in December was five weeks off. They sell houses on the courthouse steps in this county the first Tuesday of the month. I’d driven past it my whole life and never once looked.
I hung up. Sherman was crying a little, the way he does, without any sound.
“Mom’s paying the whole thing,” he said. “Every cent, Iris, not just the back payments. We won’t have a mortgage. You don’t have to do anything.”
He reached over and put his hand on my knee.
“Just sign Monday. Please. Just sign.”
The box marked SHERMAN
Carole gets her hair done every Saturday at nine, at a shop on Georgia, in the same chair since 1979. She doesn’t drive on Saturdays anymore, so Sherman took her.
I heard the truck back out. I went down the hall to the back bedroom, where her things had spread a little further every day since Thursday, and stood in the door.
Gustavo’s jacket was still on the closet door. Up close it smelled like six years in a storage unit and a little like him, oil and Juicy Fruit.
Her slippers were lined up under the window. Her pill organizer sat on my nightstand, Sunday through Saturday, every lid snapped shut, and she had moved the clock radio to the floor to make room for it. A framed photo of Gustavo on the black bike, taken somewhere outside Tucumcari, leaned against the lamp with its face turned toward her pillow and its back to the door.
Her blouses were hung up now. My quilt was folded at the foot of the bed with something set on top of it, a cardboard box, taped once and opened again. Across the side, in Carole’s black marker, it said SHERMAN, and under that, PAPERS.
I opened the flaps.
On top was a green Goldberg Title folder with DRAFT stamped across it in red.
The first page was a payoff statement from our mortgage company. $97,410.18. Our loan number. Our address.
Clipped behind it was a page I had never seen the like of.
Special Warranty Deed.
Grantor was my name, typed in capitals. Grantee was CAROLE ANN CONTRERAS. In consideration of the payment of the indebtedness described above, I was to grant, sell and convey to her all of my undivided one-half interest in the property at 4410 Fourteenth Avenue, together with all improvements thereon.
My half of the house.
There was a yellow SIGN HERE flag at the bottom, next to a line with my name typed under it.
Paper-clipped to the corner was a sheet off the notepad Carole keeps by her phone. The handwriting slants hard to the right, the way it has on every birthday card she ever sent us.
S — put this one in the middle of the stack. She signs anything they put in front of her after a shift.
I read it twice. Then I put the folder in my work bag next to the title, closed the flaps the way they’d been, and set the box back on my quilt.
The garage door started up.
Dang
I called Dang Saturday night from the backyard, standing by the fence where Sherman couldn’t hear. I’d kept his number in the boot box on the back of a funeral program. He answered on the second ring and didn’t ask me a single question.
At ten Sunday morning there were four motorcycles parked along the curb on Fourteenth and Dang’s white pickup in our driveway with a flatbed trailer behind it. He’d brought three men from Gustavo’s old group. One of them I remembered from the funeral by his beard.
I raised the garage door and stood next to the bike.
Carole came out the kitchen door in her robe with Sherman behind her.
“What is this,” she said. “Who called these people?”
“Morning, Carole,” Dang said.
I took the envelope out of my bag and gave Dang the title. He read the back of it, nodded, and folded it into his vest.
“That is my husband’s motorcycle,” Carole said. “Get your hands off it. Sherman, get his hands off it. He signed that thing full of morphine, he didn’t know his own name by then, I sat with him every day of that hospital—”
“It’s notarized,” I said.
“I know it’s notarized. I was standing in the hall when that woman went by with her little stamp. Why do you think I kept the key six years? He wanted it to go to you. Like he wanted twelve thousand dollars to go to you. I knew exactly what he signed.”
She came down the step into the garage.
“Sell it, then. Go ahead. It doesn’t change a thing. You’ll still be at Goldberg’s at ten tomorrow, because they’re auctioning this house off the courthouse steps in December, and I’m the only person in this family with ninety-seven thousand dollars. Somebody has to make decisions.”
I’d brought the boot box out with me. I set it on the bike’s seat and took the lid off.
Carole looked at the carbons. She didn’t touch them.
“That was a long time ago,” she said.
I took the green folder out of my bag and laid the deed on top of the carbons, with her note still clipped to the corner.
Sherman leaned over and read it. He read it a long time. Then he looked at his mother.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Carole said. “You were going to lose the house. I fixed it. I’m the one who always fixes it.”
Dang put a bank envelope on the workbench next to the coffee can of screws. I didn’t count it in front of her.
“Sherman,” I said. “Call Goldberg. Tell them ten o’clock is off.”
He took his phone out. Carole said his name once. He dialed anyway, and because it was Sunday he got the voicemail.
“This is Sherman Contreras,” he said. “We won’t be needing Monday.”
Carole pulled her robe closed at the neck.
“Then I am not sleeping one more night under this roof,” she said.
“Your boxes are still taped,” I said.
Two of the men walked the bike down the driveway and up the ramp onto the trailer. Dang unhooked the ratchet strap from the fork, the one Sherman had used to tow it over, and handed it to me. He used his own straps.
Carole stood in the middle of my empty half of the garage in her slippers.
“Gustavo would have hated you for this,” she said.
The first Tuesday in December
I came home through the garage after a ten-hour shift, wanting a shower and one quiet hour.
My spot was empty. There’s a dark spot on the concrete the size of a hand where the kickstand stood for five weeks. It won’t come up. I parked over it.
The ratchet strap hangs on a nail by the water heater.
At nine that Monday I’d paid $8,912.40 at the bank’s branch on Bell, out of Dang’s envelope, and put most of what was left toward November. The letter came the week after. Reinstated. Nobody was selling anything on the courthouse steps today.
Carole signed a lease on a two-bedroom off Soncy that Wednesday, with the condo money back in her own account. She calls Sherman. She doesn’t call the house.
Sherman leaves at six-forty with his blue cooler again, for a job that pays less and is real. He shows me the pay stubs without my asking.
Yoon asked me on Thursday whether I’d forgiven him. I told her I was working on it the way you work on a stain, a little every day, and that some of it might stay.
My quilt is back on the guest bed. The closet door is bare except for Gustavo’s jacket. Carole took everything else.
Sherman came and stood in the doorway in his coat while I was still in my scrubs.
“Mom wants Dad’s jacket,” he said. “She says she forgot it.”
I lifted it off the door, folded it over his arm, and went to run my shower.
If you’ve ever come home to find your own half of the garage spoken for, pass this one to somebody who’d understand.
For more family drama with motorcycles at the center, read the story of a sergeant, his daughter, and eleven bikes and the eleven motorcycles behind the hog barn. And when family takes the stage, twelve bikers in the back row make quite an entrance.
