My uncle read my grandfather’s will out loud on the fourth floor of the hospital garage, sitting on Grandpa’s own motorcycle, while Grandpa was still breathing upstairs. He got to the house and the $186,000 and grinned at me. “Nothing for the leftover,” he said. He never asked what Grandpa had put in my hand that morning.
The nurse had said nine days. Maybe less.
I’d lived in that house with Grandpa since I was seventeen, since my mom’s funeral, when nobody else in the family wanted a kid who wouldn’t talk.
Six years of sorting his pills on Sunday nights.
Six years of his oatmeal with too much brown sugar, his hip, his bad ear, his sheets.
Uncle Wes came by twice in all that time. Once at Christmas. Once to borrow the truck.
That morning Grandpa woke up clear for maybe four minutes.
He found my wrist, pushed something cold into my palm and folded my fingers down over it.
His dog tag. The one he never took off, not even in the shower.
“Don’t let Wes sell her,” he said. “Tell Lionel it’s time.”
Then he went back under, breathing that slow, ugly way.
I didn’t know a Lionel.
I knew Grandpa rode with a bunch of old guys on Sundays before his hip went, and I knew his flip phone was in my bag because the nurses kept telling me to charge it.
So I sat in the hallway and scrolled his contacts until I found Lionel B.
I texted from his phone. “This is Shelby. He gave me the tag. He said to tell you it’s time.”
Nothing came back.
At four I went down to get my charger out of the car.
Grandpa’s bike was on Level 4, three spaces from my Corolla.
His black bagger with the crack in the windshield. Wes had ridden it over from the house that morning without asking anybody, because Wes had a key now.
Aunt Candice was leaning on the pillar next to it with a coffee.
Wes was sitting on the seat with a stack of papers spread on the gas tank.
“There she is,” Candice said.
Wes held up the top page so I could see the lawyer’s letterhead. “Found it in his desk. Figured we’d save everybody a trip.”
“He’s not dead,” I said.
“Nobody said he was.” Wes licked his thumb and turned the page. “House, me and Candy. Accounts, me and Candy. The bike, me.”
“He signed that in 2014,” Candice said. “Before you got your hooks in.”
Hooks.
I had been changing his sheets.
Wes read the money part again, louder, like I’d missed it.
“I’m his granddaughter,” I said.
“He cut your mother out in 2014 and you’re what she left behind,” Candice said. “You’re the leftover, Shelby. You were the help. The help gets paid by the hour.”
A car alarm went off somewhere down on Level 2 and quit.
Wes patted the tank. “Guy’s coming Saturday for this. Fourteen grand, cash. Don’t look at me like that.”
“He told me not to let you sell it,” I said.
“Did he.” Wes laughed. “He told me a lot of things. Mostly to get a haircut.”
Then Candice saw the chain hanging out of my fist.
“Oh my God. Is that his dog tag?” She set her coffee on the ledge of the pillar and laughed until she had to hold her stomach. “Wes. Wes, look. She brought his DOG TAG.”
“Keep it, sweetheart,” Wes said. “That’s your share.”
My hand was shaking so bad the chain rattled.
“He gave it to me this morning,” I said. “He said to give it to Lionel.”
“Who the hell is Lionel?”
I didn’t know.
That was the worst part.
Wes folded the papers in thirds and slid them inside his jacket. He stood up off the bike, dug the key out of his pocket and dangled it in front of my face.
“THIS IS OURS,” he said. “ALL OF IT. You get the tag and a ride home if you’re nice.”
Then the floor started to hum.
I felt it in my shoes first.
A low rolling sound came up the ramp from Level 3, getting bigger, bouncing off every inch of that concrete.
Candice turned around.
The first headlight came around the bend of the ramp. Then a second one. Then they just kept coming.
I counted because I couldn’t do anything else.
Eleven.
Eleven motorcycles rolled up onto Level 4 one behind the other, slow, like a funeral going the wrong way, and backed into the empty spaces on both sides of Grandpa’s bike until it was boxed in.
Nobody revved anything. Nobody yelled.
The engines shut off one at a time until I could hear the parking machine beeping by the elevator.
The man on the first bike took off his half helmet and hung it on the bars.
Silver beard cut close. Dog tags at his throat, like Grandpa’s. Arms like fence posts, the ink on them gone soft and blue.
He looked at Wes for a long second.
Then he looked at me. At my fist.
“You Shelby?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Lionel Byrd. Your grandpa and I rode together twenty-two years.” He held out his hand, palm up. Not reaching. Just waiting. “He said you’d be holding something for me.”
Wes laughed, but it came out wrong. “Buddy, this is family business. We’ve got the will right here.”
Lionel didn’t look at him.
“I know you do, Wesley,” he said. “I know what’s in it.”
Behind him ten men were getting off their bikes and lining up along the pillars without a word.
Candice picked her coffee back up. Her hand wasn’t steady anymore.
“Then you know it’s legal,” Wes said.
“I know it’s the FIRST ONE,” Lionel said.
I opened my hand.
The tag was warm from me holding it all day. Grandpa’s name, his number, his blood type, punched into the metal in tiny letters.
And on the back, where I had never once thought to look, somebody had scratched four more numbers by hand.
Lionel read them twice.
Then he turned and held the tag up where Wes could see the back of it.
“You wanted to read something out loud, Wesley,” he said. “Read this.”
Zero four one two
Wes squinted at it. He didn’t take it.
“Zero, four, one, two,” he said. “Great. It’s a PIN. He forgot his PIN, so he scratched it on his necklace.”
Candice leaned in over his shoulder. “It’s not his PIN. His PIN’s his birthday. It’s always been his birthday.”
“Then it’s a locker. Who cares.”
I cared, because I knew it.
Zero four one two. April 12.
The day we buried my mom. The day Grandpa put my two trash bags in the back of his truck and drove me home with him, and the radio stayed off the whole way.
Neither of them knew the date. It was their sister.
“It’s April twelfth,” I said.
Wes looked at me like I’d spoken another language. “So?”
“So it’s the day of Mom’s funeral.”
Candice opened her mouth and closed it again. She took a sip of coffee instead.
Lionel lowered the tag. He didn’t give it back to me yet. He turned it over in his big fingers and ran his thumb across the scratches, like he was checking that they were real.
“He told me the number was on him,” Lionel said. “Said he’d carry it where nobody’d go looking. Never told me what it was.”
“Number for WHAT?” Wes said.
Lionel nodded past him. At the back of Grandpa’s bike.
The tour pack. The black hard trunk that sits up behind the passenger seat on a bagger, with the little backrest on the front of it.
I had been looking at that trunk my whole life without seeing it. It was just part of the bike.
“In 2021 he had me pull the key lock out of that and put in a dial,” Lionel said. “Four wheels. He set it himself in my garage. Sent me out of the room to do it.”
“That thing doesn’t even open,” Wes said. “It’s been stuck for years.”
“Has it,” Lionel said.
He held the tag out to me, chain hanging down over his wrist.
I took it back. It was still warm.
“It’s your box, Shelby,” he said. “Not mine. Not his. You open it.”
Wes took one step sideways and put his back against the trunk.
“Nobody’s opening anything,” he said. “Not on my bike.”
The mailbox post
I need to tell you about the crack in the windshield, because it’s mine.
Two summers ago, Grandpa decided I was going to learn to ride.
His hip was already bad by then. He couldn’t swing his leg over anymore without me holding the bars steady. So he dragged a lawn chair to the end of the driveway, sat down in it with his cane across his knees, and coached me from there.
“Clutch is your friend,” he said. “Throttle is your cousin. You don’t trust your cousin.”
I was twenty-one. I’d been living in his house for four years and I still mostly talked in single words.
He didn’t care. He talked enough for both of us.
I made it up the driveway twice. On the third time I let the clutch out too fast, panicked and grabbed the front brake, and the whole thing went over sideways into the mailbox post.
I didn’t get hurt. I just lay on the grass next to that big black bike with the back wheel still spinning, and I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe right.
It was the first time I’d cried since the funeral.
Grandpa got up out of that lawn chair without his cane. I still don’t know how. He came down the driveway one step at a time and stood over me.
He didn’t ask if I was okay. He looked at the bike.
The windshield had a crack running from the corner almost to the middle, like a lightning bolt somebody had drawn with a pen.
“Well,” he said. “Now she’s got your name on her.”
I said I’d pay to fix it.
“You’ll do no such thing. Leave it.”
He never fixed it. Wes called it “that ugly crack” every time he saw the bike. Grandpa never told him how it got there.
That was the summer, too, that I started hearing about Lionel without hearing his name.
“The boys” were coming by the diner Sunday. “One of the boys” had dropped off a new battery. “My buddy from the club” said the bike needed new tires. I never met any of them. When they came by the house, I stayed in my room. Grandpa never made me come out.
Here’s the other thing I need to tell you.
The Christmas Wes came, he didn’t bring anything. He sat at the kitchen table with Grandpa while I washed dishes, and they talked low, and I didn’t listen because I never listened to Wes.
Then Wes said something I didn’t catch, and Grandpa put his coffee cup down so hard it slopped over.
“It’s done, Wesley,” he said. “I took care of it. You’ll get what you get.”
Wes left before pie.
The spring after that, Wes called and said he needed to borrow the truck. Grandpa was at physical therapy and I was driving him, so Wes let himself in with the spare key under the frog.
He brought the truck back the next day with an empty tank.
That night I went into Grandpa’s office to get his checkbook, and the bottom drawer of his desk was hanging open on one runner. The little brass lock on it was bent sideways, like somebody had worked a screwdriver in behind it.
I asked Grandpa about it. He looked at that drawer for a long time.
“Must have been me,” he said. “I lose my keys.”
He didn’t lose his keys. He never once in six years lost his keys.
I thought about that drawer standing on Level 4 with the dog tag in my fist and Wes’s back against the trunk.
He’d said he found the will in Grandpa’s desk.
He didn’t say which drawer.
The scratches by the dial
“Move, Wes,” I said.
“No.”
He folded his arms. He’s a big man, Wes, gone soft the way men get when they sit for a living, but big. He had the key in one hand and the other one tucked into his armpit. He planted his feet like a kid refusing to get out of the pool.
“This is my property,” he said. “As of whenever. You heard the will.”
“He’s not dead.”
“Then it’s still HIS, and he’s not here, and I’m his son. So it’s mine to look after. Right, Candy?”
Candice didn’t say right. She didn’t say anything. She was watching the ten men along the pillars.
They weren’t doing anything. That was what got to her, I think. They were just standing there with their hands at their sides, like men in a line at the bank. One of them was eating sunflower seeds out of a bag and putting the shells in his vest pocket.
Lionel hadn’t moved since he gave me back the tag.
“Wesley,” he said, “nobody here’s going to touch you. You know that.”
“Damn right nobody’s going to touch me.”
“So you’re going to stand there till she opens it, or you’re going to step aside while she does. Those are the two.”
“Or I call the police on the eleven gorillas blocking in my dad’s bike.”
“You can do that too,” Lionel said.
I went around the side of the bike. Not toward Wes. Just around, past the saddlebag on the left side, so I could see the trunk from the corner.
The dial was on the right side of the lid. Four little black wheels with white numbers, set in a chrome plate about the size of a matchbook.
I’d never noticed it. I’d ridden behind Grandpa on that bike maybe three times, leaning against that backrest, and never once noticed that it had numbers on it.
Wes turned with me, keeping his body in front of the latch.
But he couldn’t cover the chrome plate and the latch at the same time.
And from where I was standing I could see the paint.
All around the dial, the black paint on the trunk was chewed up. Little bright scrapes in a ring, silver showing through. Two deep gouges right under the latch, where something flat had been jammed in and pried.
They weren’t old. Old scratches on that bike went dull and gray, like the crack in the windshield had. These were bright as a new dime.
There were curls of plastic stuck in the seam of the lid.
I put my finger on one and it came off on my skin.
“That’s fresh,” I said.
Wes looked down at the scratches, and then at me, and his face did something I’d never seen it do.
He looked caught.
Then it was gone, and he laughed.
“I told you it’s stuck,” he said. “I was trying to get it open for him. To get his rain gear out. That a crime now?”
Lionel took two steps forward, the first time he’d moved, and bent down to look at the gouges.
He straightened up and looked at Wes.
“You rode that bike forty minutes this morning,” he said, “to try a screwdriver on it in a parking garage?”
Filip from security
I didn’t see who called security.
It might have been the visitor by the elevator, a woman in a purple coat who’d been holding her phone up at us since the bikes came in. It might have been the nurse standing beside her in blue scrubs with her hand over her mouth. It might have been Wes.
Whoever it was, the elevator dinged, and a man in a gray uniform shirt stepped out with a radio on his shoulder.
His name tag said FILIP. He was maybe sixty, with reading glasses pushed up on his head and a coffee stain on his tie.
He took one look at eleven motorcycles and ten men along the pillars and put his hand on his radio.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. What’s going on up here?”
Wes got to him first. Of course he did.
“Thank God,” he said. “My father’s upstairs in hospice. This is his bike. I’m his son. These guys rolled in here and boxed me in and they’re trying to get into his property.”
He pulled the folded will out of his jacket and held it open in front of Filip like a badge.
Filip lowered his glasses and read the top of it.
“And who’s this?” he said, meaning me.
“Nobody,” Wes said. “She’s the girl who lives at his house.”
“I’m his granddaughter,” I said.
Filip looked at the will, then at me, then at Lionel.
Lionel didn’t argue. He stood there with his hands loose and let Filip look at him.
“Sir,” Filip said to him, “are these your guys?”
“They’re his,” Lionel said, and tipped his head toward the elevator. Toward upstairs.
“Well, they can’t park like this. You’ve got two cars that can’t get out down that end, and this is a hospital, so I need everybody moved in ten minutes. And nobody goes into anything that’s not theirs. You’ve got a problem with the will, you take it to a lawyer.”
He said it to Lionel. Not to Wes.
Paper wins. That’s how it works with men like Filip, who just want their shift to end without a report.
Candice found her voice again. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you. That’s all we’ve been saying.”
Ten minutes.
I had the tag. I had the numbers. I didn’t have ten minutes of anything.
So while Wes was standing beside Filip, pointing at the gouges in the trunk and saying “see, they’ve been trying to break into it,” I went for the dial.
I got the first wheel to zero.
I got the second wheel to four.
Then a hand closed on my wrist and yanked.
Wes. He pulled me off the trunk so hard my shoulder popped, and I came around and hit the side of the bike with my hip and the dog tag chain went flying out of my hand and skittered across the concrete under the next bike over.
“I SAID NOBODY,” Wes said.
He was breathing hard. He still had my wrist.
Four of the men along the pillars stepped off them at once.
Lionel didn’t turn his head. He just lifted one hand, flat, about waist high.
They stopped.
“Let go of her, Wesley,” he said.
Wes let go.
My wrist was red where his fingers had been. I didn’t rub it. I didn’t want him to see.
Filip had seen it, though. He decided not to have seen it.
“Miss,” he said to me, “you need to step back from the vehicle.”
To me.
The man with the sunflower seeds had already crouched down and fished the chain out from under the bike next to Grandpa’s. He held it out to me without a word, tag swinging.
I took it.
“Eight minutes,” Filip said.
Lionel B.
I sat down on the curb of the concrete island by the pillar, because my legs weren’t working right.
My bag was on my shoulder. Grandpa’s flip phone was in the front pocket, where it had been all day. Still at eleven percent because I never did make it to my charger.
I took it out. I don’t know why. To see if Lionel had ever written back, maybe. To have something to do with my hands that wasn’t shaking.
The text I’d sent at noon was there. Under it, at 12:09, one word from Lionel B.
“Coming.”
I’d never heard it buzz. The ringer had been off since the hospital.
I pressed back, out of the conversation, into the list of messages. I’d only ever gone into his contacts before. I’d never once read his texts. It didn’t feel like mine to do.
There were only five or six names in there. The pharmacy. Lionel B. A number with no name. And WES.
The last message from WES was eleven days ago.
I opened it.
The phone was so old the texts came up one at a time on that little screen, and I had to keep pushing the button to get down through them.
“Dad what’s the combo on the trunk”
“Dad answer your phone”
“I know you did something with the house. Candy doesn’t know and she doesn’t need to”
“Its my house too. You cant just give it to her”
“Whats the combination”
“Fine. Ill get it open myself”
That last one was from the morning before Grandpa went into hospice. The morning I was at the pharmacy for an hour and a half because his insurance had kicked back the new prescription.
The morning Wes had a key now.
I read it twice. I could hear Filip behind me telling a man to start backing his bike out.
Candy doesn’t know.
I stood up.
I didn’t go to Wes. I went to Filip, and I held the flip phone up in front of his reading glasses, the same way Wes had held up the will.
“This is my grandfather’s phone,” I said. “Read this.”
Filip took it. He pulled his glasses down. He pushed the button with his big thumb, slow, one message at a time, his lips moving a little.
Wes saw what it was from fifteen feet away.
“That’s private,” he said. “That’s a private phone. She stole that out of his room.”
“The nurses gave it to me,” I said.
Filip got to the last message. He looked at it for a while.
Then he looked at Wes, and back at the trunk, and at the gouges around the dial.
“Sir,” he said, “you told me you were trying to get his rain gear out.”
Wes didn’t say anything.
Candice set her coffee down on the ledge of the pillar.
“What does he mean, Candy doesn’t know?” she said.
The tour pack
Filip handed me back the phone. He looked tired. He looked like he wished he’d taken a different elevator.
“I’m not a lawyer,” he said. “I don’t know who owns what. But if that’s her granddad’s box and she’s got the number, she can open it with me standing right here. And nobody puts a hand on anybody. Anybody.”
He looked at Wes when he said the last one.
Wes stepped off the back of the bike. Not far. Two steps, still close enough to grab. But he stepped.
Lionel stayed where he was.
I came around to the right side of the trunk again. My hip hurt where I’d hit the saddlebag. My wrist hurt. My hands were so wet I had to wipe them on my jeans to turn the little wheels.
Zero.
Four.
One.
Two.
Nothing happened. I pushed the latch, and it didn’t move.
“Told you,” Wes said. “It’s stuck. It’s been stuck since 2019.”
Lionel said, quiet, “Push in while you lift, honey. It’s a cheap lock. I bought it at the farm store.”
I pushed in on the dial plate with my thumb and lifted the latch with my fingers.
It clicked.
The lid came up an inch on its own, the way a trunk does when there’s been something pressing on it from inside for a long time.
I lifted it the rest of the way.
There was his old rain jacket, the yellow one, rolled up tight. So Wes wasn’t all the way lying. There was a pair of riding gloves under it, small, with the tags still on. Women’s small.
I didn’t touch them yet.
Under the gloves was a big freezer bag, the gallon kind, folded over twice and taped.
I took it out and peeled back the tape.
There were two papers in it, and an index card.
The first one was thick, on heavy paper, with a stamp in the corner from the county recorder. TRANSFER ON DEATH DESIGNATION AFFIDAVIT. Grandpa’s name. The address of the house, our house, with the parcel number. And under “Transfer on Death Beneficiary,” typed in, my name. Shelby Amato.
It was recorded in June of 2021. Seven years after the will Wes was holding.
I read it all the way down to his signature. His real signature, the shaky one with the big loop on the G.
The second paper was the title to the bike. Ohio certificate of title, the blue one. On the back, in the assignment of ownership, he’d signed it over. To me. Notarized. And down at the bottom, on the line for a witness, in a heavy ballpoint that had dug right into the paper: Lionel Byrd.
The date on it was the summer I put her into the mailbox post.
The index card was in his block capitals, the ones he used for my pill chart.
SHELBY. THE CRACK STAYS.
I held it up so Lionel could see it.
He looked at it, and his face did nothing for a second. Then he nodded once and looked away, at the open side of the garage where the sun was coming in low.
“That’s him,” he said.
Filip leaned over my shoulder and read the top of the affidavit without asking. He whistled through his teeth.
“That house isn’t in the will,” he said to nobody in particular. “That’s the deed thing. My sister did one. It goes straight to whoever’s on it. Lawyer doesn’t even touch it.”
Lionel turned to Wes then, finally, for real.
“Your will’s good, Wesley,” he said. “It’s the first one. It just doesn’t have much left in it.”
The fourth floor
Wes didn’t yell right away. That was almost worse.
He laughed. He put both hands on top of his head and laughed at the ceiling, at the concrete and the pipes and the yellow paint on the beams.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “Un-be-lievable. He did it. He actually did it. The old bastard actually did it.”
“Did what?” Candice said.
“Oh, come on, Candy.”
“Did WHAT, Wes?”
He brought his hands down and pointed at me with the key still in his fist.
“He told me. He sat there at Christmas and told me to my face. ‘I took care of it.’ Like I was supposed to say thank you. Like that kid’s been his whole family, and you and me were just, what, people who visit.”
“You told me it was half and half,” Candice said. “You told me in the car. The house, half and half. You said you read it.”
“I DID read it. I just read it to you. It’s half and half. That’s what it says.”
“But you knew it wasn’t the house.”
“I knew he SAID something. He says a lot of things. He’s eighty-one, he’s on morphine, he doesn’t know what day it is.”
“He signed that in 2021,” Lionel said. “He knew what day it was.”
Wes swung around on him.
“And YOU. Who the hell are you? Twenty-two years. Twenty-two years of what, riding to a diner? I’m his SON. I’m the one who put him on the bike when I was six years old. I’ve got pictures. Where were you when he—”
He stopped, because he couldn’t think of when.
Nobody filled it in for him.
“You broke his desk,” I said.
Wes looked at me like the bike had talked.
“You borrowed the truck and you broke his desk drawer looking for that,” I said. “He said it must have been him.”
“I didn’t break anything. It was already busted.”
“And then you rode the bike here,” Candice said, slowly, like she was doing math. “This morning. With the screwdriver. To get into the trunk before anybody knew there was a trunk.”
“I rode it here because the guy’s coming Saturday, and I wanted it close.”
“The guy,” Candice said. “Fourteen thousand. Which you were going to split with me.”
Wes didn’t say anything.
“Were you going to split it with me, Wes?”
“Candy.”
“You read the will to her so she’d move out,” Candice said. “That’s what this was. Read it to her, get her scared, get her out of the house before Dad goes, so there’s nobody in it when the lawyer shows up. Change the locks. Sell the bike before anybody opens it. That’s what you said in the car. You said ‘possession.’ You said that word to me.”
“I said a LOT of words in the car.”
Candice picked up her coffee from the ledge and looked at it, and then she threw it. Not at anybody. At the concrete. It hit the floor between Wes’s boots and went all over his pant legs.
“I called her the help,” she said. She wasn’t looking at me. “I said that to her face because of you.”
“You said that because you meant it,” Wes said.
Nobody said anything to that, because it was true, and she knew it, and so did I.
Wes turned back to the bike.
He looked at it for a long time, the way Grandpa had looked at the desk drawer.
Then he held up the key.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. Take the house. Take his junk. But this is mine. The will says the bike, me. I’ve got the key.”
“You’ve got a key,” Lionel said. “She’s got the title.”
Wes stood there with the key on his finger, the way he’d dangled it in my face twenty minutes before.
I held out my hand. I didn’t say anything. I’d said all I had.
He didn’t give it to me. He threw it. It hit my chest and fell on the concrete next to Candice’s spilled coffee.
I picked it up.
Wes pushed past Filip to the elevator. Candice stood there a second longer, looking at me like she wanted to say something, and then she followed him without saying it.
The elevator doors closed.
Then my own phone rang, in my back pocket.
It was the nurses’ station on the sixth floor. A nurse named Ashanti, who’d been on with Grandpa all week.
“Shelby? Honey, he’s awake. He’s asking for you. He’s pretty clear. You might want to come up.”
I ran.
I took the stairs, because the elevator had Wes in it. Six floors. I had the key in one hand and the bag with the papers in the other and the dog tag around my own neck now, banging against my collarbone on every step.
When I got to the room he was back under. Breathing that slow, ugly way.
“He asked twice,” Ashanti said. “I’m sorry, baby. He asked where you went. I told him you’d gone down to the car.”
I sat down in the chair by his bed.
I’d been on Level 4. Holding his bike.
Sunday
Grandpa went on a Tuesday. Day six, not nine. He never came up clear again.
Wes and Candice got the accounts, the way the will said. A hundred eighty-six thousand dollars, split down the middle. I didn’t fight it. I didn’t want to sit in a lawyer’s office across from either of them for one more minute than I had to.
The house is mine. The pill organizer is still on the kitchen counter, all seven days empty. I haven’t moved it.
Candice sent me one text after the funeral. “I’m sorry about what I said.” I didn’t answer. I don’t know yet if I will.
Wes didn’t come to the funeral. Lionel told me the buyer showed up at Wes’s place that Saturday with fourteen thousand in an envelope and left with the envelope.
The first Sunday after the funeral, at ten in the morning, the floor of the house started to hum.
Eleven of them, in the driveway. Lionel at the front.
Nobody revved anything.
I came out in Grandpa’s rain jacket, because I didn’t have one of my own, and the gloves with the tags cut off. They fit.
The bike was in the garage where Lionel’s guys had trailered her home from the hospital. The crack in the windshield was still there. I’d told Lionel I’d kill anybody who fixed it.
I don’t have my endorsement yet. I’ve got the permit book from the BMV. So that morning I sat on Grandpa’s seat with the book open on the gas tank, the same place Wes spread out the will, and Lionel sat in the lawn chair at the end of the driveway, next to the mailbox post.
“Read it to me,” he said.
So I read it out loud. The part about the clutch. The part about the front brake.
When I got to the end of the page, he took his sunglasses off and folded them.
“Again,” he said. “Slower. Then you’re going to start her up.”
I put the key in.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who’s been sitting by a hospital bed while other people make plans in the parking lot.
The motorcycle-and-inheritance drama continues in The Eighteen Motorcycles and the Page Four My Brother Never Read, with more family secrets and biker standoffs in The Dog Who Woke Me When the Baby Cried Was Gone From Level Five and The Seat by the Swinging Door Before Sixty Motorcycles Climbed the Drive.
