My kid sister lifted her beer on our parents’ deck and told the whole family I was a divorced woman who bought a used motorcycle so she’d seem interesting. Then she said, “Go ahead, Jill, tell everybody what your little biker buddies call you.” So I told her. Over by the cooler, her husband’s hand went still in the ice.
Nine years I’d kept one thing from my family on purpose, and she wanted it dragged out between the potato salad and the deviled eggs.
It was Labor Day at my parents’ place on Lake Cumberland.
My cousins had ridden in that morning, so there was a row of bikes backed in along the gravel by the boathouse, mine on the end.
I’d barely gotten a hot dog on a paper plate when Lizette picked me as the afternoon’s show.
“Look who rode in,” she said, loud enough for the dock to hear. “Easy Rider.”
A few cousins turned around in their chairs.
I kept squeezing mustard.
“Mom says you’re in some kind of motorcycle club now,” Lizette said.
“Something like that.”
“Like charity poker runs?”
“No.”
“The leather vests with the fringe on them?”
“No.”
She spread her arms at the table. “Everybody, she’s got secrets now.”
My uncle snorted into his coleslaw.
Dad grinned and let it ride.
That part was old news.
My family knew three things about me. I rode. I vanished some weekends and some weeknights. And I never said where.
Somewhere along the way they’d decided that if I wouldn’t talk about it, there was nothing to talk about.
Lizette came around the end of the table.
“So where do you go on all these rides, Jill?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
Which got her the laugh she’d been fishing for.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Is it a secret biker mission?”
I ate a chip.
Arguing with Lizette had never once gotten me anywhere.
She’d always read it as me giving up.
She crossed her arms.
“Ronnie rode with a real club for nine years. You bought a bike off Marketplace after your divorce. So if you’re such a big deal, what do they call you? Everybody’s got a road name, right?”
I looked up from my plate.
Ronnie was by the cooler, a few steps off.
Shaved head, gray coming into his beard, dog tags he never took off. He’d ridden with a chapter up near Dayton until his knee quit on him, and he still wore the old vest to every cookout like Dad owed him an argument.
Up to then he hadn’t heard a word of it.
I put my plate on the rail.
“Porch Light.”
Ronnie stopped.
He was in that ice up to the wrist.
He left it there.
Lizette laughed out loud. “Porch Light? That’s a candle scent.”
Ronnie straightened up slow, his hand wet and empty.
Whatever had been funny about the afternoon was gone off his face.
“Say that again.”
I looked right at him.
“Porch Light.”
The music and the kids on the dock carried on a little longer, and then the people nearest us caught on to how he was standing.
He came closer.
“Whose chapter?”
I waited. “Big Sid’s.”
He nodded once, slow.
“Down south?”
“Yes.”
“Past the county line? Out on the gravel roads?”
I kept quiet.
He didn’t need me to say it.
Lizette made a face. “Babe. Do not feed this.”
He kept his back to her.
“Were you at the Lattimore place?”
Nobody had said that name to me in five years.
I held his eyes.
“Yes.”
Ronnie’s face went gray.
Dad’s grin finally slipped.
Lizette looked from him to me and back. “What’s the Lattimore place?”
Not one word from him or me.
Ronnie moved in again.
“There were fourteen bikes in that yard.”
I nodded.
“Thirteen were meant to pull out at midnight.”
“Yes.”
He was breathing different now.
Lizette laughed, high and wrong. “Okay, you’re both being so weird.”
His eyes never left me.
“Who said the fourteenth could stay?”
“Sid did.”
That settled it for him.
He wiped his wet hand down his jeans, very slowly.
Then he faced his wife.
“Lizette.”
“What?”
“Apologize to her.”
She blinked at him. “For what, exactly?”
“All of it. Every word since she pulled in.”
The smile went out of her.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
She jerked her head at me. “SHE BOUGHT A USED BIKE AFTER HER DIVORCE, Ronnie, and now I’ve got to—”
“Enough.”
He hadn’t raised his voice at all.
That’s what made the whole deck go quiet.
His eyes went down the table, face by face.
“I heard that name one time. At a chapter meeting, four hundred miles from here.”
Nobody moved a fork.
“Nobody had a picture. Nobody had a real name. Nobody even knew which chapter.”
He turned back to me.
“Just a rider who sat on a porch the sheriff already said nobody should sit on, because somebody inside that house needed the light left on till morning.”
Mom put her hand flat on the table.
Lizette’s mouth opened and nothing came out.
Ronnie wasn’t done.
He dug his wallet out of his back pocket and slid out a photograph folded so many times the creases had gone white.
He laid it flat beside the potato salad.
A row of motorcycles in the dark, nosed out from a farmhouse porch, one bulb burning over the door, a few riders standing at the foot of the steps.
On the back, somebody had written a date in blue pen.
Under the date was the name.
PORCH LIGHT.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
Ronnie was watching my face, not the picture.
Then he asked, very low, “You know who took this. Don’t you?”
That was the one question all afternoon I let go by.
I knew who took it.
And I knew why no copy of it should ever have ended up in Ronnie’s wallet.
The blue pen
I knew who took it because I took it.
Two minutes to midnight, five years ago, standing in the gravel at the bottom of those steps, with my own phone, against the one rule Big Sid never bends.
I printed it once. One copy, off the machine at the drugstore in Somerset, and I deleted the file before I left the parking lot.
I wrote the back at my kitchen table that night. The pen was one of Dad’s old ones from the hardware store, blue ink, VOLLMER HARDWARE down the barrel in gold that had mostly rubbed off.
Then I gave the print to Sid’s wife, Olga.
Olga drove it to Paulina Lattimore.
And that was supposed to be the end of the only picture anybody would ever have of that night.
I picked it up off the table.
Ronnie let me.
The white creases were his. The rest of it was hers. There was a coffee ring on one end, half a circle, brown. There were yellow squares at all four corners where tape had been stuck down and pulled up and stuck down again.
Paulina told Olga she’d tape it inside the cabinet over her sink. Where she’d see it every morning, reaching for a mug.
There had never been a copy.
This was hers.
I turned it over and read my own handwriting. My sevens still have the little line through them, the way Dad taught me on the price tags.
Down the table, my uncle said, “Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on?”
Nobody did.
I held the picture up between me and Ronnie, so he could see I’d seen the tape.
“Where’d you get this, Ronnie?”
He didn’t answer me.
He looked across the potato salad at his wife.
Lizette had her beer halfway up again and stopped it there. Her phone was face down beside her plate, buzzing against the wood.
She didn’t pick it up.
“Tell her where you got it, Liz,” Ronnie said.
Hollow Road
Here’s what my family didn’t know, and what I’d never planned on telling them over a hot dog.
Ten years ago I sold my house in a divorce and moved into an apartment over a tire shop in London, Kentucky.
My ex kept the dog. I kept the bike. It’s orange. The dealer called the color Tangerine Pearl and my ex called it a cry for help.
He wasn’t all the way wrong.
I met Big Sid a year later at a gas station off 25, when he saw me trying to bungee a lamp to the back seat and walked over with better cord.
Sid runs a small chapter. Twenty-some riders, most of them past fifty.
What they do is sit.
When a woman has a protective order signed and it hasn’t been served yet, or a hearing is Monday and it’s Friday, or the man has been told to stay away and has a cousin with a badge, Sid’s people go and sit on her porch.
In the yard, on the steps, all night if it takes all night.
Nobody touches anybody. Nobody carries anything they shouldn’t. Nobody posts a picture.
Nobody tells their family.
That’s the rule, and it isn’t to be mysterious. A man who wants his wife back will go through anybody’s sister to get to her.
I sat my first porch eight months after I met Sid. I’ve sat a lot of them since.
The Lattimore place was the one that got me my name.
It was a white farmhouse an hour south of here, over the Tennessee line, off a gravel road called Hollow Road. Paulina was thirty-four. Her boy, Kamil, was nine.
Her husband had been told by a judge to stay off the property. The papers were going to be served in the morning by the state police, because the county sheriff hunted deer with her husband every November.
At nine that night the sheriff pulled into the yard, looked at fourteen motorcycles, and told Sid that at midnight every one of us was trespassing.
He said nobody sits on that porch past twelve.
Sid didn’t argue with him. Sid never argues with a badge.
He asked Paulina, in front of the sheriff, if she had a guest staying the night.
Paulina said she did. She said her friend was staying.
Sid looked down the row.
I put my hand up.
So at midnight thirteen bikes pulled out of that yard, slow, one at a time, and mine stayed nosed in at the steps.
The sheriff had nothing to say about a woman sitting on her friend’s porch.
Before they left, Paulina came to the screen door with the bulb on over her head.
She said, “I want to see what it looks like from out there.”
So I walked backwards into the gravel and took one picture on my phone, the bikes and the riders and the light, at two minutes to midnight. Sid saw me do it. He let me.
Paulina left that bulb on all night.
Around two, Kamil came out in his socks with a glass of water for me. His eyes stayed off the road.
He said, “You’re the one staying?”
I said I was.
He went back in and left the door open a crack.
Her husband’s truck came down Hollow Road twice before four. Both times it slowed at the mailbox. Both times it kept going.
At seven the trooper came. By noon Olga had Paulina and Kamil in her car, headed somewhere I was never told.
A week later at the clubhouse, Sid handed me a cup of coffee and called me Porch Light, and that was that.
Five years.
Then my sister put my name on the deck like a dirty napkin.
Back on the deck, the pontoon at the end of Dad’s dock had a FOR SALE sign zip-tied to the rail, his number on it in black marker.
Lizette took her phone off the table at last, read the screen under the edge of the table, and smiled at it.
Then she put it back face down.
Marina 4B
“A client gave it to me,” Lizette said. “Is that a crime now?”
“What client?” I said.
“What do you care what client?”
Ronnie said, “Liz.”
She set her beer down hard enough that it foamed over her fingers.
“Fine. Okay. Everybody wants to hear it.” She wiped her hand on a napkin with a flag on it. “I’ve got a buyer for a condo at the marina. Unit 4B. Top floor, the one with the boat slip. He’s paying cash.”
Mom said, “That’s the one you told me about. The nice man.”
“He is a nice man,” Lizette said. “He’s sixty-something. He’s a widower. His wife passed in the spring and he’s selling their farm and he wants to be on the water. Is that enough for everybody?”
I put my thumb on the coffee ring.
I didn’t know I was doing it until Ronnie looked at my hand.
“His wife passed,” I said.
“In March. He cried in my car. Do you want me to describe it?”
Lizette has sold houses around this lake for six years. Her face is on a bench by the marina gas dock, sunglasses up in her hair, LIZETTE SEXTON SELLS THE LAKE. She is good at it.
She can tell you what a man can afford by his watch.
She kept going.
“He was clearing out her things. He found that picture taped up in a cabinet, and he said it must have meant something to her, and he’d love to find the people in it and thank them. And I said, well, my husband used to ride with a club. And he gave it to me to ask.”
“In July,” Ronnie said.
“In July. And Ronnie looked at it for about two seconds and said he’d never seen those people in his life.”
“I said I didn’t know them,” Ronnie said. “That was true.”
“And then he lost it.” She pointed at the picture in my hand. “He told me he lost it. I had to go back and tell my client my husband lost his dead wife’s picture.”
Ronnie didn’t argue with that. His eyes went to the boards under his feet.
So he had carried it in his wallet two months, knowing the name on the back, and never told her why.
“What’s his first name?” I said.
Lizette laughed. “Why, so your club can go thank him?”
“What’s his name, Lizette?”
“Lattimore,” she said. “Okay? Mister Lattimore. He’s got a farm somewhere down in Tennessee.”
There it was again, on Dad’s deck, in her mouth.
Down at the end of the table, Dad said, “Lizzie’s just doing business, Jill. Let’s everybody eat.”
My uncle reached for the deviled eggs like that settled it.
I didn’t move.
Paulina would have been thirty-nine this year. Kamil fourteen.
Olga had driven them somewhere I was never told, and I had never asked, because that is how it is supposed to work. If you don’t know, you can’t say.
And now a man was crying in my sister’s car over a wife who died in March.
“Did you see her?” I said. “His wife. Was there a funeral? Did you see anything?”
Lizette gave me a long look.
“Jill, I sell condos. I don’t go to my clients’ funerals.”
She picked up her beer again.
“His wife died in March,” she said. “Okay? Can I have my picture back now?”
The orange tank
I didn’t give her the picture.
I walked down the deck stairs with it to the dock, past the kids with their feet in the water, and I called Sid.
It rang four times and went to the recording. Sid’s voicemail is just him saying, “Go ahead.”
Labor Day weekend, Sid and Olga ride to the Smokies with half the chapter. There is no signal on half the road.
I said, “It’s Porch Light. Call me. It’s about Hollow Road.”
Then I texted Olga one word. Paulina.
I stood there with the phone in my hand and waited for the dots.
No dots.
When I came back up the stairs, Mom had moved down the bench to the empty spot by my plate.
She said, quiet, “Lizette’s been asking me about your club all week.”
“Asking what?”
“What it’s called. Who your friends are. If you had a nickname.” She turned her iced tea a quarter turn on the table. “I thought she was just being Lizette.”
Mom has stood between the two of us since we were in car seats. She doesn’t pick. She turns her glass.
“What did you tell her?”
“I said I don’t know a thing about it, because I don’t.” She looked at me. “Do I, Jillian?”
I let that one sit.
Lizette was talking to my cousins now, loud, with her back to me. Something about how Ronnie’s old club used to do toy runs and that was a real thing, with permits.
I went over to her.
“How did he find you?”
She turned around. “What?”
“Your client. How did he pick you? There’s twenty agents on this lake.”
She actually smiled. She liked this question.
“He found me on Facebook,” she said. “He said he saw my Easter post and thought I was funny. He said anybody who could make him laugh after the year he’d had could sell him a condo.”
“Your Easter post.”
“The one with your bike.” She turned to the cousins for help. “Everybody saw it. Come on.”
They had. I had.
At Easter I’d ridden up for ham, and Lizette had gone out in the gravel and taken a picture of my bike by the boathouse, and posted it with my parents’ lake tagged, and written, My sister’s divorce Harley, she’s finding herself, pray for her.
It got two hundred and some likes. My cousins still say pray for her when I walk in.
I had laughed at it. Easter seemed like the kind of thing you laugh at.
I held the photo flat on the rail where the sun was on it.
Fourteen bikes in the dark. Riders at the foot of the steps, their backs to the camera, nobody’s face. I had made sure of that when I took it.
What I hadn’t thought about was the one bulb.
Nearest the steps, under the light, one gas tank had caught it.
Orange.
Four fifty-two
Ronnie came and stood at the rail beside me. He looked at the tank where my finger was. He looked down the gravel at the end of the row, where my bike was parked, the same orange in the same afternoon.
He’d stood next to it at Easter. A slice of tank in the dark is not a bike, until somebody tells you it is.
“When you said you lost it,” I said. “Why?”
“Because I knew what the back said. And I knew I’d heard it at that meeting.” He rubbed his knee.
“Man who told it said the woman inside that house had to leave her own life. I figured a man asking about a picture from her kitchen wasn’t asking to say thank you.”
“You told Liz that?”
“I told Liz to drop him.”
“In July.”
“In July. Every week since.”
Lizette’s phone buzzed on the table again.
The whole deck heard it. Everybody had been hearing it since three o’clock.
Lizette reached for it.
Ronnie got there first. He didn’t snatch it. He put two fingers on the back of it and held it to the table.
“Show her,” he said.
“That’s my business phone.”
“Then show her your business.”
“Ronnie, I swear to God.”
“Liz.”
Dad said, “Ronnie, son, that’s her phone.”
Ronnie kept his eyes off him. He looked at his wife.
And whatever Lizette is, she has never been able to stand being looked at by a table full of people who think she’s hiding something.
She grabbed the phone out from under his fingers, put in her code, and slapped it down face up in front of my plate.
“There,” she said. “Read it. Read my whole life. I’m selling a condo.”
The text thread was at the top. He was saved as Lattimore (Marina 4B).
The newest message said, Well?? Did you get it out of her? 4:52.
Above it, from Lizette, at 12:40, a picture. The row of bikes by our boathouse, taken from the deck an hour before I pulled in. My cousins’ bikes, and the space on the end where mine would go.
Under it, Lizette had typed, Here’s the gang lol. Hers isn’t here yet, it’s the orange one. I’ll get the name out of her at lunch, in front of everybody, watch.
Above that, from him, from Friday.
Find out what her biker friends call her. Whatever that name is. And who took that picture. That’s the one I’d like to thank most.
I didn’t say anything.
I turned the phone a little so Ronnie could read it too, and then so Mom could.
Mom put her hand flat on the table again, beside the phone.
Ronnie read it twice. I watched his lips move on thank.
So that was what my sister had been doing on the deck since the minute I pulled in. Easy Rider. The poker runs. Everybody’s got a road name, right?
She had been doing it for him.
Lizette looked at all of our faces looking at her phone.
“He wants to thank them,” she said. “He told me. He wants to thank whoever helped his wife.”
The pontoon
“His wife isn’t dead,” I said.
That was all I said.
Lizette threw her hands up.
“Oh, okay. Okay. You know his wife. You know a man I’ve met nine times and you’ve never met once. Do you hear yourself?
You’ve been on the deck forty minutes and you’ve got a whole movie going. He’s sixty-six, Jill.
He wears a hearing aid. He cried in my car about her for twenty minutes and I gave him my Kleenex, the whole pack, and he gave it back to me folded.”
“Liz,” Ronnie said.
“No. I get to talk. She gets a secret club for nine years and I don’t even get to talk?”
Nobody stopped her. I didn’t try.
“Do you know what that sale is?” she said. “Do you know what four percent of three eighty-five is? It’s my winter.
It’s the roof on our house, Ronnie, the roof you keep saying you’ll get to with your knee.
And she’s going to stand on Mom’s deck holding a picture and tell me my client is some, what, some kind of”
She didn’t finish it. She didn’t have a word for it.
“He asked you what her road name was,” Ronnie said.
“Because she’s a joke. Because I told him she’s a joke. I told him the whole thing, the divorce, the Harley, the apartment over the tire place, and he laughed, and he said what do they call her, and I said I’d find out.”
She pointed at me. “That’s it. That’s all it was. Small talk.”
“You told him where she lives?”
Lizette opened her mouth and closed it.
“I didn’t give him an address,” she said. “I said London. Everybody knows London.”
Mom said, “Lizette.”
“What? What, Mom? I’m the bad guy now? She’s the one who won’t tell anybody anything.”
I held my hand out for her phone.
She didn’t give it to me. But she didn’t take it back, either. It lay there between us by the mustard.
“Text him back,” I said.
“And say what?”
“What you told everybody all afternoon.”
She just watched me.
I said it slow so she could type it. “She wouldn’t say. Some made-up name. She’s just a divorced woman who bought a used bike so she’d seem interesting. Sorry.“
Her own words, out of her own mouth, the ones the whole family had laughed at with their plates in their laps.
They were the safest thing anybody had said about me all day.
Lizette looked at Ronnie.
“Type it, Liz,” Ronnie said. “Or I’m riding home and you can get a ride from your client.”
My uncle put his fork down.
Lizette picked up the phone. Her nails clicked on the glass for a long time. She turned it so I could see before she pushed send.
She’d written it word for word. She’d even put lol on the end, which I didn’t ask for and which was right.
It went.
Delivered.
“Happy?” she said.
I wasn’t. I was reading the thread again, further up, the part from Thursday that we’d scrolled past.
Your dad still selling that pontoon? I’d love to see the lake from the dock. Maybe Monday evening if the family’s around.
And under it, from Lizette, Dad says come at 6!! He’ll show you the lift.
I looked down the table.
Dad had his napkin in his fist.
He’d been quiet since Lattimore. He’s been quiet my whole life when it counts, and grinning the rest of the time.
“Lizzie asked me Thursday,” he said. “I told her sure. The man wanted to see the boat.”
It was ten after five.
“He’s coming at six,” Dad said.
Mom stood up.
Ronnie looked at the gravel, at the row of bikes, at the road in through the trees.
I folded the picture along Ronnie’s creases and put it in my back pocket.
Then I went around the side of the house to the front porch and switched on the light.
The front steps
The light over my parents’ front door is a plain bulb in a glass cup. In daylight you can barely tell it’s on.
You can tell if you’re looking for it.
I sat down on the top step.
My cousins came around the house in ones and twos. Nobody asked them. The oldest one, the one who calls me pray for her, looked at me on the step, looked at the bulb, and went back to the boathouse without a word.
A minute later I heard his bike start.
He walked it up the gravel and backed it in at the foot of the porch steps, nose out to the road.
The others did the same with theirs.
Ronnie got mine. He wheeled it up with his bad knee, swearing at it under his breath, and parked it nearest the steps.
Then he sat down on the red cooler he’d dragged around front with him, beside the porch rail, in his old vest.
Dad came out the front door with two lawn chairs. He unfolded one next to me, sat down in it, and didn’t say anything. He put the other one on the other side, for Mom.
Lizette stayed on the back deck.
At 5:34 my phone rang. Olga.
Big Sid’s wife does not say hello. She said, “Where are you.”
I told her.
I told her about the condo and the Kleenex and the tape on the corners. I told her about the orange tank and the text. I told her six o’clock.
The line was quiet long enough that I checked it.
Then Olga said, “She’s alive, Jill.”
I put my free hand flat on the step.
“She called us in March,” Olga said. “He’d been at her again since Christmas.”
“I drove her and the boy up to Indiana myself. She left with one bag. She left everything in that kitchen.”
Olga breathed out. “I didn’t know about the picture. She must have left it on the cabinet door.”
“He’s telling people she died.”
“That’s what they tell people,” Olga said. “Dead is easier to get sympathy for than gone.”
Then Sid took the phone. He had the wind in it, somewhere on a pull-off in the mountains.
“Who’s on the porch?” he said.
“Me. My cousins. My brother-in-law. My dad.”
“Is the light on?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re doing it right,” Sid said. “Don’t go to the road. Don’t talk to him. You know all that.”
“I know all that.”
He was quiet for a second.
“You know what comes after this, Jill.”
I did. A name he has is a name that has to stop being used. If a man like that ever finds the rider, he’s one rider away from Sid, and one more away from Olga, and Olga knows what town is in Indiana.
“You’re off the porches,” Sid said. “A year at least. Maybe for good. And nobody says that name again. Not in the clubhouse, not on a patch, not anywhere.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m sorry, kid.”
“Okay.”
He hung up. Sid does not do goodbyes either.
At 6:08 a white pickup came along the lake road, slow, and slowed more at my parents’ mailbox.
It sat there with the engine running.
From the steps you could see the shape of a man in a ball cap. You could not see his face. He could see everything. The bikes nosed out in a row. Everybody up on the porch. A bulb burning over the door in the middle of a bright afternoon.
Nobody got up. Dad’s hands were on his knees.
The truck sat for maybe forty seconds.
Then it pulled off and kept going toward the highway.
Around back, a phone buzzed.
Lizette came around the side of the house a minute later holding it out in front of her like it was hot.
“He says something came up,” she said. “He says another time.” Her voice was strange. “He says tell my dad thanks anyway.”
Nobody said anything to her.
“He was right there. He saw all of you.” She looked at the bikes, at the bulb, at me. “You did that on purpose. You put everybody out here so he’d see.”
“Block him,” Ronnie said.
“I have a closing in two weeks, Ronnie.”
“Block him.”
She looked at the road for a long time. Then she looked at Mom, who was sitting in Dad’s other chair now with her purse in her lap like she was waiting for a bus.
Lizette blocked him. She did it with her arm held out, so we could all see her thumb do it.
Then she deleted the thread, and she deleted the Easter post, and she stood there scrolling and deleting things for a long time.
When she was done she said, “That’s eleven thousand dollars I just threw in the lake. I want you all to know that.”
Nobody answered that either.
The grill was still going around back, coals gone gray at the edges. After a while I got up and walked around to it.
Ronnie followed me with his knee.
I took the picture out of my pocket and unfolded it one more time. The bulb. The tank. The thirteen riders who pulled out, and the backs of the ones at the steps. Paulina’s coffee ring.
I’d taken it because she asked to see what it looked like from out there.
She’d seen it. Every morning for a while, reaching for a mug.
I laid it face down on the coals.
Ronnie said, “You sure? That’s the only one.”
“That’s why,” I said.
Thanksgiving
My parents ate Thanksgiving on the deck that year because it was sixty-one degrees, and Mom said you don’t waste a day like that on the lake.
I rode up in the morning. There were only three bikes in the gravel by the boathouse. Mine was on the end.
The pontoon was gone. Dad sold it in October to a dentist from Lexington.
Lizette’s bench by the marina gas dock was still there, sunglasses in her hair. Unit 4B had a sign in the window with somebody else’s face on it.
I haven’t sat a porch since Labor Day.
On Tuesdays I drive Sid’s coffee orders and the chapter’s mail around, and that’s all he’ll let me do, and I let him.
Nobody in the chapter calls me anything now but Jill. Some of them have to stop and think about it first.
I got a plate and stood at the rail.
Lizette came around the end of the table carrying two hot dogs on a paper plate, and a bottle of mustard under her arm.
She put the plate on the rail next to mine.
She’d already put the mustard on. Too much, the way I do it.
She didn’t say sorry. Lizette doesn’t. She stood there with her beer and looked at the lake with me for a while.
Behind us, the porch light was off. It was the middle of the day.
“So what do they call you now?” she said.
“Jill,” I said, and picked up the hot dog.
If you’ve got somebody in your family who’s the one that stays on the porch, call them tonight or send this to them, and don’t make them explain.
For more family drama and motorcycle trouble, read “The Gangway Chief Sent My Saddlebag Into a Bollard Before Sunup” and “The Night My Mother Called the Hospital to Tell My Fiancé I Was Unwell”. And when a husband’s claim to a home kicks off a driveway full of surprises, there’s “The Eleven Motorcycles in My Gravel and the Paper Cedric Signed in 2009”.
