My ex-wife’s husband had a guard walk me off a hospital lot while his granddaughter watched from her wheelchair, an hour from heart surgery, and all she’d asked for was my bike. “Nobody here called for a drunk,” he said, loud enough for her to hear. Then she pointed at it and asked me to lift the seat.
The operating room was booked for seven-forty, and the nurse said they could hold it till eight and not a minute after.
Her mother told them the girl wouldn’t go through those doors until she heard one particular motorcycle.
Not just any motorcycle.
The old blue one with the tall bars.
A nurse named Yuki called our chapter at ten to six. Four of us rode nineteen miles into Wichita in the dark, and mine was the only blue one.
I’ve had that ’91 since it was new. The bars come up past my shoulders, and my knees have hated me for it since the Clinton years.
Security had us park behind the clinic wing, by the loading dock.
A janitor was hosing pigeon mess off a bench by the door and never once looked up.
She was small for eight. Pink hoodie, sleeves pulled down over her hands, a stuffed rabbit with one ear in her lap.
Her mother had both hands on the back of the chair.
And a step behind them, in a camel coat with his car keys in his fist, stood Kenji Manalo.
The last time I saw him he was carrying Ida’s boxes out of my garage in 1996.
Thirty years. He’d gone gray and soft. I’d gone gray and the other way.
He looked at the bike, then at me.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
He waved over a guard, a heavyset woman named Tanya with a radio clipped to her shoulder.
“I want him off the property,” he said. “That lobby wall has my name on it. Go look.”
Tanya looked at my vest. Then at the other three bikes backed in along the curb.
“Sir, I’m going to need you to move along,” she said.
“Nobody here called for a drunk,” Kenji said. “Look at him.”
I’ve been sober since February of 2004. Ida was long gone by then, so he got that word from somewhere old.
I didn’t argue. I started walking the bike back off the curb.
“That’s him,” the girl said.
Flat, like she was reading it off a menu.
“That’s the one Grandma said.”
Kenji turned so fast his keys hit the asphalt.
“Grandma didn’t say anything, honey.”
“She said blue,” the girl said. “And tall.”
Yuki stepped in front of the guard with her clipboard flat against her scrubs.
“The OR is holding,” she said. “She is not going in otherwise. I’ve been trying for an hour.”
The mother looked at her father. Her father looked at the wall.
Tanya keyed her radio, listened to somebody, and turned back to me.
“ONE minute,” she said. “Idle only. You don’t rev it, she doesn’t touch it, and then you’re done.”
Fair enough.
I thumbed the starter. That old engine always catches rough and then settles, like a man clearing his throat before he says something he means.
The girl shut her eyes.
She tapped her knee with one finger, keeping count of something I couldn’t hear.
Kenji had his phone out, typing so hard I could hear his thumb.
I gave her the whole minute and maybe ten seconds more that nobody mentioned.
When I cut the engine, the quiet came back too fast.
She opened her eyes.
“Now lift up the seat,” she said.
I laughed, because I didn’t know what else to do with my face.
“There’s nothing under there but a battery, kiddo.”
“There’s my name,” she said. “Grandma said it’s white.”
My hand went to the seat and stayed there.
In the spring of 1994, Ida lost our baby at twenty-two weeks.
We’d already picked the name. We never said it out loud to anybody, not her mother, not mine.
That summer I pulled this seat off and painted the name on the steel underneath with a model brush and white enamel, while Ida sat on an upside-down bucket in the garage and watched me do every letter.
Since then nobody’s looked under there but me and two mechanics, and neither one ever asked.
I crouched down by the chair.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“Aviva,” she said.
AVIVA.
She said it the way you’d say Tuesday.
Kenji’s phone went into his pocket.
He took his daughter by the elbow, hard enough that she rocked a step.
“YOU SAID YOUR MOTHER FOUND IT IN A BOOK,” he said.
“That’s what she told me, Dad,” Asia said. “That’s all she ever told me.”
I turned the little key in the seat lock and lifted.
It was still there. Gone yellow. The V had run at the bottom the day I painted it, and the drip was still there too.
Aviva leaned out of her chair to see, and her mother let her.
She nodded once, like she was checking something off.
Then an orderly came through the sliding doors and took the handles, and they were inside before I got the seat back down.
Kenji stayed.
He stood on the curb with his hands shoved in his coat, staring at five letters on a piece of steel.
“She doesn’t know you’re here,” he said.
Asia had stopped just inside the glass. She pushed the door back open.
“Yes she does, Dad.”
She was looking up.
Third floor, second window from the end, a woman had her hand flat against the glass.
Second window from the end
It was Ida.
I knew it before I could make out her face. She used to stand at our kitchen window like that when I rode out, palm flat on the glass, like she was keeping it from blowing in.
Her hair was short and white now. Same hand.
I took mine off the seat and held it up where she could see it. I didn’t wave. I just held it there.
“Put your hand down,” Kenji said.
Asia let the door slide shut and went after the chair. Down the hall, past the glass, I could see the rabbit’s one ear over the back of it until they turned the corner.
The clock over the dock door said seven fifty-two.
Kenji had his phone out again.
“She’s resting,” he said, typing. “She’s been up since three. She doesn’t need you standing under her window like a stray.”
“Then why’s she at the window?” Tanya said.
Kenji didn’t answer her. He finished what he was writing, hit send, and held the phone screen-down against his coat.
Up on the third floor, Ida looked at something in her other hand.
Then the window was empty.
Pham
I patched into the chapter in 1992. Ida sewed the first patch on this vest herself, at the kitchen table, with dental floss, because she said thread wouldn’t hold through a Kansas summer. It’s the same patch. The floss has been redone twice.
So she always knew where to find me. That was the part I’d never gotten past.
In February of 2004 I quit drinking on a Monday night in a church basement with a coffee can full of cigarette butts on the table. My sponsor was a retired lineman named Pham, who had hands like catcher’s mitts and no patience for me at all.
By April he had me on the ninth step. Make amends.
I told him I didn’t know where she lived. He handed me the phone book.
There was one Manalo in it, on the west side.
I wrote it at his kitchen table, four pages, and I’m not going to write what was in it twice. It was about one night in the spring of 1994, and what I’d been doing in the garage while Ida needed me somewhere else. At the bottom I put the chapter’s number, and that the bike still ran, and that the seat hadn’t been off since that summer.
Pham made me send it certified. “So you know it got there,” he said. “So you can’t tell yourself it didn’t.”
Eleven days later the green card came back. K. Manalo on the signature line. I figured he’d handed it to her at supper, and she’d read it, and that was that.
Nothing came after. Not that year or any year.
I took it as an answer. I folded the card in half and put it in the plastic sleeve with the bike’s title, in the left saddlebag.
So the name sat under the seat for thirty-two years, and the card sat in the saddlebag for twenty-two.
Pham said I kept it so I’d quit asking.
Standing on that dock with one hand on the seat, I had the other on the saddlebag buckle before I knew I’d put it there.
Kenji pointed at Tanya’s clipboard.
“Write him up,” he said. “Name, plate, all of it.”
The yellow slip
Tanya clicked her pen. She had a carbon pad on the clipboard, the kind they write parking tickets on.
“Name?”
I gave it to her. Plate, too. She wrote in capitals, slow, and the carbon squeaked.
“This is a trespass warning,” she said. “You come back on this property inside a year, it’s a police matter. It’s not personal.”
“It’s a little personal,” I said.
Kenji almost smiled.
I tried one thing. I asked if I could leave the bike right where it sat and wait on that wet bench until the girl was out. No engine. No vest, if the vest was the problem. I’d take it off.
“No,” Kenji said, before Tanya could open her mouth. “I sit on the foundation board here. I’ll call the president at home and tell him his security let a biker gang camp on the loading dock during a pediatric heart surgery.”
Tanya looked at the three bikes at the curb.
“Go on home,” I told the guys. “I’ll call you.”
They didn’t like it, but they went. That was the wrong move. Now it was just me, and Kenji knew it.
Asia came back out through the sliding doors. She had the pink hoodie folded over her arm. They’d changed Aviva into a gown.
“Dad,” she said. “Stop it. Please. Not today.”
“Go upstairs with your mother.”
“Mom was supposed to be down here.” She was looking at the hoodie, not at him. “You told her to wait. She wanted to hear it.”
“Asia.”
“She’s the one who gave me the number,” Asia said. “She wrote it on a napkin last night. She said ask for the old blue one, and if it’s still running, he’ll come.”
Kenji stood very still.
Tanya tore off the yellow copy and held it out to me.
Behind her, the sliding doors opened again.
The visitor sticker
Ida had a visitor sticker on her cardigan and her phone in one hand. She came across the dock in short, careful steps, the way you walk on a boat.
She was sixty-two. I’d done the math on the ride in.
She stopped about six feet from me. Nobody told her where to stop. She just stopped there.
“I asked you to stay upstairs,” Kenji said.
“You did,” Ida said. She held up the phone. “Four times.”
She looked at the bike. She didn’t look at me yet.
“You kept the bars,” she said.
“My knees wish I hadn’t.”
That got one breath out of her nose, which used to be the most I could get on a good day.
“She’s had nightmares since September,” Ida said. “Since they told her about the surgery. I used to tell Asia about that bike when she was little. When Aviva got scared, I told her the same thing. That it sounds like a heart that won’t quit. That you can count it.”
So that was what she’d been counting.
“And Aviva,” I said.
“Asia was going to call her Madison.” Ida looked at her daughter. “I said I’d found a nicer one in a book.”
Asia shut her eyes.
Then Ida looked at me, and there was nothing easy in it.
“Thirty years,” she said. “And you couldn’t pick up a pen. Not one line to say you were alive. I sent Asia for you on a napkin because I didn’t know if you’d hang up on me.”
“Ida, let’s go up,” Kenji said.
“I wrote you,” I said.
“Don’t.”
“April of 2004. Four pages. To the house on the west side.”
“I never got a letter from you in my life.”
“He’s confused,” Kenji said. “He was drinking before you ever met him, Ida. He doesn’t know what year it is.”
I went back to the bike and unbuckled the left saddlebag.
K. Manalo
The title was in there, and a tire gauge, and a pair of gloves I’d been meaning to throw out since Obama. The sleeve was at the bottom. The plastic had gone cloudy.
I didn’t open it for her. I handed her the whole thing.
Ida slid the card out with two fingers. It had gone soft as cloth at the fold.
Domestic Return Receipt. Her name and the west side address in my handwriting on the front. On the back, the line where somebody signs for it.
She read it. Then she turned it so Kenji could see, which she didn’t have to do.
“That’s your writing,” she said.
“I sign for everything that comes to that house,” Kenji said. “I’ve signed for your sister’s Christmas packages for thirty years. I’d have handed it to you.”
“You didn’t.”
“Then it got lost. Things get set down. Mail gets thrown out with the circulars.”
“It came certified. You signed for it.”
“I’m not doing this in a parking lot.” He turned to Tanya. “I asked you to remove him ten minutes ago.”
Tanya still had the yellow slip in her hand. She hadn’t put it back on the pad, and she hadn’t given it to me either.
“Look at him,” Kenji said to Ida. “You think that would have lasted? He’d have been back in a bottle by June. Ten weeks dry. Everybody’s a saint at ten weeks.”
Ida held the card in both hands.
“I didn’t know he quit,” she said. “I never told you when he quit.”
Kenji opened his mouth and shut it.
“How do you know it was ten weeks?”
Five calls
Kenji looked at the card, and at Asia, and at me, and he gave up on the first thing and went straight to the next one.
“Because I read it,” he said. “Of course I read it. It came to my house. I read it at my kitchen table and I put it in the compactor and I ran it, and I’d do it again tomorrow.”
“Dad,” Asia said.
“You want to know what’s in it?” he said to her. “Ask him. Go on. Ask him where he was the night your mother lost that baby.”
Everybody looked at me. Tanya with her slip. Yuki in the doorway with her clipboard. Asia with the hoodie.
“In the garage,” I said.
“On the floor of the garage,” Kenji said. “Next to that bike, with a case of Busch, while she was in the bathroom bleeding. She drove herself across town. She called you from the emergency room, and you didn’t pick up, because you couldn’t. How many times did she call? It’s in your letter. Tell them.”
“Five,” I said.
That’s what I’d written. That’s what I owed her for. It was the first time I’d heard it out loud from anybody but Pham.
“Five,” Kenji said. “And I’m the one who came. I drove her to her appointments after. I carried her boxes out of that garage. I paid for this girl’s mother’s school. I’m on that wall in there. Thirty years. And he sends four pages and a phone number, and I’m supposed to pass it across the dinner table and sit there and watch her read it.”
“You don’t know what I’d have done,” Ida said.
“I know you,” he said. “I know exactly what you’d have done.”
Ida didn’t say anything to that.
Asia was the one who moved. She handed her mother the hoodie and walked over to Tanya.
“Who’s on my daughter’s visitor list?”
Tanya looked at the clipboard. “You. Grandma. Grandpa.”
“Take him off.”
“Asia,” Kenji said.
“I’m her mother. Take him off. He can call me tonight.”
Tanya looked at the yellow slip. She folded it in half and put it in her own shirt pocket.
Then she turned to Kenji.
“Sir, I’m going to need you to move along,” she said.
He held his car keys out toward Ida, at arm’s length, like she might come and take them.
She stayed where she was, with the hoodie and the card.
He put the keys back in his coat. Ida sat down on the wet end of the bench.
Tanya walked him all the way to the garage elevator and pushed the button for him.
The curb by the dock
Aviva went home eleven days later, on a Thursday.
Hospital rules say they leave in a chair, so she came out through the sliding doors in one, pink hoodie zipped to her chin, the rabbit in her lap. Asia pushing. Ida behind them with a canvas bag, a pillowcase sticking out of the top. She’s been in Asia’s spare room since that morning on the dock. Nobody has asked her for how long.
Kenji calls Asia on Sundays. She picks up about half the time.
His name is still on the lobby wall. I walked past it on my way to the restroom. It’s a nice wall.
Tanya was on the dock. She looked at the bike, and at me, and waved me up to the curb.
Ida sat on the bench. She hasn’t been on the back of this bike, and I haven’t asked her.
“Start it,” Aviva said.
I thumbed the starter. It caught rough and settled.
She closed her eyes, and a finger went to her knee. On the bench, Ida tapped hers. Same count. I don’t think either one of them knew the other one was doing it.
I gave them the minute and some more, and nobody was timing it.
When I cut the engine, Aviva opened her eyes.
“Now lift up the seat,” she said.
I dug the little key out of my pocket.
“Show her where the V ran,” Ida said.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who’s kept something under the seat longer than they’d ever admit.
For more stories about old bikers being underestimated and the family ties that refuse to stay buried, read “Three Names Were on Page One When the PTA Mom Pointed at My Pad” and “My Son Sold My Bike Without the Title. Lola Kept It in Her Sewing Box.”. There’s another hard-won family reckoning in “My Brother Kicked My Grandson’s Tools Into the Gutter. I Pay Him $650 Rent.”.
