Twenty-eight years ago I lowered an empty casket for my six-year-old daughter after the river took her. Last Sunday a boy I’d never seen came past fourteen motorcycles to my booth and set down the silver bell I’d tied to her car seat. “Mom said you’d know it,” he said.
A paper tag hung off its strap: TAKE THIS TO HIM.
I run three motorcycle shops in Davenport, all of them opened to fill the hole that levee left.
The boy looked eleven. His sister hung on his elbow and a baby slept on his arm.
The jukebox had been unplugged since spring.
“Mom kept it,” the boy said. “She told us to find the bike shop man.”
While his sister ate, he said their mother was Tabitha, sick a long time, gone since August. They’d been sleeping in a laundromat since.
My coffee cup went down and stayed there.
“Did your mom have a white streak,” I said, “in her left eyebrow?”
His chin dipped once, like it was a strange question.
Tabitha.
ALIVE. Twenty-eight years. ALIVE.
I looked out at the bikes so they couldn’t see my face go.
He dug a soft brown packet out of his sweatshirt.
“She wrote you every Christmas,” he said. “She never sent any.”
My name was on it in her block printing. One line inside emptied my lungs.
The river hadn’t taken her. Her godmother Rosalie had, and told her for years that her daddy QUIT LOOKING and picked motorcycles over her.
I got Simon Hamdan on the phone to pull every flood record with her name.
Forty minutes on, his paralegal brought a file.
There was NO death certificate. Just a missing-child report, and a girl her age signed out of a shelter eleven days after I quit dragging the river.
Somebody had moved my daughter.
Violet slept against her brother. Luca held the bell and studied me like he was weighing something.
“Are you doing this because you feel bad,” he said, “or because we’re yours?”
I got up to have the guys clear a booth.
A small voice stopped me. “Wait. Mom made me swear to tell you about Miss Rosalie.”
The paper with the gum
Violet had her eyes open. She hadn’t been asleep, or not much.
I sat back down. The vinyl let air out under me.
“What about Miss Rosalie?” I said.
“She’s going to say we’re hers,” Violet said. “Mom signed a paper when she was scared. Miss Rosalie keeps it in her purse with the gum.”
Luca put his hand flat on top of her head, the way you’d quiet a dog that’s barking at the mailman.
“In March,” he said. “Before the hospital the last time. Mom said she signed it because there wasn’t anybody else. Then she said she was wrong, and she made me swear we wouldn’t go with her.”
“Did you go with her?”
“Six days,” Luca said. “After the funeral. Then I took them.”
He said it the way a man tells you he changed his own oil. The baby made a noise in his sleep and Luca moved him to the other arm without looking down.
Kayleigh came by with the pot and a pencil behind each ear and filled my cup to the top. I hadn’t touched what was already in it.
Outside, Brady had his helmet off and was looking at the window. He’d seen me stand up and sit back down. Fourteen men don’t miss much about one booth.
I held out my hand for the packet. Luca gave it to me, then held his hand out for it back. I’d read one line. I gave it back.
“Does Miss Rosalie know where you are?” I said.
Luca looked at the bell on the table.
“She knows it’s gone,” he said. “She’ll know who has it.”
Twenty-eight cards
The bell came off my father’s first bike.
Riders hang them low on the frame. The old guys say it keeps trouble off you on the road. I don’t believe that. I believed it enough.
The morning Pamela and I brought Tabitha home from the hospital, in March of 1992, I tied that bell to her car seat on a strap I cut from an old belt and riveted at the bench. The rivet went in crooked. I never fixed it.
Pamela laughed at me. Said the baby would hear it at every pothole between there and the house.
Pamela died in the fall of 1996. An aneurysm, in the kitchen, with the radio on. Tabitha was four.
Rosalie Delacruz had stood up for Tabitha at her christening. She and Pamela had worked the same bakery counter for eleven years. After the funeral Rosalie came every afternoon. She picked Tabitha up from school and kept her until I locked the garage, which was one bay then and a lot of other men’s bikes for cash.
Rosalie had opinions about the bikes. She’d say them at my own table, smiling.
“That child is going to grow up smelling like a gas can.”
She said it enough that I started washing up in the shop sink before I picked my daughter up.
In July of 1998 the levee went at two in the afternoon. Tabitha was at Rosalie’s, the little house on the low side by the rail yard. Rosalie told the police the water came over the porch steps and pulled Tabitha out of her arms. She told me the same thing at the shelter, in a Red Cross blanket, holding my face in both her hands.
My club put johnboats in at every ramp between here and Muscatine. We dragged for five weeks. I quit when the sheriff came down to the ramp himself and took the hook out of my hands.
We buried an empty casket in September.
Rosalie moved across the river to the Illinois side that fall. She said she couldn’t look at the water anymore.
The first card came that December. A manger on the front and glitter that got on everything. Inside, in her slanted hand: Still praying for our girl. R. Her phone number was on the back, the way it would be on every one. In case you ever need me.
I wrote back. I put two hundred dollars cash in the envelope and asked her to keep putting flyers up on her side of the river, in case. I’d had the flyers printed with Tabitha’s school picture and the one thing nobody could fake. WHITE STREAK, LEFT EYEBROW.
She sent a card every Christmas after that. I sent two hundred dollars back every time. Some years it was most of what I had.
Twenty-eight cards. They’re in the bottom drawer of my desk at the first shop, rubber-banded, in order.
Across the booth, Luca had the bell closed in his fist so it couldn’t ring. I was thinking about the last card. It came ten months ago, with one more line under the prayer, and I’d taken it for kindness.
Have you let her go yet?
Erika Schneider
I took them home. I’ve got an apartment over the first shop. Devin, who runs my counter, went to the Hy-Vee at eleven at night for diapers and formula and didn’t ask me one question.
Violet slept in my bed with her shoes on. Luca slept on the couch with the baby on his chest and the packet inside his sweatshirt.
At three in the morning I went down to the office and took out the cards. I didn’t open them. I turned the newest one over and dialed the number on the back.
She picked up on the second ring, like she’d been sitting by it.
“I’ve got Tabitha’s kids,” I said.
Nothing for a while. Then her church voice, the one from the shelter.
“Oh, honey. Those poor babies. Whatever they told you, they’re mixed up, they’ve been through so much. I’ll come get them in the morning.”
“Did you take her?”
“I’ll see you in the morning,” Rosalie said, and hung up.
That was the first thing I did, and it was the wrong thing.
The phone rang at ten after eight. A woman named Erika Schneider, from family services in Scott County.
“Sir, are you the owner of the motorcycle shops?”
I said I was.
“There’s been a missing report on three children since September, filed in Rock Island. It was amended at six this morning. The legal guardian says they were taken out of a laundromat by a man with motorcycles, and she gave your name.”
“They walked into my booth,” I said. “I bought them breakfast.”
“I believe you. It doesn’t change what I’m holding.” Paper moved on her end. “Mrs. Delacruz has a standby guardianship designation signed by the mother in March. It’s valid. She’s also been the payee on the mother’s Social Security for the children since September.”
“Since September,” I said. “They were in a laundromat in September.”
“I’ve written that down,” Erika said. “Sir, she has a signed paper. You have a bell.”
“I’m their grandfather.”
“Then you’ll contest, and I’ll hear it. But I want you to understand how this works. If anybody contests, nobody takes them home. They go to a licensed foster placement until I sort it out or a judge does.”
I looked at the ceiling. Above it, a baby was crying and an eleven-year-old was shushing him like he’d done it a thousand times.
“I’ll be there at four,” Erika said. “With a deputy. Have them packed.”
Rock Island County, 1999
Simon came to the shop at eleven with his paralegal and a second file, thicker than Sunday’s.
Simon is not a big man and doesn’t talk much. He put the file on the counter between a box of brake pads and the register.
“I went across the river,” he said. “I wanted to know what name she used.”
The shelter sign-out sheet was on top. Sunday it had been a fax with the names blacked out. Now it was a clean copy. Eleven days after I quit dragging, a girl, age six, had been released from the shelter at the high school gym to a guardian. The signature said R. Delacruz. In the box for relationship, the same hand had written aunt.
Rosalie had no sister. Pamela had been an only child. There was no aunt.
Under that, a petition from the circuit court in Rock Island County, dated November of 1999. Guardianship of a minor child. Tabitha Delacruz, age seven. The petitioner was Rosalie. And on the second page, in the box where it asks about the parents, typed: Both parents deceased.
I read it twice. Then I read the date again.
“November,” I said.
“November,” Simon said. “One month before your first Christmas card.”
I didn’t say anything. Devin had come out of the back and was standing there with a tire in his hands, not putting it down.
“I’ll be straight,” Simon said. “This is ugly and it’s twenty-seven years old, and none of it touches the paper from March. Tabitha was a grown woman when she signed that. A caseworker is going to look at her signature first.”
At four, Erika’s county car pulled into the lot behind a deputy’s cruiser. Rosalie was in Erika’s passenger seat.
The guys were already there. Brady had made a few calls at noon and fourteen of them had come. They’d backed their bikes in along the curb and stood beside them with their helmets off and their hands where people could see them.
Erika got out and looked at the row. “Are we going to have a problem?”
“No, ma’am,” Brady said. “We’re just here.”
Rosalie came to the shop door in a camel coat with a church pin on it. She’s seventy-four now. Her hair was the same color it had been in 1998, which meant she’d been paying somebody for twenty-eight years to keep it that way.
She looked at me a long time.
“You got old,” she said.
Then she bent down to Violet with her arms open, and Violet went stiff as a board and let herself be hugged.
“Luca, honey,” Rosalie said. “Give Grandma Rosalie that bell. That’s a family thing.”
Luca put it in his front pocket.
Erika turned to me. “Sir. Are you contesting?”
Everybody in that lot was looking at me. The deputy, the guys, Rosalie with her hand on Violet’s back. Luca most of all.
“I’m contesting,” I said.
“Then they go to placement tonight.”
“Then they go to placement.”
A woman from the county came for the baby with a car seat that didn’t have anything tied to it. Violet cried at the car door. Luca didn’t. He looked at me the way he had in the booth, weighing something, and I knew which way it had come out.
At the car he stopped and dug the brown packet out of his sweatshirt.
“She said read the last one by yourself,” he said.
Then he got in, and Erika shut the door.
The last letter
I read them at the office desk with the shop dark and the cards in rows in front of me, one row for each decade.
Her first Christmas letter was from 2004. She was twelve. The printing was big and pressed hard.
Dear Dad. Miss Rosalie says you have a new shop now and a lot of motorcycles. I hope they are nice. We live in Moline. You could come.
She wrote one every year. Moline, then East Moline, then an apartment in Rock Island with a number in the address. At sixteen she quit saying you could come. At twenty she wrote that she had stopped being mad, which was how I knew she was still mad. At twenty-three she wrote that she’d had a boy and named him Luca and that he had the white streak too, smaller. Their father went to Texas before the baby came and stayed there. She said that in one line and moved on.
Every one of them was sealed and stamped. She’d bought a stamp every single year and never put the thing in a mailbox.
The last one wasn’t sealed. It was on a sheet of lined paper from the hospital, folded in four, and the printing slid downhill.
Dad. In July I went in Miss Rosalie’s hall closet for the baby’s birth certificate. There’s a shoebox. It has your letters in it. All of them, opened. It has three of the flyers with my face on them, and my eyebrow written on them in capital letters.
You sent her money every year to look for me. She bought my school clothes with it. She told me you never sent one dime.
I drove to your shop on a Saturday in July. You were outside with a man, talking about a tire. I sat in the car until the baby woke up. I didn’t have it in me to be told no.
I signed her paper in March. I didn’t know yet. Please don’t let her keep them because my name is on a line.
The bell was on my seat the day she brought me across the river. She let me keep it because I screamed until she did.
I put the letter down.
Then I pulled the first card out of the rubber band. December 1999. The manger and the glitter. Still praying for our girl. R.
I took the petition out of Simon’s file and laid it next to the card. November 1999. Both parents deceased. Rosalie’s signature at the bottom of the second page.
The R was the same R. It leaned the same way. It had the same little hook at the bottom where she lifted the pen.
She had told a judge I was dead. Four weeks later she licked an envelope with my address on it and asked me to keep praying.
I laid out every card after that in the same way, next to nothing, just in their order. Twenty-eight years of a woman checking on a man she’d buried on paper, to make sure he was still looking at the river and not across it.
At twenty to two I called Simon at home. He picked up on the fourth ring.
“Bring the petition Thursday,” I said. “I’m bringing twenty-eight Christmas cards.”
Room 114
The county building had one conference room with a window, and Erika didn’t get it. Room 114 had a long table, a box of tissues and a picture of a covered bridge.
Out in the lot, fourteen bikes sat in a row with nobody on them. The guys were across the street at the gas station drinking coffee where Erika could see them and not have to think about them.
The kids were in the hallway with the foster mother. Through the glass in the door I could see the back of Luca’s head.
Rosalie sat across from me with her purse in her lap and both hands on top of it.
I put the shoebox of cards on the table and took the lid off. I laid them out in rows. Nobody stopped me. Simon put the petition and the shelter sheet down at the end of the last row.
“Read the dates,” I said.
Erika read the dates. It took her a while.
Rosalie didn’t wait for her to finish.
“Those are cards. People send cards at Christmas. That’s called being decent, which is more than I ever got back from that man except an envelope with money in it like I was a waitress.”
“Mrs. Delacruz,” Erika said. “The petition says the father was deceased.”
“He was, to her. He was dead to that child the day he put her on a gas tank at five years old and rode her down River Drive. I saw it with my own eyes. Pamela would have died twice.”
“The shelter sheet says aunt.”
“I was more aunt to her than anybody with blood. I had her. That water was over the porch and I had her, not him, not the Red Cross. He was out in a boat yelling at a river. Somebody had to get her dry. Somebody had to raise her who didn’t come home smelling like a garage.”
“You told her he quit looking,” I said.
Rosalie looked at me for the first time since she sat down.
“You did quit. You quit in August. I watched the sheriff take that hook out of your hands.”
Erika had stopped writing.
“And the money,” Erika said. “The two hundred a year.”
“You think five thousand dollars raised a girl?” Rosalie’s hands came off the purse. “I bought her braces. I bought her a car when she was seventeen. I sat up with her when she had the chicken pox and he was out at a rally somewhere. I earned every dime of that and I earned those babies.”
“The children’s benefits,” Erika said. “Since September you’ve been the payee for three children who were sleeping in a laundromat on Fifteenth Street. Where did that money go, ma’am?”
Rosalie opened her mouth.
“I’m seventy-four years old,” she said. “I have a lot of expenses.”
Nobody said anything after that. Erika closed the folder.
She told Rosalie the designation was suspended as of that morning, that the payee change was going in today and that she was sending the petition and the cards to the county attorney in Rock Island. She told me a man from the lab would swab my cheek down the hall at ten, and that until the result came back, the children stayed exactly where they were.
“How long,” I said.
“Nine days,” Erika said. “Maybe ten.”
Rosalie stood up and put her coat on. She didn’t do the top button. At the door she turned around.
“She’d have hated you by now anyway,” she said. “You’d have seen to it.”
The deputy walked her out past the kids. Violet put her face in the foster mother’s coat.
I got my cheek swabbed. When I came back down the hall, Luca was standing up, holding the bell by the strap.
“Keep it till we come back,” he said.
The car seat
The swab came back on a Tuesday. The kids came home the Saturday after, which made it eleven nights, not nine. Violet still won’t sleep with her shoes off.
The cards went to Rock Island in an evidence bag. The bottom drawer of my desk is empty now. I keep opening it.
The second Sunday in November we went to the club’s diner. Kayleigh had the jukebox plugged back in and nobody had put a quarter in it.
The guys were already out front, fourteen bikes backed in along the curb.
I’d bought a car seat for the baby at the Target on the edge of town. It sat on the bench beside me with nothing on it.
Luca slid into the booth with the bell in his hand and didn’t sit down. He knelt on the vinyl and worked the strap through the handle of the car seat, around twice, the crooked rivet on top. He pulled it tight and tugged it the way he’d seen me tug a strap at the bench all week.
Then he flicked the bell once with his finger and sat down across from me.
If you’ve got a drawer somewhere with somebody’s cards in it, send this one to whoever you’d want reading them.
For more stories of family, old wounds, and the meaning carried by a motorcycle, read The Twenty-Two Bikes in My Lodge Lot and My Son’s Car at the Gate and The White Helmet I Was Supposed to Wear Out of the Church. There’s another moving story of a parent’s quiet devotion in The Mailer on My Son’s Porch Held Six Years of My Handwriting.
