My son-in-law’s mother spent $1,900 on a wig my granddaughter hated, then stood in the school lobby and told me, “She is not walking onstage looking sick, and she is not walking in next to you.” So I went back out to the lot where my riders were parked, sat down on a milk crate, and handed my daughter my pocket scissors.
Meera is eight. She’d been in chemo since the week after Easter, and by August there was nothing on her head but a little fuzz that came away on her pillowcase.
My braid was twenty-seven years old.
It hung past my belt when I rode. My wife Karen braided it every Sunday morning at our kitchen table for twenty-two of those years, three strands, finished off with the rubber band from the newspaper.
She’s been gone four Novembers.
Nobody had touched it since. I did it myself in the bathroom mirror now, crooked, and the guys gave me grief about the lumps.
Ramona is Dev’s mother. Dev married my daughter Stacy twelve years ago, in a church Ramona chose.
From the first dinner, she called my motorcycle “the machine.” Is Julius bringing the machine? Like it was something that leaked on her carpet.
When Meera’s hair started coming out, Ramona drove to Indianapolis and came home with a wig in a white box full of tissue paper. Real human hair, long and dark. She told everybody what it cost.
Meera wore it nine minutes.
“It bites,” she said.
Ramona said she’d get used to it.
Then the lion.
Biscuit was a stuffed lion Karen bought at a truck stop the summer Meera turned four. Big yellow yarn mane. He’d been to every hospital stay, every scan, every night in the chair by the window.
The Monday before the concert, Stacy found Meera on her bedroom floor with the blunt little scissors from her pencil box.
The mane was in a pile on the carpet.
ALL of it.
Stacy called me from the hallway. She couldn’t get a whole sentence out.
I drove over. Meera was sitting on her bed with Biscuit in her lap, his head lumpy and patchy, a few yellow strings still hanging on.
“Why’d he need a haircut, bug?”
She didn’t look up.
“Now there’s two of us.”
That was all. She went back to picking at the strings.
I sat on the end of that bed with twenty-seven years hanging down my back, and I didn’t have one thing to say.
The concert was Thursday at 6:30. The third grade was doing three songs, and Meera had a line by herself in the second one. She’d sung it in my truck so many times I knew it too.
Ramona phoned Stacy on Wednesday night. Meera would wear the wig. Meera would stand at the end of the riser, by the curtain. And there was a question about me.
“Is your father planning to bring that CROWD?”
Stacy told her she didn’t know.
I knew. I’d asked the guys on Sunday, and eleven of them said yes before I got to the end of it.
Thursday we rolled into the lot at Holy Redeemer in Kokomo a little after six. Eleven bikes and mine, backed in along the curb by the bus lane. Thaddeus had washed his. In nineteen years nobody had seen him wash it.
Ramona was standing just inside the glass doors next to the principal, Mrs. Shin. Ramona paid the tuition there. She’d filled out every form.
She had the wig box under her arm, like Meera might try to lose it.
I went in to tell Stacy where we’d be.
Ramona put her hand up. Not on me. Just up.
“You can watch from the lot, Julius. That’s where your friends are. These families have little ones, and nobody here wants to explain you to them.”
Mrs. Shin looked at her shoes.
“She is NOT walking onstage looking sick,” Ramona said. “I paid nineteen hundred dollars so she wouldn’t. And she is not walking in next to you.”
Meera was behind her by the trophy case, in the wig. She had Biscuit by one leg.
She looked at Ramona. Then at me. Then at the braid.
I walked back outside.
Stacy came after me. She figured I was leaving.
There was a milk crate by the dumpster. I sat on it, pulled the newspaper band off the end of my braid, and held my pocket scissors out to her handle first.
“Dad. No.”
“Above the band. Your mother always said the top part was the oldest.”
“She didn’t mean for you to…”
“Stacy. CUT IT OFF before I talk myself out of it.”
Her hands were shaking. Those scissors were made for fishing line, not this.
Behind me, Thaddeus took off his bandana.
Then the rider next to him did. Then the next. All down the curb, eleven heads, EVERY one of them shaved clean and pale as an egg.
I hadn’t told them about the lion.
Stacy had. Tuesday night. She’d sent one picture.
It took her five tries. The last strands let go, and the whole braid dropped across my knees, heavier than I’d have guessed.
I wrapped it in my bandana and stood up.
My head felt like somebody else’s.
TWELVE of us walked back across that lot. Ramona saw us through the glass, and her mouth went thin.
Mrs. Shin met us at the door this time. She had a sheet of paper in her hand, and she didn’t look at her shoes.
“Mr. Polk, I’m so sorry. This came to the office at noon.”
It was the visitor form for the concert. My name was on it, typed, with a line drawn straight through.
At the bottom were two signatures.
The first was Ramona’s.
The second was the one Stacy read over my arm before I did.
The black ballpoint
“That’s Dev’s,” Stacy said.
It was. A D, a little loop, and then a long flat line for the rest, the way he signs for a package on the porch. Black ballpoint. A date beside it. 10/26.
Ramona’s was above it in the green felt-tip she used for everything, with today’s date.
I had the braid in my left hand, still wrapped in the bandana. I gave it to Stacy so I could hold the paper with both hands.
The typing was Ramona’s. Meera Mackay, Grade 3, and under that the guests. Ramona Mackay. Dev Mackay. Stacy Mackay. Julius Polk. One line through the last one, straight as if she’d used a ruler.
“What does this mean for tonight?” Stacy said.
Mrs. Shin didn’t want to answer. She answered anyway.
“It means a parent signed it, and I can’t seat Mr. Polk. That’s the parish rule. I don’t get to pick.”
Behind me eleven bald men stood on the sidewalk holding their bandanas. Thaddeus had his folded in a square, like the flag they hand you at a funeral.
Stacy had her phone out. Her thumb kept missing the letters.
“He said he was coming straight from work,” she said. “He said he’d save us seats.”
Mrs. Shin looked back through the doors toward the gym.
“Mr. Mackay is already inside. Second row, on the aisle.”
Christmas cards
Ramona sends Christmas cards. Heavy ones with a gold edge, and every envelope addressed in that same green felt-tip.
For eight years the one on our fridge said To Karen and Julius. Karen kept them up till Valentine’s Day. She said you don’t take down a card from a woman who counts.
The first December after the funeral, there was no card at my house.
There was one on Stacy’s fridge. To Stacy, Dev and Meera. Merry Christmas from Mom.
Four Christmases since. Four cards. I wasn’t in any of them, and nobody said a word about it, and I didn’t either.
Dev is a good kid. I want that on the record. He reads meters for the gas company, he has never once been short with Meera, and he calls me sir even though I’ve asked him not to for twelve years.
He also signs things.
At the rehearsal dinner Ramona slid the church contract across the tablecloth with her green pen on top of it, and he signed it between the salad and the chicken without turning the page. Karen leaned over to me.
“That boy would sign for a piano if his mother handed it to him.”
Every Sunday after Mass, he eats at Ramona’s. Every Sunday there’s something on the table by his plate. The insurance, the tuition, the car registration. He signs and passes the potatoes.
The week before the wedding his car quit, and he needed to get to the courthouse for the license. I gave him a ride on the back of my bike. He held on to the grab rail the whole way like it was trying to throw him.
In the courthouse lot he got off, handed me back my spare helmet, and said, “Don’t tell my mother.”
I never did.
I was standing in the school lot thinking about that, with the form in my hand and the cold on my scalp, when the glass doors opened.
The pickup card
Ramona didn’t come out. She stood on the sill with the door propped against her hip, the white box under her arm, the way you stand in a doorway when the dog’s not allowed in.
She looked at the bikes first. Then at the heads. Then at the bandana in Stacy’s hands.
“Well,” she said. “I suppose that’s meant for me.”
“You crossed my father off,” Stacy said.
“I didn’t cross anybody off. Read the bottom. Her father signed it.”
“You put it in front of him.”
“I put a great many things in front of him. Somebody has to.” She turned to Mrs. Shin. “They’re lining up. Meera’s asking for her mother. Not for this.”
Stacy took the pen out of Mrs. Shin’s blazer pocket before Mrs. Shin could stop her. She wrote JULIUS POLK under the struck line in block capitals and signed her own name beside it, hard enough to tear the paper a little.
“There. I’m her parent too.”
Mrs. Shin looked at it a long time.
“Mrs. Mackay is on Meera’s pickup card, so she can bring me the form. But I go by a parent’s signature, and now I have two parents who disagree.” She said it to the paper, not to us. “When that happens, the diocese says I don’t seat the guest. I’m sorry. I didn’t write it.”
Ramona nodded like that settled the weather.
“There,” she said. “Now it’s nobody’s fault.”
The door swung shut behind her.
Stacy typed with both thumbs. I could see the screen. Did you sign Dad off the list.
The reply came before she’d put the phone down.
“Not now. Mom’s right here.”
Sixteen hundred and forty dollars
Stacy sat down on the milk crate. My milk crate. She held the braid in her lap like it was something that could still get hurt.
“Since when does Dev do what she says on a Thursday?” I said.
“Since July.”
She didn’t look up.
“He went part-time in June, Dad. Somebody had to drive her to Indianapolis Tuesdays and Fridays, and my job doesn’t let me. We were behind by August. Ramona pays the house. Sixteen hundred and forty dollars, the first of every month.”
“In green ink,” I said.
“In green ink.”
I’d been bringing groceries. Gas cards. A bag of those orange crackers Meera likes on scan days. I thought I was helping.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you’d have sold the bike.”
She was right, and we both knew it, so I didn’t say anything.
Thaddeus came over. He doesn’t talk much. He stood next to me and looked at the school like he was pricing it.
“We can pass a hat, Jules.”
“No.”
“Then you want us to go, we go. Quiet. Nobody revs.”
“Stay.”
He went back to the curb and told the others. Not one of them got on his bike. One of them, a guy we call Pipe, sat down on the curb and started reading the back of a bus schedule somebody had dropped, all of it, the whole thing, like it was the paper.
The light over the bus lane came on. It buzzed.
I held the form up under it.
Dev’s signature in black ballpoint, 10/26. That was Sunday. That was Mass and pot roast at Ramona’s.
Ramona’s call to Stacy was Wednesday night. Is your father planning to bring that crowd.
Ramona’s signature in green, with today’s date.
And the line.
I turned the paper so the light came across it flat.
The line through my name was green.
Second row
I went to the glass doors and knocked on them with one knuckle, the way you knock on a hospital room.
Mrs. Shin opened it. I didn’t step in. I’d been told where I could stand, and I stood there.
“Ma’am, would you do something for me?”
She waited.
“Take this to the second row. Show it to him. Ask him one thing. Was that line there when he signed it.”
She looked at the paper. She looked at the line a while. Then she looked at the bandana in Stacy’s hands, and at my head, and at the eleven behind me.
She didn’t say yes. She just went.
Through the glass I could see down the lobby to the gym doors. The trophy case with Meera’s school’s bowling trophies in it, a gold pin from some year in the eighties. A table with programs on it. The third grade lined up along the far wall in navy sweaters, and one long dark wig at the end of the line, by the curtain, holding a lion by the leg.
Mrs. Shin went into the gym. The doors swung back and forth behind her and stopped.
Nobody in the lot moved. Pipe put the bus schedule down.
When the gym doors opened again, it was Dev. He had his gas company jacket on and the form in his fist, and he was walking fast, the way a man walks when he’s trying not to run in a school.
Ramona came out of the gym after him and stopped by the trophy case.
Dev pushed the glass door open with his shoulder and stood in it. He looked at the twelve heads. He looked at mine longest.
“I signed this Sunday,” he said. “At her table. After Mass. Your name was on it.”
He held it up so I could see, like I hadn’t.
“I looked for it. That’s the only thing I read on the whole page. She said she needed a parent on it because she’s only on the pickup card. Your name was on it, and it didn’t have a line through it, sir.”
He turned the paper around and looked at the line like it was somebody else’s handwriting. It was.
“She asked me Wednesday if you were bringing the guys. I said probably. I said Meera would like that.”
He turned around in the doorway and looked down the lobby at his mother.
“Mom. Out here.”
The white box
She came. She took her time doing it. She stopped at the edge of the sidewalk where the concrete ends and the lot begins, and she didn’t put a foot past it.
“Don’t you call me out into a parking lot like a dog, Dev Mackay.”
“Did you draw that line?”
“Yes. I drew it. Somebody in this family has to think about how things look.” She shifted the box under her arm. “Half the parish is sitting in that gym. They have watched that child come to Mass in a scarf since May. Tonight she was going to stand on that riser looking like every other girl up there. Every other girl. That’s all I wanted. That’s all I paid for.”
“Mom.”
“And then he rolls in here with twelve of those machines, and look at them. Look at their heads. You want her walking down that aisle next to that? You want every family in that gym looking at her and seeing the hospital?”
Nobody answered her. She kept going anyway.
“I have paid for that school. I have paid for your house. I drove to Indianapolis by myself in the rain for that wig, and she wore it nine minutes, and I did not say one word.”
“You said she’d get used to it,” Stacy said.
Ramona didn’t look at her.
Mrs. Shin had come out behind Dev. She had her own pen back.
“Mrs. Mackay, you’re not a parent on this form. Your line doesn’t stand without his.” She held the pen out. “Mr. Mackay?”
Dev took it. He put the paper flat against the glass of the door and wrote his initials beside my name, small, the way you initial a correction at the bank. D.M.
Ramona watched him do it.
“Then you can pay your own mortgage in November,” she said. “And don’t call me when the bank calls you.”
“Okay,” Dev said.
“Okay? That’s what you have to say to me? Okay?” Her voice went up and came back down. “Twelve years. You have never been on one of those things in your life, and you’re going to stand out here with them like you’re one of them…”
“Courthouse,” Dev said. “The week before the wedding. His spare helmet.”
Ramona looked at me.
I didn’t say anything. I’d promised him.
Down the lobby, the third grade had started moving toward the gym. The last one in line had stopped. She was standing at the glass with her face close to it, looking out at the lot. At the curb. At the row of heads.
Then she reached up with the hand that wasn’t holding Biscuit and pulled the wig off.
It came off all at once, like a hat. Her head was pale and bare under the lobby lights, with that little bit of fuzz.
She pushed the door open with her back and came out onto the sidewalk in her navy sweater and her concert shoes. She walked past her father. She walked up to Ramona and held the wig out to her by the top, the way you’d hand somebody back a cat that scratched.
“You can have it back now,” Meera said.
Ramona didn’t take it. Her hands were full of the white box.
Stacy took it. She folded it once and laid it in the tissue paper in the box, still under Ramona’s arm, and put the lid on.
Mrs. Shin held the door open.
“Second row, Mr. Polk. The rest of you, there’s room along the back wall.”
Twelve of us went in. Ramona stayed out on the curb with the box.
Sunday at Karen’s table
The second Sunday in November, Meera sat at my kitchen table with Biscuit and a skein of yellow yarn Stacy got at the craft store.
It’s Karen’s table. The same chair. The same scratch by the napkin holder where I set down a carburetor once and heard about it for a month.
My head’s grown out to about where Meera’s is. We compare. She says she’s winning.
The braid’s in the bandana, in the drawer under the phone book. Stacy asked if I wanted to give it to one of those places that make wigs out of it. I said not yet. Maybe next year.
The first of the month, I drove a check over to Stacy’s. Dev picked up Saturdays at the gas company. Between us it covers the house. My pension doesn’t stretch like it did, and the bike stays in the garage more than it used to, and that’s all right.
There was no word from Ramona. Stacy says the Christmas cards go out after Thanksgiving. We’ll see whose name is on them.
Meera cut the yarn into lengths with her pencil-box scissors and laid them across Biscuit’s head, and she got Stacy to stitch them down, and now she had three long strands hanging off the back of him.
She braided them. Over, under, over. Slow. She’d watched me do mine in the bathroom mirror enough times.
The Sunday paper was on the table where it always is, still rolled.
She held her hand out without looking up.
“Grandpa. I need the band.”
I pulled it off the paper and put it in her hand.
If you’ve got somebody who’d cut off what he kept for twenty-seven years just to stand next to a kid, send this one to him tonight.
For more stories where motorcycles and family history meet in unexpected ways, read The Bike Title Taped Inside My Husband’s Last Notebook, The Father at Pump Four Said Her Sister Always Picks Up for Him, and The One Corner of the Tarp I Lifted Every Sunday for Three Summers.
