My husband, who called my job “paying forty bucks to sweat in a closet,” rode my late father’s motorcycle up to my spa with another woman on the back. He booked a couples’ suite under a fake name. He thought I was home in bed, and he had no idea whose suite it was.
Amy called in sick that Thursday, and I took her shift because we were two mortgage payments behind.
The spa sits outside Bozeman, a cedar oil and soft voices kind of place.
At ten past two, an engine I’d known my whole life rolled into our lot.
Dad’s old black bike, the one I let Dov keep riding after the funeral.
A woman sat on the back, arms around his waist, MY old purple helmet on her head.
I was at the front desk beside a bowl of green apples nobody ever ate.
And in walked my husband.
She stayed a half step behind, her hand on his forearm like it belonged there.
Dov didn’t look around, not once.
“Reservation under Forbes,” he said, and set Dad’s keys on the counter.
Forbes sold us our water heater.
“The couples’ steam and soak?” Jennifer said, sliding two robes across.
He nodded, and the woman squeezed his fingers.
I stood three feet away in my gray tunic, waiting for him to see me.
He never did.
As far as he knew, I was on our couch, and nobody sees a woman who isn’t there.
“He says it’s like a little hotel,” she said, and they headed down the cedar hall.
My legs went soft and I put my palm flat on the desk.
Then the shaking quit, the way a pipe goes quiet when somebody shuts the valve.
“Four’s yours, Shauna, they’re already back,” Jennifer said.
I’d written that board at noon, and next to Suite Four it said MY NAME, IN MY OWN HANDWRITING.
I picked up the service tablet, put on my bachelorette-party smile, and followed.
In that room, I set everything they’ll feel for ninety minutes.
Heat. Steam. Oil. Timing.
And they had just put themselves in the hands of the ONE PERSON with every reason to reach for the dial.
Suite Four
I knocked twice, the way we’re trained, and went in.
They were already in the robes. He had his back to me and she was laughing at something on his phone.
The steam panel is by the door, a brass dial and a little green light. I reached for it.
I turned it all the way to off.
The green light went out. The hiss in the glass room behind them stopped.
“Welcome to Suite Four,” I said. “Your steam will be a few minutes, Mr. Forbes.”
He turned around.
I’ve seen Dov’s face do a lot of things in eleven years. I’d never seen it go gray. He looked at my tunic, then the tablet, then the name tag, like the tag might say somebody else.
The woman looked from him to me. She still had her hair up the way the helmet had left it, flat on one side.
“Hi, Dov,” I said.
He didn’t say hi back. He set the phone face down on the counter, very carefully, next to a little box of tissues.
Then he put his hand on her back and said the first thing he’d decided to say.
“Brooke, this is Shauna. She’s my ex. She works here.”
The purple helmet
Dad bought me that helmet at a swap meet in Billings the summer I turned sixteen. It cost twelve dollars because somebody had scratched a star into the back with a key, and he said the star was free.
He taught me to ride in the lot behind the Lutheran church on Sunday afternoons, after the cars cleared out. Clutch, throttle, feet up. I dropped the bike twice that first month. He picked it up both times and never said a word about the paint.
That bike was his for thirty-one years. A ’94 Springer, black, with a cracked seat he’d fixed with tape and then with better tape.
When I married Dov, I stopped riding. Dov said a wife on a bike looked like she was leaving. He said it like a joke, and I laughed like it was one, and the purple helmet went on a shelf in Dad’s garage.
Dad died in February. He was seventy-one.
After the funeral, Dov stood in that garage with his hands in his pockets and said a bike that sits dies. Said he’d keep it running for me. He’d take it out once a week, keep the battery up, keep Dad’s engine turning over.
I cried when he said it. I thought it was the kindest thing he’d ever done.
So he took the bike. And he started taking the Thursday bank run too.
We pay our mortgage at the credit union on Main, in cash, because most of what I make comes as tips. Every month I count it out at the kitchen table, fourteen hundred and eighty dollars, and put it in one of the credit union’s white envelopes. I write the month on the front in block capitals. I’ve done it that way since we bought the house.
Since March, Dov rode the envelope in on Dad’s bike. “Two birds,” he’d say.
Then last week a letter came from the credit union. August and September, unpaid.
Dov took the letter out of my hand and read it twice. He said it was a mix-up on their end and he had the receipts somewhere. He said he’d go in and straighten it out.
This morning I’d put OCTOBER in his hand before he left.
The one thing he never took was the title. That’s in Dad’s gray lockbox in our hall closet, still in Dad’s name and mine, because I signed the transfer at the courthouse in April and never told anybody I’d done it.
The key to that lockbox is on my ring, between the house key and my locker key.
Ninety minutes
Brooke didn’t say anything to me. She looked at Dov, and he kept his hand on her back.
“Can I talk to you outside,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
In the hall he stood too close, the way he does in the kitchen when he wants me to move.
“You’re going to do this at your job?” he said. “Really? We’re two payments behind, Shauna. You need this job more than I need anything in that room.”
I didn’t answer.
“She’s a client,” he said. “I’m helping her with something.”
“In a robe.”
“You don’t know what you’re looking at. You never do. You get one idea and you run with it.” He looked over my shoulder at the cedar hall, at the next door down, where a couple from Ohio was getting a hot stone thing. He lowered his voice. “Turn the steam back on and go home. Tell Jennifer you’re sick. Amy does it every other week.”
He went back into Four and shut the door.
I walked to the front desk. Jennifer was on the phone with somebody about a gift card. I waited.
“Can you take Four,” I said when she hung up. “Or give it to anybody.”
“There’s nobody. Amy’s out, Tariq’s doing intake, I’m on the desk till six.” She looked at me properly then. “What’s wrong with Four?”
I didn’t tell her. I don’t know why. Maybe because then it would be true at work too.
“If you can’t do it, go home,” she said. “I’ll cover the floor and the desk both and it’ll be a mess, and Paul will ask me why. Your call.”
Paul is our manager. Paul writes people up for a wet towel on a heated floor.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
Part of the service is bagging the guests’ street clothes for the locker. Jeans, boots, whatever they rode in on. You hang the jacket, you bag the rest, you tag it with the suite number.
Jennifer slid the tablet back to me. “One more thing. His card got declined for the deposit, so I didn’t hold it. He said he’s paying cash at the end. Said he had it on him.”
I took the tablet and went back down the hall to the door with my name next to it.
Twenty-two hundred
When I went in, Dov was already headed into the steam room, the glass door swinging shut behind him. He didn’t look at me.
I set the dial to a hundred and ten, which is what the card says for the couples’ steam. The green light came on.
Brooke was sitting on the edge of the soak tub in her robe with her arms crossed.
I started laying out the towels, the warm ones on the bench, the cold ones rolled in the bowl. Lavender, then eucalyptus. Ninety minutes is a lot of towels.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is weird.”
“It’s fine.”
“He said you two split up in April.” She was talking to the towels more than to me. “He said you were in Billings with your mom.”
My mom’s been in Missoula since I was nine. I didn’t correct her.
“He’s selling me the bike,” she said. “I don’t know if he told you that part. I put twenty-two hundred down on it in September. He signs it over when your dad’s estate clears.”
I stopped with a rolled towel in each hand.
“He said you’d fight him on it,” she said. “He said you’d want it just because it was your dad’s, even though you never ride. That’s why I wanted to meet you, kind of. Not like this.”
She gave a little laugh with no air in it.
“I learned on it,” I said.
She looked up. “On the bike?”
“In a church lot.”
She didn’t know what to do with that. She uncrossed her arms and looked at the steam room, where Dov was a gray shape behind the glass with his head down.
“The estate cleared in June,” I said.
Brooke kept looking at the glass.
“Then why is he still riding it?” she said.
OCTOBER
Dov came out of the steam after eleven minutes, which is short, and walked straight past me into the soak tub. Brooke got in beside him and sat as far from him as the tub let her.
He started talking to her low. I couldn’t hear it and I didn’t try.
I did my job. That’s the part I keep coming back to. I picked up the tablet, logged the steam, started the soak timer.
Then I went to the hooks by the door for their street clothes.
Her jeans and a gray sweater. His boots. His leather jacket, the brown one with the snap pockets, which smelled like the road and Dad’s garage.
You hang the jacket on the cedar hanger. When I lifted it off the hook, the weight was wrong on the left side, and something white slid halfway out of the inside pocket.
A credit union envelope.
The front said OCTOBER, in block capitals, in my handwriting.
I held it in both hands. The flap was open. There was a stack of twenties inside, and folded around the twenties was the letter from last week, the one he’d taken out of my hand to go straighten out.
I didn’t have to count it. I counted it anyway, standing at the hook with my back to the tub, the way I count it at the kitchen table. Fourteen hundred and eighty dollars. All of it.
The credit union closes at five on Thursdays. It was two forty. He’d ridden right past it to get her.
Behind me the water stopped moving.
I turned around and Dov was standing up in the tub, the robe soaked dark at the hem, looking at the envelope in my hand.
“Put that back,” he said. “That’s not yours.”
The lot
“That’s the house payment,” I said.
“It’s our money.” He climbed out of the tub. Water ran off him onto the heated floor, the exact thing Paul writes people up for. “It’s our money and I was handling it, and you went through my jacket at your job like a crazy person. Put it back in the pocket.”
I put the envelope in the front pocket of my tunic.
“Shauna.” He came toward me. “You’re going to lose this job. You understand that? Jennifer’s going to walk in here and see you stealing from a guest.”
I picked up the bag with his boots in it and the brown jacket, and I set them both in his arms. Then I opened the door and walked out.
He followed me down the cedar hall in his wet robe and spa sandals. The couple from Ohio came out of their room right as we passed, and the woman pulled her husband back in.
“You don’t even know what you’re doing,” Dov said behind me. “You haven’t ridden that thing since you were nineteen. You’ll dump it at the first stop sign. You’ll kill yourself on the highway and then what?”
At the desk, guest valuables go in a little numbered pouch in the drawer under the counter. Jennifer had put Dad’s keys in pouch six. Staff have the drawer code. I opened it.
“Shauna,” Jennifer said.
I took the keys out of pouch six.
“Those are mine,” Dov said to Jennifer. “She’s taking my keys. You’re watching this. Call somebody.”
Jennifer looked at him, standing on her lobby rug in a dripping robe, and didn’t pick up the phone.
I walked out the front doors into the lot. It was forty-one degrees. The bike was where he’d left it, crooked across two spots.
He came out after me.
“I’ll report it stolen,” he said. “I’ll have a deputy at the house before you get your boots off. Half that bike is mine. I’ve put eight months of gas in it. I fixed the clutch cable. You know what your dad thought of me? He thought I was nothing. He’d want me to have it just to prove him wrong.”
I got on. The seat was cold through my tunic. The tape on the cracked part had been replaced with black vinyl.
“The title’s in Dad’s box,” I said. “My name.”
That stopped him for one second, and then he went right on.
“You don’t even have a helmet,” he said. “You’re going to ride out of here with no helmet, in that, in October, and I’m supposed to feel bad?”
The front door opened behind him.
Brooke came out dressed, her sweater on inside out, the purple helmet in her hands. She walked past Dov without looking at him and held it out to me.
“This is yours,” she said. “Isn’t it.”
I took it. The star on the back was still there.
Dov said her name.
“I want my twenty-two hundred,” Brooke said to him. “By Monday. I don’t care where it comes from.”
“Babe, she’s lying to you, she’s…”
“You told me she was in Billings.” Brooke had her phone out, already ordering a ride. “You told me a lot of things.”
Jennifer was standing in the doorway now with her arms folded. “Shauna, if you leave the floor I have to write it up. I’m sorry. Paul will see the board.”
“Write it,” I said.
I put the helmet on. It still fit. I turned the key, pulled in the clutch, and pressed the starter, and Dad’s engine came up under me the way it did in the church lot.
I stalled it once.
Dov laughed, a short ugly sound. “See? See?”
I started it again and rolled out past him, slow, both feet down at the edge of the lot, and then I picked them up.
Ten past two
Three Thursdays later, at ten past two, an engine I’d known my whole life rolled into our lot.
Me, this time. Purple helmet, star on the back.
The house on Fifth has a sign in the yard now. The credit union gave me ninety days to sell before they’d do it for me, and the OCTOBER envelope went in the slot the same afternoon I took it, so I’m only one payment behind on a house I won’t live in. I’m renting the room over Mavis Wasik’s garage on Durston for six hundred a month, and the bike sleeps underneath me.
I have a write-up in my file with Paul’s signature on it. I’m on five days a week now, mostly because nobody else wants Thursdays.
Dov didn’t call a deputy. He called Amy’s sister, who called Amy, who told everybody at the spa he’d gone back to his brother’s in Livingston.
I came in the side door and set Dad’s keys on the counter.
Jennifer slid the tablet across without looking up. “Four’s yours.”
I hung the helmet on the hook by the board, picked up the marker, and wrote my name next to Suite Four.
If you’ve got a garage with somebody’s old bike in it, go turn it over this weekend, and maybe call the person who taught you to ride it.
For more stories of secrets and loyalty tested, read the neighbor boy flashing SOS from a motorcycle garage and the riders who stood by a woman’s shelter. And for a mystery that lingers for years, there’s the missing flyer hung every spring.
