Until last Thursday I’d have sworn my husband and I had the easy kind of marriage, two kids, two motorcycles in the garage, one warm bed. When he started coming home smelling like somebody else’s idea of cedar, he grinned and said, “Every man gets one stupid year, babe. Let me have mine.” Then I grabbed the wrong watch.
Fourteen years and two kids tell you to hand a man his stupid year, so I handed it over.
He started staying late at the parts counter, trying a new beard oil every other week, and riding to work in flame shirts that made our nine-year-old cover her eyes.
I called it his midlife thing and kept his coffee hot.
I was such an idiot.
Thursday he was in the shower while I pulled on my boots for the dawn ride with the girls.
Helmet, gloves, the watch off the dresser, same as every week.
He called through the bathroom door, “Don’t wait on me for breakfast.”
Forty minutes out, at the gas stop by Lake Milton, I pushed my sleeve back and the band felt wrong.
For his birthday I’d bought us matching watches with olive woven bands, and I’d strapped on his.
A red heart was blinking on the screen, the alert it throws when a number climbs too high.
I tapped it. High heart rate. 122.
I figured it was mine, from the ridge road and how I take the curves.
Then I read the date under it.
And the time.
Ten to three in the morning.
I’d been asleep right beside him.
Dianne was holding the pump nozzle, a twist of silver tape around its handle, and she said, “You okay, hon? You look green.”
“Wrong watch,” I said.
I scrolled back through his nights. Eleven of them, and every one spiked at the same minute, like an alarm.
My phone buzzed inside my jacket. Blake: “Slept like a rock last night. You?”
WHAT HAD HIS HEART POUNDING AT TEN TO THREE?
I’m not dumb. I can count to two.
But I wanted proof I could hold.
So the next night, I lay down beside him and kept my eyes open.⬇️
2:48 a.m.
I kept my back to him and my eyes on the red numbers of the clock radio.
At 2:46 his watch gave one buzz against the sheet. He didn’t move. He lay there long enough that I almost let my eyes close.
At 2:48 he slid out from under the covers, picked his boots up by the tops and carried them out of the room in his socks.
The garage side door has a squeak in the bottom hinge. I heard it.
I got to the front window in time to see him walking my father’s motorcycle down the driveway with the engine off. Both hands on the grips, his shoulder into it, no lights. Dad’s old half helmet was hooked over the sissy bar, swinging.
Eight hundred pounds of Night Train, pushed by hand down the drive and up the rise to the stop sign at the corner.
That’s a hundred and twenty-two.
He didn’t look back at the house once. At the stop sign he swung a leg over, and my father’s bike started.
I’d know that idle anywhere. Dad set it himself, low and lazy, so it never woke the neighbors on a Sunday.
The taillight went left at the corner and was gone.
I stood there in my sleep shirt with my hand on the cold glass. Two motorcycles in the garage, and he’d taken the quiet one. His own bike has straight pipes that set off the car alarm across the street every morning at six-ten.
He’d pushed my dad’s past our window so it wouldn’t wake me.
Herman’s Night Train
My father, Herman Pietrzak, bought that bike new in 2003. Black. He laid the gold pinstripe on the tank himself with a brush he’d bought for eleven dollars, and if you look close on the left side there’s a spot where his hand shook and he decided to keep it.
He ran a crane for thirty-one years. He rode that bike until his hip quit, and then he sat on it in the garage with the radio on.
He died six years ago in March.
Dad kept a spiral notebook in the left saddlebag. Every fill-up went in it: the date, the miles, the gallons, the price. I took the bike over the spring after the funeral, and I kept the notebook going in my handwriting under his. His last entry and my first are on the same page.
His spare key still hangs on the hook by the garage door, on the ring with his union tag. His half helmet hangs on the nail beside it. Nobody wears it. It’s his.
The month after the funeral, I couldn’t stand in a line anywhere. Blake took the paperwork down to the title office for me. He came home and laid the new title on the kitchen table and showed me both our names on it with one little word between them.
Or.
“So either of us can deal with it if something happens,” he said. “You’ve got enough on you.”
I signed whatever he put in front of me that month. I thought that was what a husband was for.
Blake was good then. He carried the front left of Dad’s casket. He was the one who said, “It’s yours now, babe. Ride it.” He bought himself a Dyna that same summer with the pipes that rattle the gutters, and he’d laugh every time a car alarm went off, and the kids would laugh because he did.
The Thursday ride started that year too. Dianne rode with my dad in the eighties and showed up at the funeral home in her leathers. She keeps three bikes in a pole barn behind her place, four minutes from ours. She said, “Thursdays, dawn, you’re coming,” and I’ve been going ever since, with her and Kimberly and Mai.
That was the marriage. That was the man.
At 4:51 the bottom hinge squeaked again.
I was in bed with my eyes shut when he got in beside me, cold through his T-shirt and smelling of cedar.
He was asleep in four minutes. I wasn’t.
The notebook in the left saddlebag
Saturday morning he made pancakes in a flame shirt and burned the first two like always. He kissed the top of my head on his way past.
“Sleep okay?” I said.
“Like a rock.”
I took my coffee out to the garage.
The bike was back where it lives, on the right, kickstand down. The nail had my father’s helmet on it again. Everything was where it belongs, which is how I knew he’d been careful.
I opened the left saddlebag and took out the notebook.
Last Thursday, at Lake Milton, I’d written the odometer number down without looking at it. I’d been too green to look at anything. The Thursday before, same pump, same ride, I’d written another one.
Between those two fill-ups the bike had gone 341 miles.
I’d ridden eighty of them.
I sat down on the overturned bucket by the workbench and did it the way Dad would’ve, on the back of the notebook with the pencil stub. Two hundred sixty-one miles, seven nights. Thirty-seven and change a night. Out eighteen and a half, back eighteen and a half.
A receipt was folded into the back cover, where I keep the registration. It wasn’t mine.
A truck stop out where 224 meets the interstate. 3:16 a.m., the Sunday before last. Two large coffees. Four French vanilla creamers. $4.38.
Blake drinks his coffee black. He makes fun of me for using one creamer.
I put the receipt in my bra and the notebook back in the bag, and I called Dianne from the backyard so the kids wouldn’t hear.
She didn’t say anything for a while. I could hear her TV going and then not going.
“You want me to tell you it’s nothing?” she said.
“No.”
“Good, because I’m not going to.” She coughed. “Hon, I’m sixty-two. I’m up at three anyway. Next time he goes out, you call me. You don’t go out there alone at that hour, and you don’t say one word to him until you’ve got it in your hand.”
“I’ve got kids asleep in the house.”
“Then I’ll sit with your kids. I raised four. Call me.”
The fire safe
Saturday night I tried the easy fix first.
I took Dad’s key off the hook by the garage door before bed and put it inside my pillowcase. I lay on it. I figured if he went out and found the hook empty he’d come back in, and he’d have to say something, and I’d finally get to hear what.
At 2:48 the bed moved. The boots. The squeak in the hinge.
I waited for him to come back in.
At 2:57 my father’s bike started at the stop sign.
I sat up with the key still under my cheek and the pillowcase warm around it. I texted Dianne. He’s out.
She wrote back in under a minute. Where.
I don’t know yet.
Sunday morning Blake took the kids to his mother’s for church and waffles. He left his jeans from the night before on the bathroom floor, the way he’s left them for fourteen years.
His key ring was in the front pocket. The Dyna key, the house key, his locker key from the parts counter, and a new brass key with the cut still sharp enough to snag my thumb. The head had the same shape as Dad’s.
He’d had it cut. I don’t know when. I don’t know which night he took Dad’s off the hook to do it.
I put the ring back in the pocket and the jeans back on the floor.
Then I went to the hall closet and knelt down at the fire safe. The code is our nine-year-old’s birthday. Passports, the kids’ birth certificates, the marriage license, Dad’s will, and the title to the Night Train in a brown envelope.
I only wanted to hold it. I wanted to see the two names and the little word.
I turned it over.
On the back, on the seller’s line, was Blake’s signature. Dated last Monday. The buyer’s line was blank. On the price line, in his handwriting, he’d written 9,400.
A yellow sticky note was stuck to the corner. Troy. Sat. Cash.
Troy works the parts counter with him. He’s been to our house for the Fourth. He brought potato salad and sat on Dad’s bike in the garage with a beer and said, “Man, they don’t make them like this anymore.”
I took a picture of the front, the back and the sticky note. I put everything back in the envelope in the same order, and the envelope back in the safe the same way up.
He’d sold my father’s bike. He just hadn’t been paid yet.
The truck stop on 224
Sunday night I didn’t lie down at all. I sat on the closed toilet lid in the dark with my phone.
2:48, the boots. 2:49, the squeak.
At 2:53 Dianne pulled her pickup up at the curb two houses down with the headlights off, and at 2:54 my father’s bike started at the stop sign. She let the taillight get to the end of the block before she got out.
She came in through the front door in her slippers and a barn coat. She put her truck keys in my hand.
“It pulls left,” she said. “Don’t you dare do anything but look.”
I drove the eighteen and a half miles with both hands on the wheel and the radio off.
The truck stop was lit up like noon. I pulled in at pump four, the one farthest from the doors, and turned off the truck. My father’s bike was parked by the air hose at the edge of the lot, under the light. Dad’s helmet was on the seat.
Through the glass I could see Blake at the counter. Flame shirt. He was leaning on his elbows the way he leans on the counter at work when a customer’s a regular.
The woman behind the register was untying a red apron. She was maybe thirty. Her hair was in a knot on top of her head, and she was laughing at something he’d said.
She looked at the clock on the wall. 3:00. She pulled the apron over her head and hung it on a hook.
She poured two coffees herself. She put four creamers in hers. One, two, three, four. Blake held the door for her.
They walked out to my father’s bike together. Blake picked up Dad’s helmet off the seat. He put it on her head and did the strap under her chin with his own two hands, the way you do it for a child, and he tapped the top of it when he was done.
The Local 18 sticker was on the back. I could see it from pump four.
He got on. She got on behind him, and put her coffee in the cup holder Dad bolted on in 2009, and slid her hands into Blake’s jacket pockets.
He started it at the edge of the lot, not out on the road. Here, nobody needed to sleep.
They went right, toward the lake.
I sat there with Dianne’s keys in my lap until I couldn’t hear it anymore. Then I went inside.
The store smelled like the cardboard trees on the rack by the register. Cedar. Somebody’s idea of it.
The overnight guy was stocking cigarettes. He was maybe twenty. I bought a coffee, black, and asked him who the woman was who just left.
“Nicky?” he said. “She gets off at three. Every night.”
“With him?”
He rang me up. “Her ride’s always on time.”
Ten to three, Monday
Monday at eight in the morning I was standing at the title office counter with the brown envelope.
The woman behind the glass read the front. She turned it over and read the back, and the sticky note, and looked at me over her glasses.
“It’s an ‘or,’ hon,” she said. “Either of you can sign for it.”
“I know,” I said.
I signed my name on the seller’s line, under his. I wrote my own name on the buyer’s line. Where it said price, I wrote gift. It cost fifteen dollars. I walked out with a new title with one name on it and no little word anywhere.
At two that afternoon I rode Dad’s bike over to Dianne’s and rolled it into her pole barn between her two Softails. She gave me a ride home in the truck that pulls left. Neither of us said much.
That night I sat on the overturned bucket in the garage, in the empty spot on the right, with Dad’s helmet in my lap and the new title on my knee.
At 2:49 the side door squeaked. Blake came in carrying his boots.
He stopped.
He looked at the spot. He looked at the nail. He looked at me.
“Where is it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Where’s the bike? Babe. Where is the bike.” He put the boots down. “Okay. Okay. You’ve been up. Fine. You want to do this at three in the morning, we’ll do it. Yeah, I take it out sometimes. It runs better when somebody rides it. Your dad would’ve said the same thing, you know he would. A bike like that sits, the carb gums up. I’m doing you a favor.”
He came two steps closer.
“And if this is about the paper in the safe, you don’t get to be mad about that. I wasn’t hiding it. I was going to tell you this week. Troy’s paying cash Saturday. Ninety-four hundred. That’s real money. That’s money we don’t have. And half of that bike is mine. It says so right on the title. I made sure it says so.”
He said it like he was proud of the paperwork.
“Six years,” he said. “Six years I’ve been looking at it in my garage. Do you know what that is? It’s a motorcycle. It’s not him. He’s not in it. Sell it, and somebody gets to start over.”
“Who,” I said.
“What?”
“Who gets to start over.”
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He didn’t take it out. It buzzed again.
“She’s waiting,” I said.
His face went still. Then it went red from the collar up.
“You followed me. You got in somebody’s truck and you followed me like a crazy person. You know how that sounds? Who watched the kids? You left my kids?” He pointed at the house. “Nicky’s got nothing to do with this. Nicky’s a friend. She works nights. She’s got no car. I give her a ride home, that’s it, that’s what this is, eleven rides home, and you went and hid my bike.”
“My bike,” I said, and I held up the title.
He took it out of my hand. He read the front. He turned it over like the back would be different.
“You can’t do that.”
“It’s an ‘or,'” I said.
He opened his mouth and shut it. He threw the title at the workbench. It slid off and landed under the Dyna.
“Troy’s coming Saturday with cash, and there’s no bike. You did that. Not me. You.”
The door to the kitchen opened. Our nine-year-old was standing in it in her socks, holding the frame, her hair flat on one side.
“Is Grandpa’s bike gone?” she said.
“It’s at Dianne’s,” I said. “It’s fine. Go back to bed, baby.”
She looked at her dad. She looked at the flame shirt. She went.
Blake stood there a long time. His phone buzzed a third time.
Then he pulled his boots on, got his jacket off the hook, and walked his own bike out into the driveway. He didn’t push it to the corner. He started it right there under our bedroom window.
Across the street the car alarm went off. He let it go.
Three Thursdays later
The garage has one motorcycle in it now, on the right, kickstand down.
The left side has an oil stain and a cardboard tree that fell out of a saddlebag at some point. I haven’t picked it up.
The kids go to his mother’s on Sundays, and he meets them there. Our nine-year-old doesn’t cover her eyes anymore. He doesn’t wear the shirts to his mother’s.
Thursday I pulled on my boots in the dark. Helmet, gloves.
There’s one watch on the dresser. His went with him.
Dad’s helmet is back on the nail. I wiped the inside with a rag and soap and left it there. It’s his.
I walked the bike down the drive with the engine off. Not for anybody. I just wanted to know what it took. At the stop sign I was breathing hard, and I laughed, and I started it.
Forty minutes out, at the gas stop by Lake Milton, Dianne was already at the pump with the silver tape on the handle. Kimberly and Mai were inside getting coffee.
I wrote the miles in Dad’s notebook. Then I put the notebook back.
Dianne looked at my wrist. “Right watch?” she said.
I pushed my sleeve back and held it up so she could see.
If this one got to you, send it to the friend who would get out of bed at three in the morning and sit with your kids.
For more stories where motorcycles, family secrets, and painful surprises collide, read “The Eleven-Hundred-Dollar Diamond My Husband Bought Twice in One Afternoon” and “The Key to Unit 214 Was Still Hanging by My Front Door”. You can also follow another curbside shock in “The Morning After the Bentley, Eleven Motorcycles Were Parked at My Curb”.
