Nineteen days after we buried my son, the man next door ran a chain-link fence eight feet into my yard and closed it around the shed with my son’s motorcycle inside, the bike I’d sold to cover the $2,160 still owed on his headstone. “He won’t be needing the room, Lorraine,” he said. Then the buyer came for it.
Brady was thirty-seven.
He rebuilt that bike in that shed over six winters, and it was the only thing he left that was worth enough to put his name on granite.
The whole stone was $3,940. I’d paid what I could the week of the service.
Kendra at the monument company had been kind about the rest.
“We’ll hold it for you, hon. Just get me the balance by the first.”
The first was eleven days out.
Jordan Tate had ridden with Brady for nine years. The morning after the funeral he stood in my kitchen and offered me $2,500 for the bike.
It was more than the bike was worth, and we both knew it, and neither of us said so.
He was coming Saturday with a trailer.
On Wednesday I got home from the pharmacy and the fence was up.
New posts. Silver wire. A gate with a padlock on it the size of my fist.
It ran from the corner of my porch straight back to the alley, and the shed was on the wrong side of it.
Brady’s bike was in the shed.
Dobbs was out there tamping dirt around the last post with the heel of his boot. Somebody had left one yellow rubber glove on top of his trash can. It stayed there all week.
“What is this?” I said.
“This is the line,” he said. “I had it surveyed. You’ve been mowing my grass for twenty years, Lorraine.”
“My son poured that slab.”
“On my ground.”
“Then let me get his motorcycle out of there.”
He looked at the shed. He looked at me. He leaned his weight on the post like he’d been waiting all morning to do it.
“What’s on my side of the fence is on my side of the fence.”
I went inside.
I didn’t sleep. I lay there doing the arithmetic over and over, like it might come out different.
And around three in the morning I remembered something I hadn’t thought about since it happened.
The week of the funeral I’d looked out the back window at six a.m. and seen Dobbs in my side yard with a spade, down on one knee by the lilac.
I thought he was cutting it back for me.
I thought it was a kindness.
I almost baked him a pie.
The summer Brady poured that slab he was nineteen, and he took a can of spray paint to the old iron stake in the ground by that lilac and turned it bright orange.
I asked him what on earth for.
“So nobody can ever lose it, Mom.”
I never asked him again. I never thought about it again either.
Thursday I called the county.
A woman kept me on hold for forty minutes and then told me a boundary dispute was a CIVIL MATTER.
Civil.
I had eleven days and a dead son’s name to pay for, and I was supposed to hire a lawyer.
Friday I called Jordan to tell him the sale was off.
He didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Is the bike still in there?”
“Yes.”
“Is he home tomorrow?”
“He’s always home.”
“Okay,” Jordan said. “Don’t call it off yet.”
Saturday at 8:40 I heard them before I saw them.
Eleven motorcycles came down our block in Ottumwa, slow, in a line, and backed in along my curb one after the other, rear tires to the concrete.
Nobody revved anything.
Nobody yelled.
They shut their engines off one by one until the whole street went so quiet I heard Dobbs’s storm door from my porch.
Jordan came up my walk with his helmet under his arm and nodded at me like we were in church.
“Morning, Mrs. Cruz.”
Dobbs came down his steps in his house slippers with his phone already out in front of him.
“I’m calling the sheriff. I’m calling him right now.”
“Go ahead,” Jordan said. “I’m here to pick up a motorcycle I paid for.”
I hadn’t taken a dime from him yet. I kept my mouth shut.
“That bike is on MY PROPERTY,” Dobbs said. “One foot past this fence and I’ll have every one of you arrested.”
“Nobody’s touching your fence.”
“It’s MINE NOW. The shed, the slab, WHATEVER IS IN IT.”
He had his finger out past Jordan’s shoulder, aimed straight at me.
“She’s had twenty years of my ground for free. She can go visit her boy at the cemetery.”
Two of the riders at the curb took their sunglasses off.
Jordan didn’t move. He’d stepped in between me and that finger without my ever seeing him do it, and he just stood there.
Then he asked me the strangest thing.
“Mrs. Cruz. Where’s the lilac?”
I pointed.
It was on my side, by the corner post.
Jordan walked over and crouched down next to it. The dirt around the roots was darker than the rest. Loose. Turned over and patted flat.
Dobbs stopped talking.
“Get away from there,” he said.
Jordan pushed two fingers down into the fresh dirt and looked up at him.
“Funny,” he said. “Brady painted it orange so nobody could ever lose it.”
The hole by the lilac
There was no stake.
Jordan’s fingers went in to the knuckle, then his whole hand, and it all came up loose. Somebody had dug it out and filled the hole back in.
I got down on my knees next to him in my good slacks and put my own hand in. The dirt was cold and it went down past my wrist. When I pulled it out there was a chip of orange paint stuck to my palm, about the size of a fingernail.
I held it up so Dobbs could see it.
“That’s off anything,” he said. “That’s off a traffic cone.”
“Where’d you put it?” Jordan said.
“There’s never been anything there. I told you. I had it surveyed.”
“Who surveyed it?”
“None of your damn business who.”
I closed my hand on the paint chip. Then I went in the house, got a sandwich bag out of the drawer by the stove, put the chip in it and zipped it shut. I don’t know what I thought I’d do with it. I put it in my cardigan pocket.
When I came back out, Dobbs was standing on his side of the wire with his phone to his ear, telling somebody my address. He gave them his twice, and mine once, wrong, and then right.
The riders at the curb hadn’t moved. One of them had sat down on the curb with his helmet between his boots.
A county car came around the corner at the end of the block and slowed when it got to the motorcycles.
Dobbs held his phone up at it like he’d won something.
Jordan stood and wiped his hand on his jeans. He didn’t look at the car. He looked at me.
“Brady ever tell you about the city, Mrs. Cruz? The summer he poured that slab?”
The coffee can
He’d mixed it himself, two weekends in a row, in a mixer he rented from the hardware store on Church Street. He was nineteen and he wanted somewhere to work on engines that wasn’t my kitchen.
When it was still wet he took a stick and wrote in the corner of it. B.C. 6/07. It’s still there.
Then one afternoon that July I came home and there was a man in an orange vest in my side yard with a tripod, and Brady was paying him in cash out of a coffee can. Four hundred dollars. His whole summer.
“What’s that for?” I said.
“The city, Mom. It’s handled.”
A few days later a man from the city came and stood on the slab and wrote on a clipboard. And that was the week Brady took the spray paint to the stake.
I was working Saturdays then. I let it be handled.
The shed went up on the slab the next spring, and the engines started. First a lawnmower he took apart to see how. Then a dirt bike. Then, years later, the black bagger he bought off a man in Fairfield for nine hundred dollars and a case of oil, in pieces, in milk crates.
He rebuilt it out there with a space heater and a radio, six winters, and I could see the light under the shed door from my kitchen at eleven at night.
Dobbs and Brady quit speaking the summer of the slab. I figured it was an old man and a boy and a loud engine. It happens on every block.
Dobbs and I stayed fine. He set tomatoes on my porch rail every August. He waved from his recliner through the front window. When his wife passed two years ago I took him a casserole, and when Brady passed he brought a ham to the luncheon at the church and stood by the coffee with his hat in his hands.
“Marcy keeps after me to move up by her in Des Moines,” he said to me that day. “Too much house for one.”
I said I knew what he meant. I did.
Now he was walking out to the curb to meet the county car with a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve, ready for it.
Deputy Lynch
The deputy was young enough to be one of Brady’s friends. Lynch, it said on his shirt.
He read Dobbs’s paper. He looked at the fence, the padlock, the eleven motorcycles, and me with dirt to my wrist.
Jordan was close enough to see the paper over his shoulder. It was a printout off the county’s map website, the kind with the aerial photo and the yellow lot lines, and somebody had gone over one of the lines in black marker.
“That’s off the internet,” Jordan said. “That’s not a survey.”
“It’s more than she’s showing me,” Lynch said.
He turned to me. “Ma’am, do you have a survey?”
“My son had one done. Eighteen years ago.”
“Do you have it?”
“No.”
“Then this is civil.” He handed Dobbs his paper back. “Bike stays where it is till somebody’s got paper that says different. Anybody cuts that lock, that’s criminal mischief, and I’ll be back out.”
“Yes sir,” Jordan said.
The riders left the way they came, one at a time, slow. Jordan was last. He said he’d keep the trailer hitched.
Sunday morning Dobbs hung a NO TRESPASSING sign on the shed door with baling wire.
Sunday afternoon a woman in a red blazer was in his yard with a clipboard and a big camera, taking pictures of his gutters, his front door, his shed through the fence. I figured insurance.
My sister Susan called that night from Burlington.
“Lorrie, it’s eight feet of grass,” she said. “Let him have it. Ask the monument lady for a payment plan. Brady wouldn’t want you in a feud with the neighbors at your age.”
“He’s got Brady’s bike.”
“He’s got a survey. You said so.”
Monday morning at eight I called the only land surveyor in the phone book who answered. He could come out in six weeks. Six hundred and fifty dollars.
The first was seven days out.
I hung up, put my coat on and drove downtown to City Hall.
Room 104
The woman at the permit counter had reading glasses on a beaded chain. I gave her my address and the year.
It took her twenty minutes in the back. She came out with a manila folder gone soft at the corners.
The first page was Brady’s permit application, in the block capitals he wrote birthday cards in until he was thirty. He’d spelled concrete wrong and crossed it out.
The second page was a letter on lined paper.
To the City. The boy at 622 is pouring concrete on my property and I want it torn out. I have lived here 22 years and I know where my line is. And Dobbs’s name, and his address, 618.
Under it was the surveyor’s sketch. A square for the slab. A long straight line for the lot line. And by a little scribbled circle marked lilac, an X.
Iron pin found.
Between the edge of the slab and the line, an arrow both ways. 3′ 6″.
The last page was the inspector’s note, stamped. Survey confirms slab inside 622’s line. Setback met. Complaint unfounded. Closed 7/19/07.
Brady had stood in my side yard at nineteen with four hundred dollars of his own money and proved it, and then he painted the stake orange so it would stay proved. And he never said one word to me about it.
I asked for copies. They were twenty-five cents a page.
The woman counted them out and squared them on the counter, and then she tapped the folder.
“You’re the second one to pull this one,” she said. “The man at 618 had it out the week after your son’s funeral.”
Photo nine
Tuesday morning there was a FOR SALE sign in Dobbs’s front yard.
The woman in the red blazer was on it, smiling, with her name under her face. Aubrey. A phone number. Open House Thursday 10–12.
I sat at my kitchen table and found the listing on my phone. It took me a while. I’m slow on that thing.
Well-kept ranch on an oversized lot. Updated furnace. Detached storage shed on concrete slab conveys.
Twenty-two pictures. His kitchen. His bathroom with the brown tile. His recliner, with the TV remote on the arm.
Photo four was taken from his back step. You could see the whole side yard, the new silver fence running straight and tight to the alley, and my lilac on the far side of it, small, out of focus, like it belonged to somebody else.
Photo nine was the shed.
He’d opened both doors for it. The light came in across the floor, and there was Brady’s bike, black and chrome, sitting where Brady left it the last time he rode it home.
I spread the picture big with two fingers, the way the girl at the pharmacy showed me.
In the corner of the slab, just inside the doorframe, you could read it if you made it big enough. B.C. 6/07.
Under the picture Aubrey had written one line.
Room for all your toys!
Thursday at ten
I called Jordan Wednesday night.
“Bring the trailer tomorrow at ten,” I said. “You don’t need everybody.”
He brought four of them anyway. They backed in at my curb and shut off and stood by their bikes with their hands in their jacket pockets, like men waiting for a funeral to start.
There were balloons tied to Dobbs’s mailbox. Aubrey met me at his door with a box of paper shoe covers.
“Are you looking in the area?”
“I’m next door,” I said, and handed her the envelope with the copies. “Before you show anybody the shed.”
Marcy was in the kitchen wrapping his dishes in newspaper. I hadn’t seen her since her mother’s funeral. Dobbs was in his recliner. He saw me and got up fast for a man his age.
Aubrey read the inspector’s page first. Then the letter. Then the sketch.
“That’s eighteen years old,” Dobbs said. “That’s nothing. That boy got some buddy with a tripod to draw whatever he paid him to draw.”
“The city stamped it,” Aubrey said.
“The city. I’ve lived in this house forty years. Forty. She mows that strip like she owns it, her boy pours concrete on it, runs that motorcycle in and out at midnight. Six winters of that racket through my bedroom wall. Six.” He was pointing at me again, the same finger. “And I’m supposed to sell this house short because a nineteen-year-old with a coffee can said so? That stake came out the day after you put him in the ground, and I threw it off the Market Street bridge. So you show me. You show me where your line is now.”
Everybody in the room looked at me.
“Three feet six inches off his slab,” I said.
Aubrey put the papers down on his counter. “Mr. Dobbs, I can’t list a shed that a survey on file puts on the neighbor’s lot. I have to disclose this to anybody who walks in. I’m taking down photo nine.”
Marcy had stopped wrapping. She came over and picked up the letter and read it standing there with a plate in her other hand.
“Dad,” she said. “You told me she gave you that strip. You told me she said take it, she couldn’t keep it up.”
He didn’t answer her.
Marcy put the plate down. She went to the hook by the back door, took off a small key on a green rubber tag and held it out to him.
“You go open it,” she said.
He put his hands in his pockets.
So she held it out to me instead, and I took it.
I went out his back door, across my own grass to the gate. The padlock was heavier than it looked. It opened on the first try.
I swung the gate wide and waved Jordan through.
The orange can
Jordan and two of the others walked the bike up the ramp onto the trailer, slow, the way you’d carry somebody. I signed the title on the hood of his truck. He counted twenty-five hundreds into my hand and closed my fingers over them.
He didn’t start it. He said he’d do that at home, where Brady would have.
I drove the money to Kendra that afternoon, four days before the first. She came around the counter and hugged me with the receipt still in her hand.
The fence came down the next Tuesday. Two men in a truck from a fence company pulled it post by post. Marcy paid them. Dobbs stayed in his recliner with the blinds shut.
The surveyor came after all, in November. He measured off Brady’s slab with a long tape and drove a new iron pin in by the lilac. That was four hundred and twenty-five dollars, what was left over from Jordan’s money and some of mine.
The stone went in the Saturday after that. BRADY CRUZ. Gray granite, his name cut deep.
On the way home from the cemetery I stopped at the hardware store on Church Street. I took out the sandwich bag I’d kept in my purse since that Saturday and held the chip up to the caps on the spray paint shelf until I found the one that matched. Then I went home and out to the side yard with it.
The new pin stuck up about an inch out of the dirt, by the lilac, plain gray.
I shook the can a long time, and I painted it orange.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who still has a can of spray paint in the garage from a kid who knew what mattered.
For more family drama where motorcycles and money complicate everything, read the account Dad opened that October and the bike sold to help cover a mortgage. And for another unexpected motorcycle arrival, there’s the aunt who rode up before Kathy’s loan.
