My husband married me eleven days after my first love rode out of town and left me pregnant at eighteen, and for twenty-six years I thanked God for him. Then I carried a folder Damon forgot out to the back lot of his motorcycle shop, and a man standing by the bikes said, “He never told you why I left, did he?”
Damon and I had been together since junior year, and we had three kids, a paid-off house in Muncie and KRAMER CYCLE painted over the service bay.
Everybody at church called us the couple who made it.
What they didn’t know was that our oldest, Natasha, wasn’t Damon’s by blood.
She was Kevin’s, the boy with the loud secondhand dirt bike.
The week after graduation he rode off and never called, and I was seven weeks along.
Damon proposed on my mother’s porch eleven days later, and I told him everything before he got the whole question out.
I figured he’d walk. He didn’t.
“She’s mine the day she’s born, Shan,” he said. “Nobody ever has to know.”
And he kept it, every single day.
For twenty-six years I believed he’d saved me, and I was grateful for all of it.
Then one Thursday in August he left a customer’s title paperwork on our kitchen counter, so I drove it over before close.
Nobody was at the desk, so I went out back where the bikes wait for parts.
A man stood alone by the row of them in a leather vest gone gray at the seams, thin as a rake handle.
The radio in the bay played a mattress commercial.
Then he turned around.
It was Kevin.
Twenty-seven years, and he looked at me like I was the one who’d died.
“Why’d you go?” I said. “You didn’t even call.”
He took a long time answering.
“I never wanted to go, Shannon. DAMON MADE SURE I COULDN’T COME BACK.”
The folder bent in my hands.
And the worst part?
That wasn’t the last thing Kevin told me.
He looked over his shoulder at the bay door and said the thing I still hear at night.
“Shannon. There’s MORE you need to know.” ⬇️
Bay three
“What?” I said.
Kevin kept his eyes on the bay door. “I told him about the baby. Me. Right in there, the first week of June, with his dad’s radio going. I was scared out of my mind, and he was the only guy I knew with a job and a truck.”
I set the folder down on the seat of the nearest bike so I wouldn’t drop it. The tag on its handlebar said WAITING ON CLUTCH in Glenn’s writing.
“Damon didn’t know,” I said. “I told him. On my mother’s porch.”
“He knew eleven days before the porch, Shan.” He said my name short, the way Damon says it. “And when I asked him to get word to you, he came back and said you’d taken care of it. That there wasn’t going to be any baby. That you didn’t want to hear my name again.”
“You looked at me like I was dead,” I said.
“I spent a long time getting you that way,” he said. “It was easier.”
Natasha was born that January. Seven pounds, two ounces. Damon cut the cord.
“She’s twenty-six,” I said. I don’t know why I told him. He already knew. It was all over his face.
“I found out in July,” he said. “At my mom’s funeral lunch. Some lady from the church said Shannon Kramer’s oldest was born in January of 2000, and I sat on my bike in the parking lot and counted it out on my fingers like a kid.”
“Then what are you doing here?” I said. “Why are you at his shop?”
He opened his mouth.
The bay door rattled up the rest of the way. Damon stood in it, and he wasn’t looking at Kevin. He was looking at the folder.
The card file
KRAMER CYCLE was Leon’s before it was Damon’s. Damon’s dad opened it in 1971 with two lifts and a Coke machine, and in 1998 he still kept his books on index cards in a green steel cabinet behind the counter. One card for every bike he ever sold. The price at the top, the serial number under it, and every payment in pencil with the date.
Damon still has that cabinet in the office. He won’t let anybody throw out a single card. “Dad’s whole life is in there,” he tells customers, and they think it’s sweet. I thought it was sweet too.
Kevin’s dirt bike came out of that shop. A red Honda, ten years old, loud as a leaf blower. Leon let him have it for six hundred dollars at forty a week, because Kevin’s mom cleaned the church and Leon liked her. Kevin stuck a Ball State sticker on the tank, crooked, and rode it to school every day of senior year.
What we told people at church was that Damon and I had been together since junior year. It’s true if you skip a part. Damon took me to junior prom. In September of senior year I broke up with him at the Burger King on McGalliard, because Kevin Shafer had asked me to ride on the back of that Honda and I’d said yes before I thought about it.
Damon took it well. Everybody said so. He kept working his dad’s counter after school, and he sold Kevin his oil and his chain lube, and he never said one word about it to me.
Leon closes the shop the first week of every June and drives down to Lake Cumberland to fish. He still does it, at seventy-four. That year he left on a Saturday, and Kevin rode out the Tuesday after.
When Damon came up my mother’s porch steps on the nineteenth, he had a ring in his shirt pocket and his hair still wet from the shower. I told him everything before he got to the word marry. He didn’t blink.
I’ve told that part at two baby showers and a funeral.
Out by the back fence of the shop, past the row of bikes, there’s an old dirt bike under a blue tarp with no front tire. Damon calls it the parts bike. Our kids grew up being told not to touch it.
Now Damon held his hand out to me across the lot.
“Shan,” he said. “That’s a customer’s. Give it here.”
Eleven thousand
I didn’t give it to him. I opened it.
It was a title, like he’d said. A black 2009 Harley Road King, and the owner on the front was Kevin R. Shafer of Dayton, Ohio. Behind it was a bill of sale with Damon’s signature already on it, and a check from the shop account for eleven thousand dollars.
I don’t know what motorcycles are worth. I know what eleven thousand dollars is. It’s Jayla’s last year at Ball State.
Kevin was already walking to a black bike parked by the side gate. He didn’t look at either of us. It took two tries to start, and he rode out without turning his head.
Damon took the folder out of my hands, gently, the way he takes the car keys from me after two glasses of wine.
He told it that night at the kitchen table with the overhead light on.
Kevin had called the shop in July. Then again in August. Broke, sick, sleeping in his dead mother’s house while the bank took it back. He wanted money.
“I said no the first time,” Damon said. “The second time I thought about Natasha. That’s her blood, whatever else he is. So I offered to buy his bike for about twice what it’s worth, so the man could keep a little pride. I was going to tell you when it was done.”
“He said you knew about the baby before the porch.”
Damon laughed through his nose. “He’d say anything. You saw him.”
“He said you told him I got rid of it.”
He took his glasses off his head and folded them. “You want to know why Kevin Shafer left town? He took a bike out of my dad’s shop without paying for it and rode it to Ohio. They arrested him at a gas station outside Eaton. I never told you because you were seven weeks pregnant and it would have killed you.”
He reached across the table and put his hand over mine. It was warm. It always is.
Ian came down for a Gatorade in the middle of it. Damon asked him about his chemistry test and told him to get to bed, and I sat there with my hand under his.
“Twenty-six years, Shan,” he said. “Think about who’s been here.”
Then he went upstairs, and I heard him on the phone in our bedroom with the door shut.
Preble County
My mother still lives in the house with the porch. She’s seventy-one and keeps the glider oiled.
I asked her Saturday morning if she remembered Kevin Shafer getting arrested.
“Damon told me,” she said. “That June. He sat right where you’re sitting, so I’d know what kind of boy I almost let in this family.”
“Before he proposed?”
“The night before. He asked for my blessing.” She stopped the glider with her foot. “Shannon. That man has given you everything. Don’t you go digging up some boy who couldn’t pay for a dirt bike.”
I didn’t argue with her. I never have.
I drove to Ramona Shafer’s house that afternoon instead. The bank’s sign was in the yard. Kevin was carrying boxes out to a dumpster in the driveway, and he set one down on the grass when he saw my car.
We sat on his mother’s front step. There was a garbage bag of her church dresses beside him, and he moved it so I could sit. He didn’t ask me in.
“He called me Thursday night,” he said. “Said if I came near you again he’d tell the prosecutor I tried to shake him down.”
“Why’d you go to Dayton?”
“My cousin had a roofing crew paying twelve an hour. Three months of that and I’d have had a car seat and a deposit on something. Your mom hated me, so I couldn’t call your house. I asked Damon to tell you I’d call Sunday.”
“He never told me.”
“They pulled me over on 35 the next morning. Nine days in county because I couldn’t make bond. On the eighth day Damon drove over in his dad’s truck. He said his dad would drop it if I stayed out of Indiana. If I came back they’d refile, and I’d be a felon at nineteen. And he said you’d taken care of the baby and didn’t want to see me.”
“And you believed him.”
“I was eighteen in an orange jumpsuit,” he said. “And he was the one you’d picked before me.”
“Damon says you never paid for it.”
“Last forty dollars, June fourth. The Friday before Leon left for the lake. Leon wrote it on my card and said he’d sign the title over when he got back.”
He went inside and came out with a manila envelope gone soft at the corners. “I don’t know why I kept this.”
It was a court paper from Preble County, Ohio. The State of Ohio against Kevin R. Shafer, receiving stolen property, one motorcycle. Dismissed June 19, 1999. The complainant declined to proceed.
June 19 was the porch.
“He offered me eleven thousand to sign my bike over and be back across the line by Labor Day,” Kevin said. “I came Thursday to tell him no to his face.”
I read the line under the case number again.
Complainant: Kramer Cycle, Muncie, Indiana, by Damon L. Kramer.
The parts bike
Damon took Ian to the Colts game on Sunday. He asked if I wanted to come. I said I had a headache, and he brought me two Advil and a glass of water before he left.
I still have a key to the shop. I did the deposits for nine years when the kids were small.
The office smelled like hand cleaner. The green cabinet was where it has always been, under the calendar from the parts supplier. Leon filed the cards by year. I pulled out the drawer marked 1997 to 1999 and went through the S’s with my thumb.
SHAFER, KEVIN. HONDA XR250, RED. $600.
Leon’s pencil, forty dollars at a time, down the front of the card and onto the back. The last line was darker than the rest, like he’d pressed hard.
6/4/99. $40. PAID IN FULL. Title when I get back. L.K.
The serial number was at the top, where Leon always put it.
I took the card out the back door and across the lot, past the row of bikes waiting for parts, to the fence.
The tarp had leaves in the folds. I pulled it off and let it fall on the gravel.
Under the dust the tank was red. There was a sticker on it, crooked, gone white in the sun, and you could still read the B.
I’d ridden on the back of this bike with my arms around Kevin’s waist. My kids had played tag around it. Damon had walked past it every working day for twenty-six years.
I turned on my phone’s flashlight and found the plate on the frame by the handlebars. I read the number off the metal one character at a time and checked each one against Leon’s card. I had to start over twice because the light kept sliding off the plate.
Every one matched.
One of the shop cats came and sat on the tarp where I’d dropped it. I let it.
I put the tarp back the way it was, leaves and all, after the cat left. Then I drove to the east side, to the little ranch house where Leon lives with his second wife and a TV too big for the room.
Leon opened the door in his socks, and I held up the card.
Seven-fifteen Monday
Leon read the card at his kitchen table with his glasses pushed up on his forehead and the card held close. Then he read the Ohio paper. Then the card again.
“That’s my hand,” he said. “I was at Cumberland. When I got back, Damon told me the Shafer boy left the bike at the fence and lit out for Ohio. I figured he’d come for the title someday.” He set the card down. “I never called anybody. I never been to Preble County in my life.”
“I’m going to the shop Monday before Glenn gets in,” I said. “I’d like you there.”
He looked at me a long time. “Damon was always the careful one,” he said. “I used to brag on it.”
Then he nodded.
Damon came in the back door at seven-fifteen with his travel mug and stopped when he saw his father in the office chair. The card and the Ohio paper were on the desk between us.
“Dad. What are you doing here?” He looked at the desk. “Where’d you get that? That’s Dad’s file. You don’t go in Dad’s file.”
“It’s my file,” Leon said.
“Dad, she’s upset, she’s got some drunk filling her head.”
“Sit down, Damon.”
He didn’t sit.
“Okay,” Damon said. “Okay. You want to do this. I was eighteen. He had you on the back of that thing, Shan, and he was going to haul you to Dayton to live in his cousin’s basement with a baby. I made one phone call. One. I fixed it.”
“You told him I got rid of her,” I said.
“I told him what he needed to hear to stay gone. And he did, didn’t he? Nine days in jail and he folded. He’d have left you anyway. Guys like that always leave. I just made it quicker.” He put the mug down too hard and coffee went on the card. “Who paid for her braces? Who sat up with her in the ER the night she broke her wrist at the roller rink? And the eleven grand? Yeah. I was paying him to go back to Dayton. That’s not a crime. That’s a man keeping his family.”
“Why’d you keep the bike?” Leon said.
Damon didn’t answer that one.
“So now what?” he said to me. “You tell Natasha? Go ahead. Tell her her real dad sleeps in a foreclosure. Tell her I lied to her every day of her life. Tell her you did too. You think she picks you?”
I’ve thought about that a lot since. He wasn’t wrong that I’d lied.
Leon stood up. He took the card off the desk, wiped the coffee off it on his pant leg, and put it in his shirt pocket.
“That’s my name on the sign,” he said. “You put my name on a kid in a jail cell.” He looked at his son. “I owe that boy a title.”
“Dad.”
Leon walked out to the lot.
I took the shop key off my ring and set it on the desk where the card had been.
“I’m telling her tonight,” I said. “Before you can.”
March
Natasha didn’t answer my calls for nineteen days. On the twentieth she came to my apartment over the florist on Walnut Street and sat on my couch with her coat on and asked me every question she had. I answered all of them. Some of them twice.
She still calls Damon Dad. She should. He drove her to every practice she ever had.
Jayla took my side, and Ian took nobody’s, which is how Ian is. I don’t sit with our old Sunday school class anymore. The divorce is set for April. Damon kept the house.
In March Leon rolled the red Honda into his own driveway on a borrowed trailer, and Kevin put a new front tire on it with Natasha holding the light. Leon signed the title over at his kitchen table and wrote the fourth of June, 1999, on the line for the date of sale. He said that was the day it was paid for, and he wasn’t going to argue with his own card.
He gave me the folder to carry out.
It was cold. The two of them were bent over the carburetor in the driveway, Natasha’s hair tied up the way mine used to be on the back of that bike.
Kevin straightened up when he saw me and wiped his hands on a rag.
I gave him the folder. He opened it, read Leon’s name, and handed it to Natasha without saying anything.
She read it twice. Then she folded it into her back pocket, leaned over the bike, and put her boot on the kicker.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who has been keeping a story straight for someone else for too long.
For more family secrets tangled up with motorcycles, read The Eleven Thousand Dollars My Mother Wanted for Grandpa’s Motorcycle and The Biker Knew My Daughter’s Secret Middle Name. Then follow another biker’s unexpected intervention in The Biker Knew Why the Bank Wanted My House.
