My son put me in a tool shed behind the garage I paid for and wanted my late wife’s motorcycle sold for $6,500. “The house is in Melissa’s name now,” he told my old riding partner’s son. “If my father doesn’t like it, he can pack up and go.” He had no clue what that rider had grown into.
The motorcycle turned onto our street on a gray Thursday afternoon in October, loud enough that the dog three doors down quit barking to listen.
I was out in the driveway in my old blue work shirt with a rag and a can of polish. It was the one thing out front my son still let me touch.
Arlene’s green bike.
She and I spent fourteen months bringing that machine back in 1979. Every bolt on it went through both our hands.
I came to Noblesville six years ago with three motorcycles and the money from the house we raised Derek in. He sold two of the bikes before that first spring was out.
The money went into this house, so we’d all be under one roof. That was the idea, anyway.
These days the green one lived in the driveway, because the garage was full of Melissa’s treadmill and the shed behind it was full of me.
Derek called the shed my “studio.”
It was a tool shed with drywall screwed over the studs. I had to duck to pull my boots on.
When the wind came across the yard, it came straight through the wall by my cot.
There was a hot plate on a milk crate, a folding chair, and a coffee can of washers I couldn’t make myself throw out. Derek told his cousins I liked the independence.
The rider backed his bike in beside the mailbox and swung his leg over.
“Walt?”
I knew the voice before the face.
The rag dropped onto the concrete. “Travis?”
He was up the driveway in about four strides, and he grabbed me hard enough to knock the wind out of me.
The last time I’d seen him was at Arlene’s funeral, a skinny thirty-two in a tie he kept yanking at. He was thirty-eight now.
Dark beard, ink down both arms to the wrists.
A gray T-shirt under a black leather vest gone soft and scuffed at every edge.
Gene’s boy.
Gene and I rode together for twenty-two years, and when we buried him I promised to keep an eye on his son. Mostly it went the other way.
Travis called on my birthday. He mailed a card every Christmas with a twenty in it, like I was still twelve.
But having him in front of me was like turning the key on an engine that’s sat for years and hearing it catch.
“Figured I’d surprise you,” he said.
“You did.”
Then he looked past me.
At the side gate standing open. At the shed door, the pill bottles on its windowsill, the orange extension cord running out to it from the garage.
His face went still, a piece at a time.
“Walt. Why is your cot in a shed?”
Before I could make it sound like nothing, the front door opened.
Derek came down the steps in his navy pullover with his shoulders already set.
Melissa stopped on the porch with her coffee. She had on the face she saved for anybody who parked where she could see them.
“Travis,” Derek said, too loud and too friendly. “Didn’t know we were having company.”
Travis kept his eyes on me. “He sleeps out there?”
Derek laughed once. “It’s a STUDIO.”
“He likes his own space,” Melissa said from the porch.
I opened my mouth to smooth it over, the way I’d smoothed over everything in this family for six years. Travis beat me to it.
“That’s a tool shed with a hot plate.”
Derek’s face shut like a garage door. “Watch how you talk on my property.”
Travis turned and faced him square. “Why is the man who paid for this garage sleeping behind it?”
And Derek said it out loud, like it had been sitting in him for years and he’d finally found somebody worth saying it in front of.
“Because the house is in MELISSA’S NAME NOW,” he said. “And if my father doesn’t like it, he can PACK UP AND GO.”
Nobody moved.
A sprinkler two houses down kept ticking around in its circle. It was watering the sidewalk.
Melissa took a quick breath on the porch. She didn’t disagree with him, she just didn’t like him saying it in front of a witness.
The shame got to me before the anger did. It always does.
Six years of it and it stops feeling like something happened to you. It just feels like Tuesday.
“Derek,” I said. “That’s enough.”
Derek wasn’t done.
He pulled a sheet of paper out of his back pocket, folded in thirds.
“Glad you’re both out here,” he said. “Saves me a trip around back.”
He held it out. “Sign that.”
I took it. It took me two tries to open it, because my hands wouldn’t hold still.
A bill of sale for the green bike.
A buyer I’d never heard of. Sixty-five hundred dollars.
A line at the bottom with my name typed under it.
Arlene wet-sanded that tank on our kitchen table with the radio on.
My reading glasses were in my shirt pocket.
I didn’t need them for that number.
A hand came down on my shoulder. Heavy, warm, not going anywhere.
Travis didn’t look at the paper. He was looking at my son.
Derek folded his arms and smiled down at me, like a man waiting on a pen.
“Walt,” Travis said, the way you read off a part number. “Whose name is actually on the deed to this house?”
Derek laughed. “That’s none of your business.”
Travis kept his hand right where it was.
Down at the mailbox, his saddlebag hung open. A thick brown file stuck out of it, rubber-banded twice, with a courthouse parking pass clipped to the front.
Derek had no idea what Gene’s boy did for a living now.
But I knew the look on Travis’s face. His father wore the same one every time he’d already found the cracked part and was just waiting for you to catch up.
Whatever was in that file, my son was about to meet the man Gene raised.
The brown file
“Mine,” I said. “I wrote the check.”
It came out of me the way a part number does. Two hundred thirty-one thousand dollars, a cashier’s check, across a table at a title office in Carmel six years ago this May.
Derek laughed again. “Not since March, Dad.”
Travis took his hand off my shoulder. He walked down to the mailbox, pulled the file out of the saddlebag and snapped both rubber bands off on the way back up.
He laid it open on the seat of Arlene’s bike.
The top page was a copy of a deed. QUITCLAIM, it said across the top. A stamp in the corner from the Hamilton County Recorder, dated March 19. Walter J. Ostrander, grantor. Melissa A. Ostrander, grantee.
Consideration: ten dollars.
At the bottom, on the line, was my name. In my handwriting, or close enough that I had to look twice.
“You asked me something on the phone,” Travis said. “On your birthday. Remember?”
I remembered.
Derek’s arms came uncrossed. “What is that?”
“Public record,” Travis said. “Anybody can pull it. I pull about forty a week.”
I put my reading glasses on. Now I needed them.
When did I sign that?
Ostrander Cycle
For forty-three years I had a shop on East Washington Street in Indianapolis. Two bays, a counter, a calendar from a parts supplier that I never once turned to the right month.
Every job got a work order in triplicate. Customer copy, shop copy, a pink one for the box.
My hands were black from seven in the morning on, so by the time Derek was twelve he was signing my name on the work orders for me. He put a little hook on the bottom of the W, because he thought it looked like the number on a race bike.
Arlene used to hold one up to the light and laugh. “He does your W better than you do.”
I never made the hook. I still don’t.
Gene came in with a Triumph that wouldn’t idle in 1974 and kept coming in for twenty-two years after it idled fine. Travis grew up on a milk crate in the corner of bay two, sorting washers out of the floor sweepings into a coffee can for a nickel a can.
That’s the can. I brought it to Noblesville. I couldn’t tell you why.
In March my heart went sideways in the middle of the night. Derek drove me to the hospital in Carmel and I was in there four nights with wires stuck all over my chest.
When I got home I cut the plastic band off my wrist with tin snips and dropped it in the coffee can with the discharge sheet. Junk goes in the can. That’s been the rule since 1974.
On the Fourth of July, Derek said over a plate of brats that Melissa was handling the house now. “It’s in her name for the insurance,” he said. “Simpler.”
I didn’t ask what was simpler.
In September Travis called on my birthday, and I asked him the only question I had. Could a house get put in somebody else’s name without the owner?
“Not legally,” he said. “Why?”
“No reason,” I said, and asked about his truck.
Now that question was lying open on the seat of Arlene’s motorcycle, with a stamp on it.
Derek stepped up to the bike and put his finger on my name.
“You signed it, Dad. You just don’t remember.”
March
“You were a mess in March,” Derek said. “You know you were.”
He said it to Travis, not to me. Like a man explaining a dog that bites.
“He left the hot plate on twice. He called me Gene at dinner. He took Tuesday’s pills on Wednesday and Wednesday’s on Tuesday and didn’t know it till the box was empty.”
“He put his boots in the freezer,” Melissa said from the porch.
That one was true. I’d been looking for the ice.
“We went to the bank together,” Derek said. “Me and you. You signed where they told you. I bought you a coffee after. You don’t remember any of that?”
I didn’t.
I didn’t remember a lot of March. That was the part that scared me. The days ran together like oil in a drain pan, and there were whole afternoons I couldn’t account for.
“I’ll call the county,” I said. “Tell them I didn’t sign it.”
“Go ahead.” Derek spread his hands. “Tell them you don’t remember. You know what they do with old men who don’t remember signing things? They send somebody out to look at them.”
He nodded at the shed.
“They look at that. They look at the pills. Then they talk to me, because I’m the one who’s been taking care of you. Where do you think you go after that?”
Melissa came down one step. “Nobody wants that, Walt. We just want to get things settled.”
“Settled,” Travis said.
“The bike’s just sitting there,” Melissa said. “It’s not like he rides it.”
I hadn’t ridden it since Arlene. My hip wouldn’t let me swing a leg over anymore, and some days my hands wouldn’t work the clutch. She wasn’t wrong about that, and she knew it.
Derek pulled a pen out of his pullover and clicked it.
“Sign the bike,” he said, “and we’ll forget Travis was ever here.”
Page two
Travis didn’t look at the pen.
He turned the deed face down on the seat. Under it was another copy, longer, with the same recorder’s stamp in the corner.
MORTGAGE, the top said.
Melissa A. Ostrander, borrower. A bank on 116th Street, lender. Eighty-five thousand dollars, a home equity line, recorded April 2.
Fourteen days after the house went into her name.
I read the number three times. My house. The one I wrote the check for. Somebody had borrowed eighty-five thousand dollars against it while I was still walking around with the tape marks on my chest.
“That’s ours,” Derek said. “That’s our business. She owns the house.”
Travis turned that page over too.
The third sheet didn’t come from the recorder. It had a case number on it and the name of a court, Hamilton Superior. A complaint to foreclose, filed in September. The bank on 116th Street against Melissa A. Ostrander.
Melissa set her coffee down on the porch rail. It slid a little on the wet paint and she didn’t catch it.
“How did you get that?” she said.
“I’m in that building three days a week,” Travis said. “It’s on the docket. Anybody can read it.”
I looked at the bill of sale in my hand. Sixty-five hundred dollars.
That would buy them a month against the bank, maybe two.
“We had a bad year,” Derek said. “The roof. Her car. You don’t know what it costs to run a house like this.”
“I know what it cost to buy one,” I said.
That was the most I’d said to him in six years, and it wasn’t much.
Travis turned the mortgage back over and went to the deed again. He put his finger on the bottom of the page, under my name, where the notary had stamped it.
Kimberly Sowers, notary public. The bank on 116th Street. Subscribed and sworn before me this twelfth day of March.
“Walt,” Travis said. “Where were you on March twelfth?”
The coffee can
I didn’t know.
March was the hospital. March was beeping and a nurse named Pat who called me young man and lukewarm Jell-O at four in the afternoon. I couldn’t have told you which days.
But I knew where the junk went.
I walked back through the side gate. Nobody stopped me. My boots were loud on the patio and then quiet on the grass.
The shed door stuck the way it always stuck. I put my shoulder in it and ducked under the frame.
The cot. The folding chair. The hot plate on its milk crate with a pan still on it from breakfast. The wind coming through by the wall, the way it always did.
The coffee can was under the cot, behind my other boots.
I picked it up. It was heavier than you’d think. Fifty years of washers is a lot of steel.
I tipped it out onto the blanket.
They came out in a pile, every size, a few lock washers, a cotter pin Gene must have dropped in 1980. And folded up among them, gray from the dust, the discharge sheet with a white plastic band still tucked inside it where I’d put it.
I unfolded it on my knee.
OSTRANDER, WALTER J. Date of birth, April 2, 1948. Admitted 03/11. On the sheet: discharged 03/15, released to son.
Released to son.
I put both of them in my shirt pocket next to my glasses and ducked back out.
Derek was standing by the bike with the pen still in his hand. Travis was where I’d left him. Melissa had come all the way down off the porch.
I laid the sheet on top of the deed, on the seat of Arlene’s bike. I put the band down beside it, the cut end facing up.
Admitted 03/11. Released 03/15.
Sworn before me this twelfth day of March.
Nobody said anything. The sprinkler down the street ticked around.
Then I leaned over and looked at my name on the deed one more time, with my glasses on.
There was a little hook on the bottom of the W.
Derek looked at the hook. Then he looked at his wife.
The pen
“Okay,” Derek said. “Okay. Fine.”
He put the pen back in his pullover, then took it right back out again.
“You want to do this in the driveway, we’ll do it in the driveway. Yes. I signed it. Somebody had to sign it. You were lying in there with wires all over you and the doctor’s telling me maybe you go home, maybe you don’t, and the taxes were due, and the roof was leaking into her closet, and you think this house runs on a check you wrote six years ago?”
He was louder now. A garage door went up across the street and stopped halfway.
“I’ve fed you every day for six years. I’ve driven you to every appointment. I sorted your pills. Me. Not him.” He pointed the pen at Travis. “He sends a card at Christmas. With a twenty in it.”
“Derek,” Melissa said.
“Everything you own was coming to me anyway. All I did was move it up.”
“Derek.”
“What?”
“Kim said it was fine,” Melissa said. She said it to me, not to him. “She said as long as family brought it in, it was fine. She said they do it all the time.”
Derek turned around and looked at her like she’d dropped something heavy on his foot.
“Go inside, Mel.”
She didn’t go inside.
I held out my hand. Derek looked at it a while. Then he gave me the pen, because he’d been waiting on me to want it all afternoon.
I turned the bill of sale over on the seat of Arlene’s bike and wrote my name on the back of it, slow. Walter J. Ostrander. No hook. Then the date. My hand shook, and the letters came out shaky too, and they were mine.
I folded it in thirds and handed it to Travis, not to my son.
“That’s what mine looks like,” I said.
Travis put it in the file with the rest.
“You put the house back in my name,” I said to Derek. “Monday.”
“Or what? You’re going to the county?” He laughed, and it didn’t come out right. “You’d do that? To me? They’d charge me, Dad. They’d charge her. Kim would lose her job. You want that on you?”
I didn’t answer him.
“You file that, you don’t have a son. I mean it. You don’t have a son and you don’t have a roof. You get your junk out of my shed tonight.”
“Monday,” I said.
He looked at Travis. He looked at the bike. He looked at the shed with the extension cord running out to it.
“The curb’s right there,” Derek said.
So I took the green bike off its stand, put both hands on the bars and walked it down the driveway to the curb.
Behind me the front door shut.
Gene’s garage
Three weeks later it was another gray Thursday, colder.
Gene’s old garage on the east side still smells like Gene. Travis never sold the house. He keeps his bike in the left bay and now Arlene’s is in the right one, and I have a room upstairs with a door that closes and a window that doesn’t let the wind in.
Monday came and went. Derek didn’t call.
On Tuesday Travis drove me to the courthouse in Noblesville and I signed an affidavit in front of a woman at a counter who checked my driver’s license twice. The hospital sent the records over on its own letterhead. Travis says the bank will take a year to untangle.
I haven’t heard my son’s voice since the driveway.
I was out front with a rag and a can of polish when a motorcycle turned onto the street, loud enough that the dog next door quit barking to listen.
Travis backed it in beside the green one and pulled his helmet off.
“Your hip any better?” he said.
“Some.”
He held the green bike steady by the bars while I got my leg over. It took two tries.
I turned the key, and it caught.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still has a parent’s old tools sitting in a coffee can somewhere.
