My stepson stood in my kitchen and told me the house was his now, that I’d put it in his name in March for one dollar, and that a locksmith was coming Saturday at four. “Who’s going to stop me, Gloria? Dad’s biker friends are all dead.” Two days later I walked up to six strangers at a gas station and asked them to lie for me.
Forty-one years I’d lived in that house.
The paper Jason waved at me had my name on the bottom line, in handwriting that looked like mine the way a picture of a cake looks like a cake.
And Armando’s motorcycle was still in the garage under the blue tarp.
He rode it every Tuesday until his heart quit, fourteen months ago.
Jason had a buyer for that too.
Eleven thousand dollars, cash, picking it up Saturday right behind the locksmith.
I’m seventy-two. I don’t sleep much anymore.
So Thursday afternoon I was at pump four on Route 34 outside Ottumwa, putting nine dollars of gas in the car because nine dollars was what I had in my purse.
Six motorcycles were backed in along the air pump.
All black. All dusty.
Their riders sat on the curb eating gas station hot dogs, and one of them was spitting sunflower shells into a coffee lid.
I don’t know what came over me.
I walked over with the paper folded in my fist.
The biggest one got up before I reached them. Bald head, gray in his beard, dog tags on a chain.
“You all right, ma’am?” he said.
“No,” I said. “And I need you to lie for me.”
That got all six looking.
I told it fast, before I lost my nerve. The stepson. The paper. The locksmith at four on Saturday.
“My husband rode with a club for thirty years,” I said. “Jason thinks they’re gone. He told me nobody’s coming.”
“Are they gone?” the big one said.
“Most of them. The rest can’t get a leg over a bike anymore.”
He looked at the paper in my fist.
“So what’s the lie?”
“Be them,” I said. “One afternoon. Stand in my yard and let him believe Armando’s friends came back.”
Nobody laughed.
The youngest, maybe twenty-five, with a ponytail, held his hand out for the paper.
“Mind if I take a picture of this?” he said.
I let him. He took four.
Then he zoomed in on the bottom corner, on the round stamp, and stared at it a long time without saying anything.
“What’s your name, ma’am?” the big one said.
“Gloria.”
“Kwame,” he said. He pointed down the curb with his hot dog. “That’s Paolo. That’s Roberto. The rest you’ll meet Saturday.”
“So that’s a yes?”
“Write your address on something.”
I wrote it on the back of my gas receipt. My hand shook so bad the 4 came out looking like a 9.
Friday nobody called.
I told myself that was fine.
Strangers at a gas station don’t owe a widow anything.
Mabel from across the street brought over a tuna casserole and asked why I’d been crying in the driveway. I said allergies.
Saturday at 3:40 I heard them.
You feel six motorcycles before you hear them. The front windows hum in their frames.
They came up Delmar Street in a line and backed in along my curb, rear tires to the grass.
Mabel came out on her porch with a dish towel still in her hand.
Kwame took his helmet off and walked up my steps like he’d done it a hundred times.
“Where do you want us?” he said.
“Anywhere he can see you.”
So they stood in my yard.
Roberto leaned on the mailbox. Paolo sat on the porch rail with his phone.
At four o’clock on the dot, Jason’s truck pulled in behind the bikes.
Then a white locksmith van.
Then a pickup towing an empty trailer.
Jason got out laughing.
He was wearing the golf shirt I bought him two Christmases ago.
“Gloria,” he said. “What is this? You hired a costume party?”
“These are your father’s friends,” I said.
“My father’s friends are in the cemetery.”
He held the paper up over his head so the whole street could see it.
“This is MY house. Signed, stamped, recorded. You’ve got an hour to pack your pills and your cat.”
I don’t have a cat.
Mabel had the dish towel over her mouth.
Kwame came down the steps and stood between us.
He didn’t touch Jason. He just stood there.
“Move,” Jason said.
“No,” Kwame said.
“You don’t know her. You never met my dad.”
Kwame didn’t argue that.
Jason turned to the street like he was giving a speech.
“She’s confused. She doesn’t remember what she signs. THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT.”
“Then you won’t mind one question,” Kwame said.
He held his hand out without looking, and Paolo put the phone in it.
On the screen was the corner of the paper. The stamp. A name inside the circle, too small for me to make out from the porch.
“Paolo spent yesterday at the county recorder’s office,” Kwame said. “All day.”
Jason’s hand was on my gate latch.
It stayed there.
“So you tell her,” Kwame said, “or I will. WHOSE NAME IS ON THAT STAMP, JASON?”
Jason didn’t answer.
He looked back at his truck.
At the passenger seat, where somebody had been sitting the whole time with the windows rolled up.
The passenger door
Kwame didn’t wait for him.
He walked down my front walk, past Roberto at the mailbox, and out to the back bumper of Jason’s truck.
The passenger door opened before he got there.
Danica got out.
My daughter-in-law. Jason’s wife of nineteen years.
She had her navy credit union fleece on, and her lanyard was still around her neck from the Saturday shift.
Kwame held up the phone and read it off the screen, loud enough for Mabel.
“Danica R. Lockwood. Notary Public. State of Iowa.”
Lockwood was her name before she married Jason. She never changed it at work. She said it was easier for the bank.
“That’s me,” Danica said. “So?”
“So you stamped a paper that hands your husband a house,” Kwame said.
Paolo got down off my porch rail.
“Lady at the recorder’s office told me twice,” he said. “A notary can’t stamp something her own husband gets. Not in Iowa.”
Danica laughed at that. It was the short laugh she does at Thanksgiving when Jason’s uncle starts in on taxes.
“You’re a long way from home to be reading me the law,” she said to Paolo. “What are you, twenty?”
“Twenty-six,” Paolo said.
“Twenty-six.” She turned to the street, to Mabel, to the neighbors who’d come out onto their steps. “These men don’t know her. They don’t know any of us. She found them Thursday.”
Nobody in my yard said anything back to her.
Jason let go of the latch long enough to wipe his hand on his golf shirt. Then he put it right back.
“I told you to stay in the truck,” he said to her.
“And I told you she’d make a circus out of it,” Danica said.
She walked up to my gate. Jason’s hand was still on the latch, and she put hers on top of it.
“I didn’t stamp anything she didn’t sign,” she said. “She sat at my kitchen table and signed it herself.”
She looked past Kwame, straight up the walk at me.
“March ninth. You had two cups of coffee and a lemon bar. Tell them, Gloria.”
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out of it.
Because I had been at her kitchen table on March ninth.
And I’d eaten the lemon bar.
Armando’s pen
I married Armando when Jason was six.
He came with the house on Delmar, a brown Buick and a little boy who wouldn’t eat anything that touched anything else.
I learned to cut his sandwiches in four. I learned to keep the peas in their own bowl.
Jason’s mother lived in Des Moines and called on his birthday, mostly.
So I packed his lunches. I signed his report cards. I sat on the bleachers through eleven years of baseball and never once understood the infield fly rule.
He called me Gloria from the start. Armando said give it time.
It never came to anything else, and I stopped minding.
Armando rode every Tuesday. Rain, cold, it didn’t matter.
He’d come home at dark smelling like the road and set his keys in the dish by the door, and that was how I knew the week was half done.
When he died, the club came to the funeral.
Three of them.
Three old men in vests that didn’t close in the front anymore. One of them had his oxygen on a little cart, and he stood up the whole service anyway.
Jason shook their hands at the door. I saw him do it.
So when he stood in my kitchen on Tuesday and said they were all dead, he knew better.
He just knew they couldn’t ride.
After the funeral it was paper. Nobody tells you that. A man dies and you spend six months proving it to people.
The pension wanted a form. Social Security wanted a form. The motorcycle was still titled to Armando, and the state wanted his death certificate before it would put it in my name.
I kept losing the envelopes. I’d find them in the bread box.
In March, Danica called.
“Let me help you with Armando’s paperwork,” she said. “I do this all day, Gloria. Come over Sunday and we’ll knock it out.”
She’d held my elbow at the cemetery. She’d brought me groceries twice. I thought it was a kindness, and I said yes.
So March ninth I sat at her kitchen table on the north side of town.
She had a rooster clock over the stove that ran four minutes fast. She’d made lemon bars with too much powdered sugar, and I got it down my good blouse.
She had the stack ready. She slid it to me one page at a time.
“Initial every page in the corner,” she said. “So nobody can slip a page in later.”
So I did. G.M.S. in the bottom corner of every one.
I signed with Armando’s pen. It was a free one from the tire shop on Church Street, blue, and I’d been carrying it in my purse since the funeral because it was his.
It skipped on the downstroke.
Every time I signed, the big G came out with a gap in it, like somebody lifted the pen halfway through.
“It’s fine,” Danica said. “Nobody’s grading it.”
When I signed a page, she breathed on her round stamp and pressed it down beside my name.
At the end she tapped the stack straight and put copies into a manila envelope. She wrote GLORIA COPIES on the front in marker.
“Keep that somewhere safe,” she said.
I took it home and put it on top of the refrigerator, behind the Cheerios. I never opened it. I’d seen those pages once and that was plenty.
In April the motorcycle title came in the mail in my name.
I put it in the Folgers can in the cabinet over the stove, with forty-one years of receipts. Armando kept every receipt he ever got. After he died I kept doing it, because I didn’t know how to stop.
That’s where my head was, standing on my own porch with the whole street looking.
At that table. At that stack.
“Eleven pages,” I said. “I signed eleven pages for the pension and the bike.”
Danica smiled at me like I was a child who’d said something cute at church.
“Twelve,” she said. “You lost count, Gloria.”
Lukas
The man from the white van got out while she was still smiling.
He was maybe thirty-five, in a work shirt with LUKAS stitched over the pocket, and he carried a gray plastic case with a handle.
He didn’t look at me. He looked at Danica.
She took a folder out of her purse and handed it to him like they’d done this before.
He read the top sheet out loud, the way you read a grocery list.
“Rekey front, back and garage service door. Owner, Jason Salerno.”
He turned the page.
“Occupant, none.”
“I’m the occupant,” I said. “I’m standing right here.”
“Ma’am, I go by what’s recorded.” He held up the folder. “This is recorded. I’ve got a copy of the deed and his license, and that’s what my boss needs.”
Mabel had come down off her porch to the end of her driveway.
I took my phone out of my cardigan pocket. It’s the kind that flips open. Jason calls it my museum piece.
I called the sheriff’s office. The regular number, the one on the magnet on my refrigerator.
A woman answered. I told her there was a man about to change my locks.
“Is anyone hurt, ma’am?”
“No.”
“Is anyone threatening you?”
I looked at Jason’s paper over Kwame’s shoulder.
“He says it’s his house.”
“Is there a deed?”
“There’s a paper.”
“Okay,” she said. “That sounds like a property dispute. That’s a civil matter. You’ll want to talk to an attorney. I can put you down for a deputy when one’s free, but it’s Saturday and it could be a while.”
She asked me to spell Salerno. I did it twice, because the first time I left out the R, and then I gave her the address and the cross street and the color of the house.
“Ma’am, are you all right?” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m standing in my yard.”
Jason had heard every word of it. He was grinning.
“Tell her about your biker gang, Gloria,” he said. “Tell her you picked them up at a gas station.”
Danica shook her head at Mabel like they were two women sharing a sad thing.
“She calls the police on her own family,” she said. “This is what we’ve been dealing with.”
I closed the phone. My hand was shaking again.
Lukas came up my walk with his case.
Kwame went up the steps ahead of him and stood in front of my door. He didn’t fold his arms or anything. He just stood on the mat with his helmet under his elbow.
“Sir, I need the door,” Lukas said.
“I’m not going to touch you,” Kwame said. “And I’m not going to move. She’s living in it.”
Lukas looked at him for a long time. Then he looked at the six bikes on my curb.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll start with the back.”
He picked up his case and walked around the side of my house.
Zero four one two
Jason went for the garage.
There’s a keypad on the frame by the big door. Armando put it in the year his knees got bad, so he didn’t have to dig for the remote with gloves on.
The code is his birthday. Zero four one two. Jason set it up for him.
He punched it in without looking. The door went up.
The pickup backed its empty trailer up my driveway, slow, a man leaning out the window to watch the ramp. He had a Hawkeyes cap and a mustache that needed a decision made about it.
“That’s Trenton,” Jason said, to nobody. “He’s buying it.”
The blue tarp was right where I’d left it. I pull it down every Tuesday to dust the seat. Then I sit on the step stool for a while and put the tarp back.
Mabel knows. She can see into the garage from her kitchen.
Jason took the tarp by one corner and yanked it off like a magician. It slid onto the concrete.
There it was. Armando’s black touring bike, with his vest still hanging on the nail above it.
Kwame came to the edge of the garage and stopped. He looked at the vest, at the patch on the back of it, and he didn’t say anything at all.
Trenton walked around the bike once and squatted by the back tire.
“Good shape,” he said. “You got the title?”
“It’s coming,” Jason said. “She’ll sign it.”
“It’s in my name,” I said. “The state sent it in April.”
Jason didn’t even turn around.
“Danica can fix that.”
That’s when Paolo came and stood next to me. He had his phone out again, but it was a different picture this time. A page from a big book, with columns and stamps and tiny type.
“Ma’am,” he said quietly. “There’s something else from Friday. I didn’t want to say it in front of everybody.”
He made the picture bigger with two fingers.
“The deed got recorded March twentieth. Four days later there’s another one on the same house.” He pointed. “A mortgage. Ninety thousand dollars.”
I read it twice.
The lender was the credit union. Danica’s credit union.
“Somebody borrowed ninety thousand dollars on your house, ma’am,” Paolo said. “In March.”
Kwame had heard it. He walked back into the driveway and stood by the trailer hitch.
“Ninety thousand,” he said to Jason. “Where’d it go?”
Jason opened his mouth.
“Jason,” Danica said, from the gate.
He shut it again.
She came up the driveway with her purse on her shoulder and walked right past me, toward my side door.
“Trenton, back it all the way in,” she said. “I’ll get the title myself.”
The Folgers can
She went in my side door like she lived there.
I went in after her.
My kitchen is the same kitchen it’s been since 1985. Yellow counters. A table with one short leg and a matchbook under it. The calendar from the funeral home, still on September.
Danica was already pulling open my drawers. The junk drawer, the one with the batteries. The drawer with the dish towels.
“Where is it, Gloria?”
I didn’t answer her. I reached up over the stove and took down the Folgers can.
It still smells like coffee, that can. There hasn’t been coffee in it since Armando switched to decaf.
I held it against my chest with both arms.
Danica stopped opening drawers. She leaned on my counter and looked at me, and her face went different. Tired. Like she’d been carrying the nice one all afternoon and finally set it down.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s how it goes.”
She took a folded paper out of her fleece pocket and opened it on my counter, smoothing it flat with the side of her hand.
At the top it said PETITION FOR APPOINTMENT OF GUARDIAN AND CONSERVATOR.
My name was under it.
There were lines typed below that I could read upside down. Episodes of confusion. Signs documents she later does not recall. Has recently formed associations with strangers.
The petitioner was Danica Salerno.
“I haven’t filed it,” she said. “I don’t want to. I’ll file it Monday if I have to.”
“Have to,” I said.
“You sign the bike over to Jason. Right now, on this counter. You can stay in the house till Christmas. Then we find you somewhere nice, and this goes in the shredder at work.”
She tapped the last line on the page.
“Associations with strangers. You know what a judge hears when I tell him you picked up six bikers at a gas station? Because I’m going to tell him.”
Out the window over my sink I could see the driveway. Trenton had the trailer backed almost to the garage. Kwame was standing at the bottom of the ramp with his hands in his vest pockets, and Trenton was talking to him, and Kwame was shaking his head.
I didn’t say anything to her. I didn’t have anything to say that she couldn’t write down on that paper.
“Nobody’s going to believe you over me, Gloria,” she said. “I do this all day.”
I looked up, away from her.
There was the box of Cheerios on top of the refrigerator.
I set the can on the counter and reached up behind the box.
The envelope was right where I’d put it in March. GLORIA COPIES in her marker. Still sealed.
Eleven pages
Danica saw it in my hand.
“Those are mine,” she said. “Those are my copies. I need those back.”
“You wrote my name on it.”
I went out the side door with the envelope in one hand and the can in the other, and I didn’t stop until I was on my front porch.
Paolo was back up on the rail. Kwame was at the bottom of the steps. Roberto hadn’t moved off the mailbox the whole time.
Danica came out behind me. Jason came halfway up the walk.
I set the can down by my feet and tore the envelope open along the top.
“Gloria,” Danica said. “Don’t make a scene.”
I counted out loud. I didn’t care who heard me.
“One.”
The pension form. G.M.S. in the corner, her stamp beside my name.
“Two.”
Social Security.
I laid each one on the porch rail next to Paolo’s knee. He put his hand on the stack so the wind wouldn’t take it.
Three, four, five. The credit union. The death certificates. A thing from the cemetery about the headstone.
Every page had my initials in the bottom corner.
Six was the motorcycle. The title application for the state. Transfer upon death of owner. Armando’s name crossed through and mine written in.
And my signature on the bottom line, with the big G broken halfway down where the tire shop pen had skipped.
Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.
Eleven pages.
I turned the envelope upside down and shook it. Nothing else came out.
Paolo reached into his vest and took out a folded paper with a gold seal in the corner.
“Certified copy,” he said. “Recorder’s office. A dollar a page.”
He unfolded it on the rail. It was the deed. The same one Jason had been waving over his head.
Quitclaim. One dollar. Gloria M. Salerno to Jason A. Salerno.
There were no initials in the corner of it. Not on the front and not on the back.
Paolo picked up page six and laid the deed on top of it. Then he stood up and held the two of them flat against my storm door, against the glass, with the sun behind them.
The light came through both pages at once.
The signatures sat on top of each other. Every loop. The tail on the S. The little dip at the end where I always run out of room.
And the G, broken in exactly the same place.
“Nobody signs their name the same way twice, ma’am,” Kwame said, from the bottom of the steps. “Not even the skip.”
I looked at Danica.
She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the storm door.
“You told me to initial every page,” I said. “So nobody could slip one in.”
The hood of the truck
I took the two pages off the glass and walked them down my steps.
Kwame moved out of my way. I went out the gate and laid them on the hood of Jason’s truck, page six and the deed, side by side, where everybody on Delmar Street could see them.
Mabel came across the street in her house slippers.
“That proves nothing,” Danica said. “It’s the same pen. Of course it looks the same. It’s the same day, it’s the same table, you signed them both.”
“No initials,” Kwame said.
“She forgot. She forgets. Gloria, you forget things, you know you do. You left the stove on in July. I have it written down.”
I didn’t answer.
“Copies look alike,” she said. “That’s what copies are. Anybody who works with paper will tell you that.”
She looked around at the yard for somebody who worked with paper.
Lukas had come back around the side of the house with his case. He was standing by my rosebush.
“Lukas,” Danica said. “Tell them. You see deeds all day.”
Lukas walked over to the hood of the truck. He set his case down on the bumper and bent over the two pages.
He looked a long time.
Then he picked his case back up.
“I’m not doing this one,” he said.
“You were paid a deposit,” Danica said.
“I’ll send it back.” He took the work order out of the folder and folded it in half and put it in his shirt pocket. “I’ve got a license. I’m not rekeying a house with a lady standing in it and two signatures like that.”
He walked back to his van and got in and sat there with the door open.
Danica turned on Jason.
“Say something.”
Jason looked at the hood. His face was red up to the hair.
“Danica, stop,” he said.
“Stop? Stop what? You want to know where the ninety went, Gloria? You really want to know?”
Nobody said they did. She told us anyway.
“His truck. His card. His brother-in-law’s restaurant that lasted eight months.
The line of credit he ran up and told me about in February, after the bank already called me at my own desk. That’s where it went.”
“Danica.”
“And who was going to pay it? This house. That’s who. A woman who lives alone in four bedrooms and talks to a motorcycle in the garage on Tuesdays.”
Mabel had her dish towel twisted in both hands.
“He was supposed to get this house,” Danica said. “Armando told him. When Jason was twenty he told him, this is yours someday.”
She pointed at me over the hood.
“And then he put every last thing in your name. Every account. The bike. All of it. Forty years he left Jason standing at the end of the driveway, and you got the house. And you never once said, Jason, here, let me make it right.”
Her voice went up and the whole street heard the end of it.
“We were going to find you a nice place. In Fairfield. With a garden. I had the brochure in the truck.”
Jason put his hands flat on the hood. He looked at me for the first time all afternoon.
“Gloria,” he said. “Just sign the bike over. I’ll make the rest go away. I swear to God.”
Trenton had been sitting in his pickup at the top of the driveway with the trailer still empty.
He got out, walked down to the ramp and folded it up.
“Not buying a dead man’s bike off a guy with no title,” he said, to the air.
He got back in. The pickup pulled forward off my driveway, onto Delmar, and the empty trailer bounced behind it all the way to the stop sign.
I took my phone out of my cardigan.
I called the same number. The magnet number. The same woman picked up.
“This is Gloria Salerno on Delmar again,” I said. “I need to report a forged deed.”
She asked me if I knew who forged it.
I looked at Jason, across the hood of his own truck, in the golf shirt I bought him.
“My son,” I said. “And his wife.”
I’d never called him that out loud before. Not once in forty-one years.
Paolo read the instrument number off the certified copy, one digit at a time, and I repeated it into the phone. The woman said a deputy would come out, and this time she said it different.
Danica sat down on the curb by her own truck, with her lanyard still on.
Jason didn’t move.
I closed the phone and put my hand out across the hood, palm up.
He knew what I wanted. It took him a long time to find my house key on his ring.
Tuesday
The lawyer says six months, maybe longer. A forged deed is no deed at all, she says, but the county wants a judge to tell it so.
She charges three hundred an hour. She wanted thirty-five hundred to start.
The credit union’s lawyer calls her now. They don’t call me.
Three weeks after that Saturday, on a Tuesday, Paolo stood in my kitchen.
He put four thousand dollars on my table in an envelope from his own bank, and he wrote down on a napkin what he’d pay me the first of every month after that, until it came to eleven thousand.
“It’s what the other guy was going to give him,” he said. “Feels right.”
I signed the title over at my own kitchen table. With a pen from my own drawer.
The G came out whole.
Then I wrote him a receipt on the back of an envelope, the way Armando would have, and my hand didn’t shake once. The 4s came out looking like 4s.
We went out to the garage. I’d changed the code. Mabel was at her kitchen window pretending to wash a pan.
Paolo took Armando’s vest off the nail and held it out to me.
“You keep that,” he said.
I put it over my arm.
He rolled the bike out into the driveway and started it, and the front windows hummed in their frames.
“Ride it past here on Tuesdays,” I said.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to someone who keeps a widow’s coffee can of receipts somewhere in the house.
For another story of family underestimating a woman and the bikers who show up for her, read The Thirteen Bikers Who Escorted Me to My Bronze Star Pinning and The $164,000 Loan in My Name and the Fourteen Bikes at My Curb. For a more tender tale of someone stepping in when a child needs help, there’s The Little Girl on Level Three Hadn’t Eaten Since Monday Night.
