The man whose pickup put my husband in surgery walked into the waiting room with a $4,000 check and said, “That covers the bike, and honestly it’s more than that old junker was worth.” Across from him my seven-year-old was pulling a stranger’s beard out one hair at a time, and the stranger was counting every one out loud.
Darren had been in surgery for five hours by then.
The surgeon came out once, at 1:15, said the left leg was going to take longer than they’d hoped, and went back through the double doors before I could ask what longer meant.
Lina hadn’t said a word since the trooper knocked on our front door that morning.
Not to me.
Not to the nurse who brought her apple juice. Not to my mother on speakerphone.
She sat in a plastic chair with her shoes kicked off and her knees up under her chin, and she watched those doors.
By two o’clock there were fourteen motorcycles backed in along the curb outside the window.
I knew maybe four of the men who came in off them.
Darren rode with them every Sunday out to the reservoir and back. I always stayed home.
Now they were filling the chairs around us in their vests, not talking much, taking turns at a coffee machine that only took exact change.
Gideon, the young one, had been riding behind Darren when it happened.
He hugged me hard, said “I’m so sorry, Ivette,” and went straight back out to the lot. He didn’t come back in.
The oldest one came over last.
Big through the shoulders, a silver beard cut close, faded roses and an eagle down both arms. He sat down in the empty chair next to Lina and didn’t say anything.
Lina looked at him for a long time.
Then she got up on her knees, reached over, took one hair of his beard between her finger and thumb, and pulled it out.
“Lina, NO,” I said. I was already half out of my seat.
He put one hand up toward me, palm out.
“Let her,” he said.
She pulled another one.
“Two,” he said.
I sat back down.
“Daddy counts,” Lina said.
Nine hours of nothing, and that was what she gave a man whose name I didn’t know.
“I know he does, honey,” he said. “Three.”
She laid each hair on the armrest in a little gray row, and waited, and pulled the next.
His name was Fred. He told me somewhere between eleven and twelve.
Darren talked about it at the clubhouse EVERY Thursday, he said. How Lina couldn’t fall asleep unless she was pulling his beard while he counted.
How he went patchy on the left side of his chin the winter she had croup.
“Six years of hearing about it,” Fred said. “Figured I knew the rules. Fourteen.”
The television over the vending machine was showing two men fixing up a barn. Nobody could find the remote.
At nineteen, a man in a navy quarter-zip walked over to our corner with a folder under his arm.
“Mrs. Sikora? Joshua Ricci. I was driving the truck.”
He didn’t sit down.
“I’m sorry this happened,” he said, the way people say it about weather.
Then he opened the folder on the low table.
A form from his insurance company. One paragraph saying my husband’s motorcycle had “entered the lane from the driver’s blind side.” A line for my signature. The check clipped to the corner.
That was when he said the thing about the junker.
Darren rebuilt that bike over three winters in our garage, one part every payday.
“My attorney says tonight,” Joshua said. “After tonight the offer is zero, and you can wait two years for a jury like everybody else.”
I thought about the mortgage. The deductible.
The surgeon’s face when he said longer.
“Twenty-six,” Fred said.
Joshua looked down at Lina, up on her knees, working at a stranger’s chin. His mouth went sideways.
“This is who you’ve got her around?”
Nobody answered him.
He leaned in toward me and dropped his voice, like the two of us were on the same side.
“Look. Guys like your husband know the odds every time they climb on those things. He came up on my LEFT, out of NOWHERE. I never even saw him.”
I had the pen in my hand.
I don’t remember picking it up.
“Thirty,” Fred said.
Then he did something he hadn’t done all afternoon.
He looked up.
Not at me.
“Which side did you say?” Fred said.
“Left,” Joshua said. “He was weaving. You people always weave.”
Fred nodded, slow, like a man putting something in a drawer he meant to open later.
“Then you’ll want to tell that to the kid who rode FOUR BIKE LENGTHS BEHIND HIM from the reservoir to that light,” he said. “He’s been out in the lot with a state trooper since two.”
Joshua’s fingers closed on the edge of the folder.
“He’s showing her what’s on his helmet,” Fred said.
Behind Joshua the sliding doors opened.
Gideon came in with his helmet under his arm and the trooper right behind him, and she wasn’t looking at me.
She was looking at the quarter-zip.
Joshua reached for the check.
Lina pulled one more hair before Fred could open his mouth.
“Thirty-one,” she said.
Trooper Vitale
The trooper stopped at the end of our row of chairs. VITALE, it said on the tag over her pocket. She didn’t look at the folder.
“Mr. Ricci,” she said. “I need you out at my car.”
“I’m in the middle of something with Mrs. Sikora.”
“I’ve watched the video three times,” she said. “Your truck turns left across him at the light. He’s in his own lane with his headlight on.”
Gideon stood behind her with the helmet against his hip. The little camera was still on the side of it, the size of a lipstick.
He looked at me, not at Joshua.
“Darren had the green, Ivette,” he said. “He had it the whole way.”
Joshua slid the check out from under the clip and folded it into his shirt pocket. Then he held his phone flat over the open folder for a second, like a man checking the time, and put it away.
“That’s one camera angle,” he said.
“Then you can explain the angle to me outside,” Trooper Vitale said.
He went. He left the folder on the table. Gideon went out after them, and the doors slid shut, and the fourteen bikes were back to just sitting at the curb.
Lina laid hair thirty-one at the end of her row and sat back on her heels.
Fred didn’t say anything. He had his hands on his knees.
I looked down at the form. The pen was still in my fingers.
On the signature line, in my handwriting, there were two letters. An I and a v.
The coffee can
Darren bought that bike the November Lina turned four. It came off a man’s back porch as a frame and an engine in two milk crates, and it cost $600, and I told him it was the dumbest $600 we’d ever spent.
He didn’t argue. He just put it in the garage.
Every other Friday after that, when his check cleared, one part came in the mail. A carburetor. A seat. A pair of chrome mirrors he said were for safety and I said were for looking at himself.
He kept every receipt in a Maxwell House can on the workbench, rolled up with a rubber band, the date on each one in his square printing.
I do our bills at the kitchen table. Last spring I took that can down because I wanted to be mad about something, and I added it up.
$9,340. Not counting the milk crates.
I wasn’t mad. I rolled them back up and put the can where it was.
He wired the headlight so it came on with the key. Day or night. “They see a light before they see a man,” he said, and he said it every Sunday, to me, in the driveway, like I was the one who needed reminding.
I never rode. Sundays were mine. The house quiet, Lina at the table with her markers, a pot of something on the stove.
Thursdays were his. He went to the clubhouse after work and came home smelling like their woodstove, and I called them his Thursday guys. I didn’t know their last names. I didn’t know most of their first ones.
The bedtime thing started the winter she had croup. She was two. She couldn’t sleep sitting up and couldn’t breathe lying down, so he sat in the rocker with her against his chest all night, and somewhere around two in the morning she started pulling on his beard.
He counted so she’d have something to listen to besides her own breathing.
After that it was every night. Lights off, Lina in the crook of his arm, one hair, a number. Thirty and lights out. He never went past thirty.
She tried once. Pulled the thirty-first and held it up.
“Thirty-one’s for tomorrow,” he told her. “That’s tomorrow’s.”
I’d thought it was a thing he did at home. I didn’t know he’d told a room full of men about it every Thursday for six years.
At 1:15 I’d done the math in my head while the surgeon talked. The mortgage was $1,412 on the first. The deductible on our plan was $3,000. Darren gets paid by the hour.
Fred reached over and took the pen out of my hand. He set it down on the folder, crosswise, away from the line.
“Put that down a minute,” he said. “Nobody’s timing you but him.”
Exact change
The number at the bottom of the form said CLAIMS, so I called it.
I wanted somebody who did this for a living to tell me what two letters on a line meant.
It rang four times. Then a man’s recorded voice said I’d reached the Law Office of Seth Dunlap, that the office was closed until Monday at nine, and that if this was regarding a pending matter I could leave my name and number.
I hung up without leaving either.
The claims number on his insurance form went to his lawyer.
I sat there with the phone in my lap and looked at it. Then I called my mother back, because she’d called twice, and I put her on speaker without thinking about who could hear.
I told her about the check. I didn’t tell her about the I and the v.
“Take it, honey,” she said. “Four thousand is four thousand. You don’t know what the insurance is going to do. You don’t know these people.”
“They’re right here, Mom.”
“I mean the lawyers. You’ve got a mortgage on the first and a little girl. Take what’s on the table and let Darren fight about the rest when he’s up.”
A man across from me with a gut and a gray ponytail got up and went to the coffee machine. He came back with two cups and gave me one. Then he put four quarters on the armrest next to Lina’s row of hairs, without touching the hairs.
“For the next one,” he said. “It won’t take a dollar bill. It won’t take a five. Took my five, though.”
His name was Ralph. He did tile. He told me later that he’d done the floor in their clubhouse bathroom twice because nobody would stop tracking oil in.
Two rows over a woman was doing a word search with a pen from a Hampton Inn.
My mother was still talking.
“Ivette? Are you there? Don’t let your pride sign for you.”
“I’m here.”
Lina had stopped pulling. She was on her knees still, watching the sliding doors, both hands on Fred’s arm.
At ten to six the doors opened, and Joshua Ricci came back in by himself.
Fred’s readers
He walked straight to our corner. He didn’t look at the bikers. He looked at the folder, to see if it had moved.
“She took a statement,” he said. “That’s all that was. People give statements. Nobody’s getting arrested over a camera angle.”
He still didn’t sit. He took a checkbook out of his back pocket, leaned over the low table, and wrote a new check standing up, using the folder for something hard.
“Six,” he said. He clipped it where the first one had been. “Because I’m not a monster. Same paper, same deal. Tonight.”
“Your attorney’s office is closed,” I said.
“My attorney has a cell phone.” He tapped the form. “And my attorney says a video doesn’t change a release. Civil is civil. This is about you and me, Mrs. Sikora, not about whatever she writes in her report.”
The nurse who’d brought Lina the apple juice came through the double doors. Holly. She’d told me her name that morning and I’d lost it twice. She bent down to me and said the surgeon would be out within the hour, and that he was closing.
Closing. I didn’t know if that was good.
I picked the form up off the table. I had read it once, the paragraph about the blind side and the line for my name. That was all I’d read. The rest was small and gray and my glasses were at home on the kitchen counter next to the bills.
Fred reached into the inside pocket of his vest and handed me a pair of drugstore readers, the kind that come on a spinning rack. Plus two and a half. One arm was held on with electrical tape.
They fit.
The paragraph under the blind-side one said I, the undersigned, on behalf of myself and the claimant, released and forever discharged Joshua M. Ricci from any and all claims, known or unknown, arising from the incident.
For property damage and bodily injury.
I read it again with my finger under it, the way Lina reads.
Ralph had come around behind my chair. He was reading it over my shoulder, close enough that I could smell the coffee.
Joshua saw him reading and spoke faster.
“That’s standard language. Every release says that. It’s boilerplate. Nobody reads that part.”
Ralph put one finger on the paper, on the two words.
“Bodily injury,” he said. “Ivette, that’s his leg. That’s the whole leg.”
N/A
The surgeon came out at 6:20.
He still had the paper cap on. He sat down on the low table, right next to the folder, because there was nowhere else to sit, and he talked to me with his elbows on his knees.
They kept the leg.
Two plates and a rod. Another surgery in two weeks, maybe three. No weight on it until spring. Darren would wake up in recovery in about an hour and he’d be very sore and very confused and I could see him for ten minutes.
Lina let go of Fred’s arm.
“Does Daddy know I’m here?” she said.
It was the second thing she’d said all day.
“Not yet,” the surgeon said. “But he will in about an hour.”
When he stood up, his hip knocked the folder, and the form slid half off the table, and I caught it with Fred’s glasses still on my face.
The top of it was a row of boxes I’d skipped. Claimant. Date of incident. Location. Insured. Carrier. Policy number.
Insured said Joshua M. Ricci, in his handwriting.
Carrier said N/A.
Policy number said N/A.
I unclipped the check. It wasn’t a company check. It had his name printed in the corner, Joshua M. Ricci, and a street address, and a little picture of a lake behind the numbers. Check number 1047.
I held them both out so he could see which one I was looking at.
“Who’s your insurance, Mr. Ricci?”
“That’s between me and my attorney.”
“It’s on your form,” Fred said. It was the first thing he’d said to him since the left side.
“It lapsed,” Joshua said. “Two weeks ago. It’s a paperwork thing. A payment didn’t go through. It happens to everybody.”
Nobody said anything.
The four thousand had never come from an insurance company. Neither had the six. There wasn’t one. There was a man with a checkbook and a lake on his checks, and he’d come up from the lot with a pen while my husband was still open on a table, to buy Darren’s leg for the price of a used motorcycle before anybody wrote down what he didn’t have.
“After tonight the offer is zero,” I said. I was reading it off nothing. I was just saying it back to him.
He didn’t answer that. He looked at the doors.
The lot
I folded the form in half with the check inside it and stood up.
“Where are you going?” Joshua said. “Sit down. Sit down a second. I’m trying to help you.”
I put Fred’s readers in my cardigan pocket.
“Ten,” he said. “Okay? Ten thousand. I’ll write it right now. And I’ll pay the deductible on top, whatever it is, you just tell me the number. That’s more than a jury gives you, you know that? You know what a jury in this county does with a guy on a motorcycle who rides with a club? They look at him and they look at these guys and they go home.”
Ralph moved out of the way to let me by. Joshua came after me down the row of chairs.
“You think these guys are going to pay your mortgage? Because they’re not. They’re going to go home and have a beer and feel great about themselves, and you’re going to be sitting at your kitchen table in February.”
The woman with the word search put her pen down.
“I have a house,” he said. “I have a daughter at Penn State. I am not losing my house over a weird angle on a kid’s helmet.”
At the sliding doors he got in front of me and took his phone out.
He turned it around so I could see the screen.
It was a picture of the form on the low table. The line for my signature. The I and the v, clear as anything, and the pen lying beside them.
“That’s you signing,” he said. “My attorney says that’s intent. You started it, you agreed to it. So you can take the ten and finish it, or you can explain this to a judge for two years. Up to you.”
He’d taken it when the trooper first walked in. When he held the phone flat over the folder like he was checking the time.
“Then show her,” I said.
The doors opened.
Outside it was getting dark and the fourteen bikes were in a line at the curb, chrome on every one of them, and Trooper Vitale was leaning against the hood of her car with Gideon sitting on the bumper next to her. She had his helmet on the hood between them.
I walked across the lot and handed her the folded form with the check inside.
“He gave me this at five o’clock,” I said. “Darren was still in surgery.”
She opened it. She read the boxes first, the same as I should have. She stopped at Carrier.
“Mr. Ricci,” she said. “At the scene this morning you told me your proof of insurance was in the glove box.”
“It is. Somewhere in there.”
“Your truck’s at the tow yard. We’ll go look together tomorrow.”
She put the form and the check in a clear sleeve and clipped it to her board under her own report. She said she’d need a statement from me too, not tonight. She said Darren’s motorcycle was being held as evidence, and so was Gideon’s helmet, and that it could be a year.
Gideon looked at the helmet on the hood and didn’t say anything. He’d bought that camera with his first two paychecks.
Joshua was standing between the trooper’s car and the doors, and the bikers had come out to the curb behind me without anybody calling them, not close, just there.
“You just threw away ten thousand dollars,” he said to me. “You understand that? You’re going to get nothing. Nothing.”
“Mr. Ricci,” Trooper Vitale said. “My car.”
Thursday
Darren came home the Tuesday before Thanksgiving with a frame of steel rods around his leg, and we put him on the couch, and that’s where he lives now.
My mother’s check came on the first. $1,412. No note with it, which was worse than a note.
His half of the garage is empty except for the workbench and the Maxwell House can. The report came the second week of November. Failure to yield. No proof of insurance. A letter came after it from the Law Office of Seth Dunlap, and I didn’t open it. I rolled it up with the receipts.
Thursday, Fred stopped by after the clubhouse with Ralph and a pan of something from Ralph’s wife.
Fred’s beard has a bald spot the size of a quarter on the left side of his chin. He says it’ll grow back by spring. He says it like it’s the same deadline as the leg.
That night Lina climbed up onto the couch on Darren’s good side and got up on her knees.
She took one hair between her finger and thumb.
“One,” Darren said.
She laid each one on the arm of the couch, in a row, and waited, and pulled the next.
At thirty he said, “Lights out.”
She pulled one more and held it up in front of his face.
He looked at me over her head. I didn’t say anything.
“Thirty-one,” Darren said.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who rides on Sundays, and to whoever waits up for them at home.
For more stories where motorcycles become part of a family’s history, read The First of His Grandmother’s Three Conditions Was About Our Coffee Can and The Old Black Bike in My Husband’s Garage Was the One Nobody Rode. For another moving tale of a rider and a long trail of letters, see The Old Rider Mailed Me Twenty-Five Letters, and Twenty-Four Came Back.
