At our Christmas toy run a girl of about ten threw a chunk of ice at the front motorcycle, and the bank manager beside my cocoa table said, “Somebody grab that little brat before she gets a man killed.” The girl bent for another piece. Ten minutes earlier I’d brushed her off myself, and I still owe her for it.
She had tugged my sleeve twice before that.
Both times I said, “Not now, honey, I’ve got a line,” and handed somebody else a cup.
That’s the part I can’t get past.
Sixty-two bikes had come down Second Avenue in Ottumwa that Saturday, each one with a stuffed animal bungeed on the back.
A pink bear. A giraffe missing an ear.
My cocoa urn had a dent in it shaped like Ohio.
The ice hit the windshield of the front bike with a crack you could hear over the pipes.
People yelled.
The rider stopped so hard his back tire slid sideways in the slush, and the whole column bunched up behind him, engines popping, somebody leaning on a horn.
Stella Weiss pointed with her entire arm. “That’s the Rasmussen girl. She’s been running wild all morning.”
A dad near her yanked his son back by the hood.
The girl didn’t run.
She scooped another gray chunk off the curb and held it up over her shoulder.
Her mouth was wide open.
Nothing was coming out.
The rider swung off his bike and walked toward her.
He was huge. Gray ponytail, a leather vest over a hooded sweatshirt, a beard halfway down his chest.
His name was Julio and he was fifty-seven, but I didn’t know that yet. Right then he was just the biggest man on that street, heading for a ten-year-old.
A younger rider caught up to him fast. “Julio, she could’ve put that through your face.”
“Shut them down,” Julio said.
“What?”
“All of them. Shut them DOWN.”
He put a fist over his head and turned it once.
Down the line, bike after bike went quiet.
Then all you could hear was slush dripping off the bank awning and a baby fussing somewhere in a stroller.
Officer Kumar was pushing toward us from the corner. “Sir, step away from her. I’ve got this.”
Julio didn’t step away.
He got down on one knee in the wet.
Her hood had come off when she threw. Behind her right ear sat a little beige hearing aid.
Julio saw it before any of us did.
He didn’t reach for the ice. He pulled one glove off with his teeth, dug out his phone, tapped it twice, and held it out to her flat on his palm.
She stared at it.
Then she let the ice fall and grabbed that phone with both hands.
Her thumbs flew.
She shoved it back at him, and he read it out loud so the rest of us would finally hear what she’d been trying to say for twenty minutes.
“GRANDPA TRUCK IN DITCH BY ELEVATOR. WONT WAKE UP.”
Nobody on that curb said a word.
The grain elevator was half a mile back, past the tracks.
Everybody in town knows the road behind it. It drops off into a drainage ditch with no rail.
Julio was already standing. “Donovan. Take eleven. Go.”
Twelve bikes fired up and peeled out of the column the wrong way, and Officer Kumar ran for his cruiser.
Stella Weiss said, “Well, how was anybody supposed to know?”
Nobody answered her.
I left the urn and the cash box and grabbed the first-aid kit from under my table.
I put the girl in my car. By then she’d typed her name on Julio’s phone too. Hanna.
She sat with her fists in her lap and didn’t look at me once.
I deserved that.
The pickup was nose-down in the ditch with its back wheels up on the shoulder. The tailpipe was buried in a drift.
The windows were white with fog.
The engine was still going.
Donovan had both hands on the driver’s door. “Locked.”
Julio didn’t bother with the handle. He pulled a tire iron off somebody’s saddlebag, put the passenger window in with one swing, reached across and popped the lock.
Four men lifted the old man out onto the snow.
Brown work coat. One boot unlaced. An insulin pen still in his fist.
Julio knelt at his head and turned his face up toward the sky.
And Julio stopped moving.
I knew that face too. Anybody over forty in this county does.
Emmett Rasmussen was our sheriff for twenty-two years.
Sixteen years ago he stood up in a courtroom and told a judge that Julio was “the worst thing this town ever grew.”
Julio did six years on his word.
Donovan saw it land on him. “Lito. Is that who I think it is?”
Julio didn’t answer.
Hanna had come around the back of my car. She stood at the edge of the ditch, watching Julio’s hands, waiting to see what they’d do.
Then her grandfather’s eyes came open.
He looked straight up into that beard, and every bit of color that was left in him went out of his mouth.
“You,” he said. “Of all the men in this county, it had to be YOU.”
The ditch behind the elevator
Then he tried to get up.
He got one elbow under him and shoved at Julio’s chest with the hand that still had the insulin pen in it. “Get your hands off me.”
Julio didn’t move his hands. “No, sir.”
“I said get off me. I’d sooner lie here.”
“Then you’ll lie here with me holding your head.”
The old man’s lips were gray. He was shaking so hard his teeth clicked.
I knew what an insulin pen and a gray mouth meant. My dad had sugar for the last nine years of his life.
I dug in my coat pocket. I always end a toy run with a fistful of sugar packets in there, because the church buys the big box and somebody has to carry them back.
I tore four open at once and knelt in the snow on his other side.
“Emmett. Open up.”
He looked at me like he was trying to place me. Then he opened his mouth, and I tipped the sugar in, and he worked it around with his tongue like a kid with a pixie stick.
I tore four more.
Down on the road Officer Kumar’s cruiser came over the tracks with the lights going, and somewhere behind it an ambulance.
Hanna hadn’t come any closer. She stood on the shoulder in her red coat with her arms wrapped around herself, looking at the truck.
I followed her eyes.
Through the window Julio had broken, on the passenger seat, sat a stuffed dog. Brown, floppy, the kind you’d win at the fair. Something white was rubber-banded around its middle.
Emmett got his voice back before the ambulance got to us.
He didn’t say it to Julio and he didn’t say it to me.
“Hanna,” he said, louder than a man in his shape should have been able to. “Get the dog out of my truck.”
The brown pickup
I’ve run the cocoa table at the toy run for fourteen years.
It’s First Lutheran’s table. Fifty cents a cup, a dollar if you want marshmallows, and every dime goes to the kids’ coat drive. I have a cash box with a broken latch, a stack of napkins with the church’s name printed on them, and a ballpoint pen taped to a piece of string so nobody walks off with it.
The toy run is younger than my table.
It started nine years ago with eight bikes and a pickup full of toys. Julio had been out about a year. I remember because people talked. A man with his record, organizing something for kids. Rose from church said she’d believe it when the toys showed up at the hospital.
They showed up.
The second year there were twenty bikes, and they wanted to gather in the bank’s lot on the corner of Second, because it’s flat and it’s big. Stella Weiss said no. Insurance. I was standing right there when she said it.
The fourth year there were fifty bikes and a photographer from the paper.
The fifth year the bank’s banner was on the reviewing platform.
Every December since, at noon, Stella Weiss climbs those platform steps in a red sash with the bank’s name on it and hands Julio’s club a check the size of a door. Twenty-five hundred dollars. The paper runs the picture. Stella stands in the middle of it.
That’s Stella. She does the Rotary pancake breakfast too, and her name is on a bench in the park.
What I’m about to tell you about I didn’t think about once in nine years.
I live out past the tracks, and on toy run mornings I drive in by the elevator road at seven to set up the urn. Every one of those mornings there’s been a brown pickup parked on the shoulder up there, engine running for the heat, facing the route.
An old man in a hunting cap behind the wheel.
I figured he was a farmer who liked the bikes. I waved one year. He didn’t wave back.
This morning there’d been a small somebody in a red coat in the passenger seat.
I’d driven right past them.
And when Hanna tugged my sleeve the second time, she had one of my church napkins in her other hand. I thought she wanted cocoa and didn’t have the fifty cents.
Not now, honey.
Down in the ditch the paramedics got Emmett on a board. He kept turning his head to see where Julio was standing, and every time he found him he turned it away again.
Hanna came back from the truck with the dog hugged against her coat. The white thing on it was an envelope. She wouldn’t let the paramedic touch it.
Officer Kumar came over to me with his notebook out. “Her mom’s in Des Moines. Two hours, if the roads are good.” He looked at Hanna, then at me. “Can you bring her to the hospital?”
Bay three
Hanna rode with me again.
This time she looked at me. Twice. Both times I was the one who looked away.
At the ER they put Emmett in a curtain bay with a heater blowing and a clip on his finger. The nurse said his sugar had been thirty-eight when the ambulance checked it. She said the truck’s exhaust was the other half of it, and that if the tailpipe had been in that drift another half hour we’d be having a different conversation.
Julio came in ten minutes behind us with Donovan. Snow on both of them, helmets under their arms, standing in the hallway like two men who’d walked into the wrong church.
Emmett saw them through the gap in the curtain.
“I don’t want him in here.”
The nurse said, “Mr. Rasmussen, he’s in the hallway.”
“Then I don’t want him in the hallway.”
Donovan took a step toward the bay. “Old man, he put your window in with his own arm. You’d be dead in that truck.”
“Donovan,” Julio said.
“No. Somebody ought to say it.”
“Donovan. Go get the bikes off the ambulance lane before they tow them.”
Donovan went. He hit the door with his whole hand on the way out.
Julio didn’t come in. He didn’t leave either. He sat down in a plastic chair across from the bay with his helmet on his knees and his gloves inside it.
Hanna sat on the end of Emmett’s bed with the dog on her lap.
Emmett wouldn’t look at the hallway. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the clip on his finger. Once he reached over and touched the envelope on the dog, like he was checking it was still there, and then put his hand back under the blanket.
I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I held my phone out to Hanna the way Julio had. Flat on my palm.
She took it.
I’d typed: I’M SORRY I DIDN’T STOP. WHAT WERE YOU TRYING TO SHOW ME?
She read it. She looked at me a long time.
Then her thumbs went.
GRANDPA WOULDNT WAKE UP SO I RAN. I WROTE IT ON A NAPKIN AT YOUR TABLE WITH THE PEN ON THE STRING. YOU SAID NOT NOW.
I could see her mouth make the shape of it. Not now.
She kept typing.
I GAVE THE NAPKIN TO THE LADY IN THE RED SASH. SHE READ IT. SHE PUT IT IN THE GARBAGE BY THE BANK DOOR.
The can by the bank door
The nurse said Emmett would be kept overnight. Hanna’s mom called from somewhere past Oskaloosa. Hanna went back to the end of the bed and the dog.
At a quarter to noon I drove back downtown, because my cash box was sitting on a folding table on Second Avenue with a broken latch and a morning’s worth of fifty-cent pieces in it.
Rose had it. She’d been watching it since I ran.
“Where on earth did you go? Stella said you put that child in your car and took off with the bikers.”
“Her grandfather was in the ditch by the elevator.”
“I heard.” She didn’t look at me while she said it. “Everybody’s heard.”
The toys were being loaded off the bikes into the hospital’s van. The reviewing platform had its bank banner up and a microphone on a stand. Somebody had set out the big cardboard check against the railing.
The garbage can by the bank door is green metal with a domed lid. I’ve dumped my cups in it for fourteen years.
I took the lid off.
Cups. Candy cane wrappers with the bank’s name on them. A dirty diaper somebody should be ashamed of.
And under three of my own cups, balled up tight, a white napkin with First Lutheran printed on the corner.
I flattened it on the lid.
The ink had run where it was wet, but you could read it. Block letters, pressed so hard the pen had gone through in two places.
MY GRANDPA TRUCK IS IN THE DITCH BY THE ELEVATOR. HE WONT WAKE UP. PLEASE CALL 911. I CANT TALK GOOD.
At the bottom, smaller: PLEASE.
I stood there holding it with the lid of a garbage can in my other hand.
Rose had come up behind me. She read it over my shoulder.
“Oh, Maggie,” she said. Then, “Put it away.”
“She threw it out, Rose.”
“You don’t know who threw it out.”
“Hanna told me who threw it out.”
Rose took hold of my coat sleeve. Same sleeve. “Stella holds the note on the church van. Pastor’s going to ask her about the roof in January. Whatever you’re about to do, do it Monday, in private, like a grown woman.”
Behind us the microphone squealed.
Stella Weiss was up on the platform in her red sash, tapping it with one finger. “Can everybody hear me?”
The envelope on the dog
Julio came around the corner on foot before I got to the steps.
He’d left his bike at the hospital, or Donovan had it. He had the stuffed dog under one arm. The envelope was still rubber-banded around it.
He stopped in front of me like I was the one person on that street he’d been looking for.
“He gave it to me,” Julio said. “After you left. He told the nurse to get me.”
“Emmett did?”
“He said, ‘Read it. Out loud. The way you read hers.'” Julio held the dog out a little, like it was evidence. “I haven’t. I didn’t want to read it to myself in a hospital chair.”
The envelope was the long kind, from a bank. Written on it in shaky ballpoint: TOY RUN. FRONT RIDER.
He worked the rubber band off with his thumb.
Inside was a check and one sheet of lined paper folded in thirds.
The check was for six hundred dollars, made out to the toy run. The memo line said COATS.
He unfolded the paper and stood there on Second Avenue with stuffed animals going by him in armloads, and he read it out loud, to me, because I was who was there.
“‘I have parked on the elevator road every year for nine years to watch you go by. My granddaughter thinks it’s for the bikes. In 2010 I told a judge you were the worst thing this town ever grew. I said it because I believed it and because I wanted it in the paper. I have been wrong in front of a judge and I have never once had the guts to be wrong in front of you. This year I’m going to walk down there and hand you this myself. If I don’t, it’s because I sat in the truck again.'”
He stopped.
“There’s a name,” he said. “That’s all. Just his name.”
He folded the paper back in thirds. His hands were steady. His face wasn’t.
That’s what the old man had meant in the ditch. Of all the men in the county.
He’d been working up to it for nine years, and he’d ended up on his back in the snow with the man’s hand under his head before he could get out of the truck.
Julio put the check back in the envelope. “I’m supposed to go up there and take her check now.”
“Julio. Before you go up there.”
I held out the napkin.
Noon on Second Avenue
He read it. He read it again. Then he climbed the platform steps with the napkin in one hand and the dog under his arm, and I went up behind him.
Stella had the microphone. She turned with her photo smile on, saw the dog, and the smile stopped halfway.
“Julio. There you are. We’re just about to do the check.” She stepped toward him with her hand out for the other end of the cardboard. “Is the old man all right? We were all so worried.”
Julio held the napkin up in front of her face.
She looked at it for maybe two seconds.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, and she didn’t cover the microphone. “That’s a wet napkin.”
Julio said, “Read it.”
“I’m not going to stand up here and read garbage. Do you know how many notes children shove at me at a parade? Raffle tickets. Drawings. That girl pulled the fire alarm at Wilson in October, did you know that? The whole school out in the cold. Her mother had to come from Des Moines for that too.”
People at the front of the crowd had stopped talking. The photographer from the paper had his camera halfway up.
“She can’t hear the alarm,” I said.
Stella turned on me. “And you. Don’t you dare. I watched that child go to your table first. Twice. You didn’t even look down at her. You sent her straight to me, Maggie, and now you want to stand up here with a biker and…”
“I did,” I said.
That was into the microphone. I hadn’t meant it to be. I was standing next to it.
“I sent her away twice,” I said. “She wrote it on my napkin with my pen. Then she brought it to you, and you read it, and you put it in the can by your door. I just took it out.”
Stella looked at the crowd and then back at me.
“Yes, I read it. A Rasmussen kid writes ‘my grandpa won’t wake up’ on a napkin, I’m supposed to call 911 and send an ambulance out to the elevator on her word? I knew exactly whose granddaughter she was. I’ve known that family thirty years. Emmett Rasmussen arrested my brother in front of our whole church and that man has never once said he was sorry for anything in his life.”
Julio held up the dog with the envelope rubber-banded around it.
He didn’t say a word about what was in it.
Stella stared at the dog.
“I’m not going to apologize to a stuffed animal,” she said. “Are we doing the check or aren’t we? There are people waiting.”
Julio leaned past her to the microphone.
“We’ll take the sheriff’s,” he said.
Then he walked down the steps. The other riders were standing in the street by the van. Not one of them went up for the cardboard.
Stella stood there with it. Then she picked up the check herself and carried it inside the bank and shut the glass door behind her.
Rose was still at the bottom of the steps. She didn’t say anything to me.
The next December
The church gave the cocoa table to Rose the following year. Pastor said it was a fresh start for everybody, and that the van note had come up for renewal at a bad time. I said I understood. I didn’t argue it.
So this December I bought my own urn, a used one off a woman in Fairfield. It doesn’t have a dent. I set up a card table on the curb at the corner of Second, across from the bank, with napkins from the Dollar General and a sign that says COCOA FREE, COATS ARE NOT, with a coffee can for the coat drive.
There’s a ballpoint taped to a piece of string.
At seven I drove in by the elevator road. There was no brown pickup on the shoulder.
It was parked on Second Avenue, right in front of my table, with a handicap tag on the mirror and the heater going. Emmett had the window down. He was wearing the hunting cap.
He nodded at me. That’s as much as we’ve ever said.
At a quarter to eleven the pipes came over the tracks.
Sixty-eight bikes this year. Julio out front, a pink bear bungeed on the back of his, and on the back of the second bike a brown floppy dog.
Julio slowed when he got to the pickup. He didn’t stop the column. He put two fingers to his forehead at the open window, and Emmett put two fingers up to his cap.
I was pouring for a man in a Hawkeyes stocking hat when somebody tugged my sleeve.
Hanna, eleven now, in the same red coat with the sleeves too short.
I put the ladle down in the urn before she let go of me.
“Now, honey,” I said, and pushed the napkins and the pen on the string across the table to her.
If this one stayed with you, make the cup wait the next time a kid pulls your sleeve.
Stories about the adults who step in when a child needs someone include the coach who kept a little girl’s letter in the cash box and the uncle trusted with one night and a painful history. For a family story where standing up for a parent matters, read what happened after a husband filled out his father-in-law’s pension form.
