The man across the street promised my dying daughter one ride on his motorcycle, and on the Saturday we’d counted down to for six weeks he sat on it at the foot of our driveway with the key shut in his fist and said, “I won’t start it. Take her back inside, Kerri.” I wanted him dead. Then she pointed down the hill.
Avery was eleven, and in August the hospice people stopped saying “months.”
Her heart had been bad since she was four.
Dean Yeager had lived in the yellow house across from ours since before we moved in. Sixty-two, retired off the county road crew, gray ponytail, and an old blue touring bike he washed every Sunday whether it needed it or not.
Avery used to sit on our front step and watch him do it.
In September he walked over, crouched down beside her wheelchair, and asked where she’d go if she could go anywhere on that bike.
“The lake,” she said. “The part where the road runs right along the water.”
“Then that’s where we’re going.”
He picked the date. October 18th.
She wrote it on her whiteboard in purple marker and drew a motorcycle under it that looked like a dog.
Every morning she asked how many days were left, and Wesley told her, and she wiped the old number off with her thumb.
Dean brought over a catalog so she could pick a helmet. She picked the purple one with glitter in the paint.
She asked him if the bike was loud.
“Loud enough,” he said. “You’ll find out.”
Our dryer buzzer broke that same week and nobody fixed it.
The Thursday before, I got up at two to check on her and saw Dean’s garage light on across the street. Three trucks I didn’t know were parked on his side.
I figured he was drinking with somebody.
I was almost glad he had friends.
Saturday came.
Paulette, Avery’s nurse, got to our house at eight and checked everything twice. She said twenty minutes, slow, and she’d follow in her car.
Wesley carried Avery out to the driveway already wearing the helmet. We’d bought her a new hoodie just for this.
Dean was there. Bike at the foot of the driveway, him sitting on it, both boots flat on the concrete.
He didn’t get up.
“Morning, sweetheart,” he said to Avery.
Then he looked at Paulette, and Paulette looked at the grass.
“Okay,” I said. “She’s been up since five. Let’s go.”
He didn’t move.
“Dean.”
“I won’t start it.”
Wesley laughed like it was a bad joke. “Come on, man.”
“I won’t start it,” Dean said. “Take her back inside, Kerri.”
Avery was right there.
In the helmet. Holding the strap in both hands because she couldn’t work the buckle anymore.
Something went hot behind my eyes.
“You PROMISED HER,” I said.
“I know what I told her.”
“She has days, Dean. DAYS. She doesn’t get a rain check.”
His fist stayed shut. I could see one edge of the key between two fingers.
Wesley walked over and put his hand flat on Dean’s chest. Not a shove. Close.
“Get off it or start it,” Wesley said. “Those are your choices.”
Dean didn’t knock the hand away. He let it sit there.
Across the street, Jorge from the corner house had come out with his coffee. Ruby next door had her phone up.
Good.
I wanted it on every phone in Moline.
“Look at her,” I said. “LOOK AT HER and tell her yourself.”
He did. That was the worst part.
He looked straight at my daughter and his face didn’t do anything at all.
“Not today, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Avery didn’t cry. She’d quit crying about things back in the summer, which was its own kind of awful.
“Is it because I’m too sick?” she said.
Dean shut his eyes for a second.
“No,” he said. “You’re not too anything.”
I turned on Paulette. “Did you tell him something? Did you tell HIM something you didn’t tell ME?”
She opened her mouth and closed it again.
“Paulette.”
“He called me Tuesday,” she said. “He had a lot of questions.”
“What questions?”
She looked at Dean. Dean moved his head maybe half an inch.
That’s when I lost it.
“You don’t get to keep SECRETS with my kid’s nurse,” I said. “You’re the NEIGHBOR. You wash a motorcycle on Sundays. That’s all you are to this family.”
It came out uglier than I meant it to.
I meant every word.
He sat there on the bike and took it.
Wesley grabbed the handles of Avery’s chair and started backing her toward the porch.
“Mom,” she said. “Mom, wait.”
“We’re going in, honey.”
“No. Mom. LOOK.”
She was pointing past Dean, down the hill, toward the stop sign at Fourth.
There were bikes down there.
A lot of them.
I counted thirty-one before I lost track.
Two rows, parked straight across the bottom of our street, and every rider standing beside their bike with a helmet under one arm.
Nobody was talking.
Not one engine was running.
Ruby lowered her phone.
Dean swung his leg over, walked up the driveway past my husband, and crouched in front of my daughter’s wheelchair.
Then he opened his fist, put the key in her palm, and closed her fingers over it.
“Your call, sweetheart,” he said. “Nobody down there touches a thing until you say so.”
Eight-fourteen
Avery looked at the key and then at him.
“Who are they?”
“Friends of mine. Some of them are friends of friends.” He stayed down on one knee in front of her. “They’re here for you, sweetheart. Every one of them. They came in from Davenport and Rock Island and there’s one guy from Peoria. They’re riding with you to the lake. The part where the road runs right along the water.”
“All of them?”
“All of them. Two in front, the rest behind you, and nobody passes.”
At the bottom of the hill one rider in the front row lifted his hand. Then the one next to him did. Then the whole two rows, every hand up, and still not one engine.
Avery lifted the hand with the key in it.
I stood there in my socks with the porch light still on behind me at eight in the morning. Wesley had let go of the chair.
“Then start YOURS,” I said. “If they’re all going, why won’t you start yours?”
Dean looked up at me. Then at Avery’s hands, the one with the key and the one still hooked through the helmet strap.
He got up slow, the way men his age get up off concrete, and came close enough that I could smell the bike wax on his jacket.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, low, so she wouldn’t hear it. “Not in front of her.”
The back of the blue bike
Here’s the Sunday in September, the one where he asked her.
It was the seventh. He’d been washing the bike, and when Avery said the lake, he said, “You want to sit on it?” and she said yes before I could say anything.
He carried her across the street himself. Set her on the back seat, the passenger seat, with the engine off and the kickstand down and his own driveway under her. He set her fingers around the rail that runs behind it.
“Hold that,” he said. “That’s all you’ve got to do.”
She held it for maybe a minute.
Then she started going over to the left. Slowly, like a tree in no hurry. Her hands were still on the rail and she was still going.
Dean caught her by the hood of her sweatshirt.
Everybody laughed. Me loudest. I said she just needed to practice holding on, she’d been lying down too much, that was all.
Dean didn’t laugh. He set her back in her chair and stood there a long time looking at her hands.
Then he said the date. “October eighteenth. Gives us six weeks.”
“Forty-one days,” Avery said. She’d counted it on her fingers while he was talking.
That’s how the whiteboard started. After that, on Sundays, she made Wesley carry it out to the step so she could hold it up for Dean when he washed the bike, and he’d give her a thumbs-up across the street. Once he yelled over that the dog was the best-looking bike in Moline.
That same Sunday, Ruby Kramer came out on her porch in her robe. Ruby had lived next door to us eleven years. She’d called the city on Dean twice that summer about his pipes.
“Some of us sleep on Sundays, Dean,” she said.
He turned the hose off and waited until she went in.
By October, Avery couldn’t hold her juice cup. Wesley held it for her and nobody said anything about it.
On the eighth, Paulette sat at our kitchen table with her folder open and said, “Kerri, about the ride. Her hands…”
“Don’t,” I said.
“I just need to…”
“She’s going. She already sat on it. If you’ve got a problem with it you can bring it to me on the nineteenth.”
Paulette closed her folder.
The Wednesday before the ride, Dean knocked on our door. I told him Avery was asleep and I had a load of laundry I had to stand next to, because the buzzer was broken. He said it could wait.
And now that empty passenger seat was at his back, and he wouldn’t look at it.
Ruby’s phone
“Say it here,” I said. “You’ve already said plenty in front of her. Say the rest to me.”
“No,” Dean said.
“Kerri.” Wesley had his hand on my arm now instead of Dean’s chest. “Let’s go in. Five minutes. Let him say it.”
Ten minutes earlier my husband had been ready to pull the man off his bike. Now he was holding my elbow like I was the one who might do something.
I pulled my arm back.
I bent down to Avery and held out my hand, palm up.
“Give me that, honey. We’ll go inside and figure this out, and then we’ll see.”
She looked at my hand. Then she put the key in the front pocket of her hoodie, the new one, and kept her hand over it.
“He gave it to me,” she said.
That was when Ruby came across the grass.
She had her phone turned around so I could see the screen. Robe again, and slippers, and her hair still flat on one side.
“I put it up,” she said. “Forty seconds. You’re in it, Kerri, but you come off fine. You come off like a mother.”
On the screen I was in our driveway with my finger in Dean’s face, yelling that he promised her. The words across the top said a neighbor backed out on a dying girl’s last ride. The bikes weren’t in it. She’d stopped recording before Avery pointed.
Under it, people were already writing. Somebody had typed the name of our street. Somebody said men like that ought to be dragged off their bikes. Somebody had found Dean’s yellow house on a map and posted the picture.
“People ought to know who lives on this street,” Ruby said. “I’ve been saying it about him for years. Nobody listens to me.”
“There’s thirty bikes down there, Ruby.”
“I can see the bikes. That doesn’t change what he did to her up here.”
Dean hadn’t moved. He was standing with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking down the hill at his friends.
Ruby tapped the screen with one nail.
“It’s at six hundred shares,” she said. “Channel Six already messaged me.”
Tuesday
Wesley rolled Avery a few feet up the driveway, closer to the porch. She let him. She didn’t take her eyes off the bottom of the hill.
I went to Paulette.
“What did he ask you,” I said. “Tuesday. All of it.”
Paulette has been a hospice nurse for thirty years. She does not do this in driveways. She did it anyway.
“He asked if she could hold on for twenty minutes,” she said. “I told him no. He asked if she could hold on for five. I told him not since September.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He asked what happens if she passes out on the back of a motorcycle at forty miles an hour. I told him she goes off the side. He asked who’d be holding her, and I said nobody, Dean, you’ll be driving.”
She was talking to me the way she talks to me at the kitchen table, flat and even, one thing at a time.
“He asked if the shaking and the cold would be too much for her heart. I told him I didn’t know. I told him nobody could promise him either way, and I’d follow in the car with the bag.”
“And you didn’t think I should know any of this.”
“I tried on the eighth. You told me to bring it to you on the nineteenth.”
There it was. My own kitchen.
“Then he asked me how wide her chair cushion is,” Paulette said. “How tall she sits. Which side the tank goes on. I told him the right. I didn’t ask him why. I figured I knew.”
“And he asked what you’d say. I said you’d take it better from him than from me.” She looked at the grass again. “That part’s on me.”
I looked across at Dean. He was still watching the bottom of the hill.
“You could have come to the door,” I said to him.
“I came to the door Wednesday,” Dean said. “You were doing laundry.”
I thought about the Sunday in September. Avery tipping over like a tree. Me laughing loudest.
Behind me Avery said, “Mom, are they leaving?”
They weren’t. Not one of them had moved.
I left them all in the driveway and started down the hill in my socks.
The stop sign at Fourth
It’s a long hill. I’d never walked it without a car.
The riders were older than I thought. Most of them had gray in their beards, and a couple of them were women, and none of them said a word to me. They stepped back from their bikes as I got close, the way you’d step back from a casket.
In the middle of the front row, where I couldn’t have seen it from the top of the hill, there was a black bike bigger than Dean’s, and bolted to the side of it was a sidecar.
It was old. Somebody had sanded it and painted it black, and on the front of it, on the nose, in purple paint, was a motorcycle that looked like a dog.
I knew that dog. I’d looked at that dog every morning for six weeks.
The seat inside had been built up with foam and covered in vinyl, with a high back and a headrest. There was a wool blanket folded on it. There were straps, five of them, coming together at one buckle in the middle. On the right side there was a metal bracket bolted to the frame, about the size of Avery’s oxygen tank.
The right side.
The man standing by it had a white beard and a Hawkeyes cap. He was eating a granola bar.
“You’re the mom,” he said.
“Is this Dean’s?”
“It’s mine. I’m Axel.” He put the rest of the granola bar in his pocket. “His frame’s too old to take a mount. We tried Thursday till about three in the morning. Ended up putting it on mine.”
“Then why is he sitting up there on his?”
“Because he wasn’t going to tell a little girl she’d fall off his bike,” Axel said. “He told us he’d sit there till dark before he said that in front of her. He was going to tell you and your husband inside. Then walk you down here. That was the whole plan.”
I turned around and looked up the hill. Dean was a little shape at the top of my driveway, crouched by the wheelchair again.
“Who painted the dog?”
“He did. Off a picture on his phone. He took it from his yard one Sunday. The board she holds up.”
I put my hand on the buckle in the middle of the seat. It was the big kind, the kind on a car seat, where you have to push with your whole thumb.
“She can’t do that herself,” Axel said. “So he figured somebody’d have to.”
I pressed it open. It took my whole thumb.
The lake road
I walked back up the hill. I didn’t run. My socks were soaked through.
Everybody was where I’d left them. Ruby was on the sidewalk now with her phone down by her leg, and Jorge had come halfway across the street with his coffee.
Avery was holding the hoodie pocket shut with both palms.
“Mom,” she said. “Can I?”
“Yes,” I said.
Dean looked at me.
“I saw the dog,” I said.
He nodded once. He didn’t say anything else and neither did I.
Wesley carried her down the hill. I walked beside them with the helmet strap, and Dean walked behind us pushing the empty chair. At the bottom, the riders made a gap, and Wesley set her in the seat, and Avery pulled the blanket up herself.
I did the straps. Two at her shoulders, two at her hips, one up the middle. I pushed the buckle shut with my thumb and pulled every strap twice, the way Paulette checks things.
Paulette set the tank in the bracket on the right side and ran the line.
Dean got on Axel’s bike. Axel climbed on the back of somebody else’s.
Avery took the key out of her pocket. She held it up so all of them could see.
“Okay,” she said. “Go.”
Thirty-one engines.
I felt it in my teeth. I felt it in the street. Avery’s whole face opened up, and she put both her hands over her ears and was laughing behind them, and I couldn’t hear a thing she was saying.
I rode behind them with Paulette. Two bikes in front, Dean and the sidecar, then everybody else, and nobody passed. On the stretch where the road runs right along the water, Avery put one arm up out of the sidecar and held it there for a whole mile. We were gone fifty minutes. Paulette never once reached for the bag.
That night I knocked on Ruby’s door.
She came out with the porch light on and her phone in her hand like she’d been waiting for me.
“If you came to tell me to take it down, I’m not,” she said. “It’s at four thousand. Channel Six wants to talk to me at nine tomorrow. It’s what happened, Kerri. I didn’t make you scream at him. I heard you say you wanted it on every phone in Moline. I’ve got ears.”
“He built her a seat,” I said.
“Then he can post that. He’s got a phone. I’m not the one who sat on his bike all morning in front of a dying child and wouldn’t start it.”
“Ruby.”
“And frankly that man has had this coming. Eleven years of that bike at seven in the morning. Eleven years of that hose. I called the city twice and they did nothing, and now people finally see what he is. You think I’m going to apologize because his friends showed up with matching jackets? People are writing me. People I don’t even know. A woman two towns over said I was brave.”
There was a comment under her video with Dean’s house number in it. I’d seen it that afternoon. It was still there.
I walked out to the middle of our street, halfway between her house and his, and turned on the camera on my own phone and held it out in front of my face.
“My name is Kerri Mueller,” I said. “I’m the one yelling in that video.”
I said what he’d promised, and what he’d built, and what Paulette had tried to tell me on the eighth, and what I’d said to him in front of my daughter about who he was to this family. I said it slow so nobody could clip it.
I posted it on my own page and under Ruby’s video and sent it to Channel Six.
“You’re going to look like an idiot,” Ruby said from her porch.
I didn’t answer her. Ruby went inside and turned her porch light off.
Sunday
The next morning Dean was out washing the blue bike, the way he does.
Ruby’s curtains were shut. My video had nine thousand views by then. Somebody had written under it that the mother ought to be ashamed of herself. I left that one up.
Avery wanted to go over. Wesley carried her and I carried the chair, and she had the whiteboard on her lap. It still said zero. She won’t let anybody wipe it.
She still had the key. She’d slept with it.
She held it out to Dean.
He turned off the hose and shook his head and pointed at the ignition.
She couldn’t turn it alone. I put my hand over hers, and we turned it together.
The bike caught. It was loud in our street at nine in the morning on a Sunday, and Dean let it run.
“Well?” he said.
“Loud enough,” Avery said.
If you know somebody who washes something every Sunday whether it needs it or not, go over and say good morning to them this week.
For more family stories where old wounds surface in unexpected ways, read the faded line on a father’s ribs and the sister left off her brother’s wedding list. And for another moment when a child gets caught in an adult’s grudge, there’s the seven-year-old told her dad still owed $292.15.
