My oldest friend’s second wife had an usher walk me out of his service, and she said it loud enough for the back pews: “Lewis’s daughter doesn’t need some biker hanging over her father’s grave.” I ended up outside the cemetery fence in the drizzle for an hour, until his thirteen-year-old squeezed through it holding his phone.
Pen was the only reason I went at all.
Her mother died when she was three, and for ten years after that I was the man Lewis called when his girl needed something he couldn’t figure out alone.
Lewis Mullen and I met at fifteen, both of us cutting shop class behind the same dumpster.
He looked at my dirt bike and told me I’d put the chain on backward.
I told him to mind his own business.
He fixed it anyway, with a butter knife.
That was forty-six years ago.
We hung drywall side by side for most of those years. I stood up as his best man the first time he got married, and I helped carry Rosemarie out of the church the spring Pen turned three.
After that I figured out how to pack a lunch a picky kid would actually eat.
Cheese in triangles. Never squares.
I sat through two band concerts a year on a folding chair, and on Sunday mornings Pen rode behind me to the pancake place by the grain elevator in a helmet two sizes too big for her.
I wasn’t her father and I never acted like it.
I was just the guy who showed up.
Then Dorota came along, two and a half years ago.
She was sweet to waitresses and cold to me from the first handshake.
She told Lewis a man his age had no business riding around with a guy who smelled like gas station coffee.
Lewis laughed and said give her time.
I gave her time.
It didn’t help.
Lewis went on a Thursday, in the parking lot at the plant, slumped over the wheel of his truck with the engine still running.
Heart, the coroner said.
I heard it from a guy in our riding club, not from his wife.
Dorota let my calls ring out for four days.
Then the obituary went up online with one line I read six times: graveside to follow, immediate family and invited guests.
Nobody invited me.
I went.
I left my vest on the hook. I borrowed a navy suit from my neighbor that pulled tight across the back, parked the bike two blocks down, and walked into the chapel in Decatur with my hair still flat from the helmet.
I made it to the fourth row.
Dorota stood up from the front pew, turned all the way around, and found me like she’d been watching the door.
“That’s him,” she said to the usher.
The usher had a dinosaur Band-Aid on his thumb. He kept tugging at it while he talked.
“Sir, the family’s asking you to step outside.”
“I’ve known Lewis since we were FIFTEEN,” I said.
“Then you’ve had plenty of him,” Dorota said. “Today is for family.”
Pen was in the front row in a gray sweater, staring at her shoes.
When she heard my voice she started to get up.
Dorota put a hand on her shoulder and pressed her back down without looking at her.
So I walked out.
The burial was up the hill, past the chain-link that runs along the back road.
A groundskeeper in a yellow rain jacket came over to tell me everything inside that fence was cemetery property.
“I know,” I said. “I’m not coming in.”
I stood on the gravel shoulder with the suit soaking through and watched them lower Lewis into the ground from fifty yards away.
Dorota stood under a big black umbrella next to a man of maybe forty in a camel coat.
At the visitation she’d introduced him as her cousin Kendrick.
His palm sat low on her back the whole time the casket went down.
Pen kept turning her head toward the fence.
Then the umbrellas came down, the car doors started slamming, and she wasn’t next to Dorota anymore.
I didn’t see her again until she was crawling through the gap behind the shed, where the mowers had bent the chain-link up off the ground.
Mud to her knees. Hair stuck to her face.
She held out her dad’s phone. The case still had the crack from the day he dropped it off a ladder.
“Dad said if she ever kept you away, I had to show you this,” she said. “Just you.”
I got down on one knee in the wet gravel.
“Show me what, Pen?”
“His notes. The code’s my birthday.”
From up the hill Dorota’s voice came across the graves: “PENELOPE. Car. Now.”
Pen shoved the phone into my hand and ran back toward her.
I walked the two blocks to my bike, sat on the wet seat, and opened it.
One note was pinned at the top, and the title was my name.
He’d written it nine days before he died.
The first part said Faye Wright, his lawyer, was holding papers that named me Pen’s guardian, and that every dollar of his insurance went into a trust Dorota couldn’t touch.
The second part said Kendrick Rios was nobody’s cousin.
The last line was typed in capitals, the way Lewis only typed when he was scared:
ASK FAYE WHAT DOROTA SWITCHED MY HEART PILLS FOR.
I looked up from the screen.
Dorota was up by her car at the top of the hill with her phone to her ear.
She was looking straight down at me.
Dot
The phone buzzed in my hand.
The note slid away and a call came up over it. The name across the top was Dot.
That’s what Lewis called her. Nobody else did.
She was calling her dead husband’s phone, and she was looking at me while it rang.
I let it ring. Six times. Then it stopped, and up on the hill she took her phone away from her ear and looked at the screen of it like it had done something to her.
A text came in under the missed call.
Johnnie, that phone belongs to this family. Hand it to the usher and we’ll forget today.
The usher. Like we were still in the chapel.
I took a picture of the note with my own phone. It took me three tries, because my hands were wet and my phone has buttons on the side that do things I never asked for.
Then I put both phones inside the borrowed suit, flat against my shirt, and buttoned the jacket over them.
Dorota said something to the man in the camel coat and handed him her keys.
He didn’t hurry. He got in her car, came down the cemetery drive, turned onto the back road and rolled up beside my bike with the window already going down.
He looked at my chest, where the jacket was buttoned.
“That’s a dead man’s property, chief,” he said.
The blue pill box
Two summers before, Lewis went off a ladder on a kitchen job.
His heart did something on the third rung and he came down with it. That’s the day the phone case cracked. He did two nights in the hospital and came home with three prescriptions and a sheet of instructions in print he couldn’t read without the glasses he never carried.
I went to the Rite Aid and bought the biggest pill organizer they had. Blue, two rows, morning and night, the days in raised letters you could feel with your thumb.
Pen took it over the first Sunday.
She was eleven. She set the bottles in a line on the kitchen table, square to the edge, and she did it the way she did her cheese.
“The peach ones have a line down the middle,” she told me. “Those are his heart. You can snap them in half if the doctor says. The long white ones are cholesterol. The little yellow one is a water pill and he hates it.”
Every Sunday after pancakes she filled that box. Lewis would stand behind her chair with his coffee and act like he was supervising.
Six months after Dorota moved in, the box moved off the kitchen table and into the master bathroom.
“A grown man shouldn’t have his child doing his medicine,” she said. She said it to me, not to him, like I was the one who’d set it up.
She switched his prescriptions to a place in Decatur called Hilltop Pharmacy, because Hilltop delivered and nobody would have to drive. She ran the refills off her own phone.
Lewis said it was the first time in his life anybody kept track of anything for him.
Pen didn’t say a word. She just quit coming out to the kitchen on Sunday nights.
And Dorota never adopted her. Lewis told me that one over a beer like it was funny. Dorota said the papers were four hundred dollars for nothing, Pen already had a father.
I rode home that afternoon with Kendrick in my mirror until the highway, and I set Lewis’s phone on my kitchen table, still in the cracked case.
The battery said four percent. I didn’t own a single thing that would charge it.
Faye Wright’s safe
The gas station by the on-ramp had one on a hook for fourteen ninety-nine.
I sat in their lot with it plugged into the bike until the phone came back up, and at five after eight Saturday morning I called the number under Faye Wright in Lewis’s contacts.
She answered on the first ring.
“This is Johnnie,” I said. “I’m Lewis’s…”
“I know who you are. He said you’d be calling from his phone.” She had a voice like a school secretary. “Where’s Penelope?”
“With her.”
Faye didn’t like that, and she said so. She had the guardianship papers in her office, signed the same day as the note, two witnesses. Since nobody had adopted Pen, the person Lewis named came first and a stepmother came nowhere. But papers in a drawer don’t walk into a house and bring a kid out. That takes a judge and a hearing, and Dorota would show up to it with somebody.
“His note says ask you,” I said. “About his pills.”
She went quiet long enough I checked the screen.
“Three weeks before he died he brought me a pharmacy bottle in a freezer bag,” she said. “Hilltop label, his name, his heart medicine. He’d already had a pharmacist in Wheeling look at what was inside.”
“And?”
“Vitamin C. The little store-brand ones. A hundred for four dollars.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He wanted to be sure before he went to the sheriff,” she said. “He made an appointment with his own doctor for the Friday after. To start over clean, he said.”
He died on the Thursday.
“There’s a detective at the county sheriff’s office named Toni Nam,” Faye said. “She’s returned my calls for twenty years. With your say-so, as the man he named, I’ll walk that bag over to her Monday.”
“Do it today.”
“It’s Saturday.”
“Do it today.”
She said she would. Then she said one more thing, slower, like she was reading it off something.
“I never opened that bag. He told me not to trust a lab by itself. He said Pen would know what’s supposed to be in it.”
Hilltop Pharmacy
I wanted to see Pen before anybody else did. So I did the dumb thing.
I rode over to Lewis’s house Saturday afternoon.
Kendrick opened the door with a paper plate of funeral ham in one hand. He’d taken the camel coat off. Under it was one of Lewis’s flannel shirts, the green one, with the sleeves rolled because it was too big for him.
Dorota came up behind him before I could get a word out.
“I filed a report this morning,” she said. “A man took my husband’s phone off a thirteen-year-old girl in the mud at a cemetery. The deputy wrote it all down. He was very interested in you, Johnnie. Do you know how that sounds? Do you know what you look like, standing here?”
“I want to talk to Pen.”
“She’s asleep.”
It was three in the afternoon.
Upstairs, in the window over the porch, the curtain moved. Gray sweater. One hand flat on the glass.
“If you come up these steps again,” Dorota said, “the next person you talk to is a judge, and it won’t be about a phone.”
Kendrick ate a piece of ham off the plate.
“Go home, chief,” he said.
At six that evening a deputy called my house. He was polite about it. He asked me to bring the phone by the substation Monday morning and said he’d hate for it to turn into something.
So I had one night with it.
I went through the pictures, because I figured once the sheriff had it I’d never see them again. Pen at a band concert, in the second row of clarinets. Me asleep in a lawn chair with my mouth open. Lewis’s truck with a flat. A sandwich he was apparently proud of.
Then, eleven days before he died, a picture of his own kitchen counter.
A white paper pharmacy bag, folded over at the top and stapled. Lewis had taken it close, so the receipt on the staple filled the screen. His name. The drug. The date.
And at the bottom, in the same blue print: Delivered by: K. Rios.
The pancake place by the grain elevator
Sunday I went for pancakes at eight-thirty, same as always, because I didn’t know what else to do with a Sunday.
I ordered two short stacks out of habit and then sat there with the second one going cold across from me.
At ten to nine a bike went past the window and banged into the rack outside.
Pen came in with her hood up and a backpack on, slid into the booth, and pulled the plate toward her before she said hello.
Then she unzipped the backpack and set the blue pill box on the table between the syrups.
Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday night, Sunday morning. Every one of those little doors still had pills in it. Round white ones. No line down the middle.
“She doesn’t go in his bathroom,” Pen said. “She has her own. I’ve been filling it again since summer, when she’s at the gym Sunday mornings. I didn’t want him to have nobody doing it.”
“Since summer.”
“In July the peach ones came out of the bottle white.” She cut her pancake into triangles and didn’t eat any of it. “I told Dad. He said don’t say anything to her. He took one to a man in Wheeling.”
I asked her if he quit taking them.
“No.” She pushed a square around in the syrup. “He kept taking them out of the box every morning in front of her, so she wouldn’t know he knew. He said one more week wouldn’t kill him.”
I had to put my fork down.
“There’s more,” Pen said. “Wednesday night she was in the garage on the phone with Kendrick, saying your name. So I went out there. I said I knew about his pills. I said if anything happened I was telling Uncle Johnnie.”
“What did she say?”
“She said nobody would ever believe a biker over a widow.” Pen looked at me. “That’s why you couldn’t sit down. She told me after. She said if you came near me at the funeral she’d tell everybody you were trying to take me, and they’d believe her because of the bike.”
Her phone was face down by the syrup. It started to buzz against the table and kept buzzing.
She didn’t turn it over.
“She tracks it,” she said. “She’ll be here in like eleven minutes.”
I put the pill box in my own jacket.
“Ride home the long way,” I said. “Tomorrow I come get you the right way.”
Faye’s conference room
Faye called Dorota in for ten o’clock Monday to go over Lewis’s papers.
I was there at nine. I wore my vest.
Dorota came in at ten after with Kendrick behind her carrying her coffee. She saw me at the end of the table and stopped, and then she sat down anyway, across from me, and set her purse on the table like she was claiming the spot.
Faye read the guardianship part out loud. All of it, slowly, the witnesses’ names too.
Dorota let her get to the end.
“Okay,” she said. “So he wrote some things down while he was sick. He was on a lot of medication, Faye. You know that. Everybody knew that. This man” — she pointed at me without looking at me — “has been in that house every Sunday for ten years. He’s got no wife, he’s got no kids of his own, he takes a little girl on the back of a motorcycle. You want to put that in front of a judge? Go ahead. I’ll be there. I’ll bring the deputy.”
I took the blue pill box out of my vest and set it on the table.
“That’s from my bathroom,” Dorota said. “He stole that too.”
“Penelope brought it to him,” Faye said.
“Penelope is thirteen and her father just died. She’ll say whatever the last person told her.” Dorota picked up the box, rattled it, put it down. “Those are vitamins. He liked vitamins. He bought all kinds of junk. You can’t prove where this box has been since Thursday. You can’t prove anything.”
Nobody said anything.
Kendrick had stopped drinking the coffee he was holding for her.
Dorota looked at him and then at me, and something went out of her shoulders.
“Fine,” she said. “You want the kid? Take the kid. I never signed up to raise somebody else’s teenager. She’s hated me since the first day I walked in. Take her this week, take her tonight, I’ll pack her bag. The house is in my name. Leave the house alone and leave that insurance to my lawyer, and give me back his phone, and you and her can go eat pancakes for the rest of your lives.”
“Dot,” Kendrick said.
“What? He wants her. Give him her.” She held her hand out across the table to me, palm up. “The phone, Johnnie.”
“No,” I said.
I got up and went to the conference room door.
I’d called Toni Nam from the pancake place Sunday, after Pen rode off. She was on the bench in the hallway where she’d said she’d be, with a paper evidence bag on her knees.
I handed her Lewis’s phone, the picture of the pharmacy bag already up on the screen.
It was the last thing I had of his that had his fingers on it. She told me it could be a year or more before I saw it again.
“Mr. Rios,” she said, past my shoulder. “You drive deliveries for Hilltop Pharmacy?”
Kendrick was halfway out of his chair.
He sat back down.
The front gate
Three Sundays later it was drizzling again.
I sold the bike to a kid from the club for about half what it was worth and bought a Buick with a back seat and a heater that works. The helmet two sizes too big is on the shelf in my garage. I couldn’t put it in the sale.
Pen sleeps in my spare room now. Faye says Dorota has been down to the sheriff’s office twice, the second time with a lawyer, and there’s a lockbox on the front door of Lewis’s house that Pen won’t look at when we drive by.
We parked at the cemetery’s front gate this time and walked in on the paved path.
The groundskeeper in the yellow rain jacket was by the shed. He looked at me, and at Pen, and lifted a hand.
Nobody was on the hill.
Pen stood at the stone with the umbrella over both of us, and she got a sandwich out of her coat pocket wrapped in a napkin, and tore it in half, and gave me mine.
“Triangles,” she said. “Don’t tell me you forgot.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still fills a pill box for someone they love on Sunday nights.
For more stories about family tensions and the people caught in the middle, read the dinner where Dad made a place card for everyone but his grandson and the boy hiding under a folding table.
