The last thing I saw of my father alive was the back of his pressed shirt, untucked on one side, going out the side door of the country club past the coat check.
I watched it go and turned back to my champagne.
That was Saturday, May 16. Pawel’s relatives had come in suits and pearls. My father wore his one good pair of jeans, his burn scars and faded ink showing below sleeves an inch too short, and steel-toe work boots he’d polished until they looked wet. When the DJ called for the father-daughter dance, he walked out alone and held his hand out to me.
“Just one song, kiddo.”
I had been hiding from that man since fourth grade. Behind the school bus when he came on the 1979 bike he rebuilt himself. Behind his first name, which I started using in high school so nobody would hear me call a muffler welder Dad. He never corrected me once.
So I shook his hand like he’d sold me a car.
“Not in those boots, Lenny. Pawel’s whole family is watching.”
He nodded and let go. He left before the cake, and I didn’t call.
Eighteen days later, on Wednesday, June 3, a gravel hauler drifted over the center line on Route 7 in fog. When the sheriff’s office called I said thank you and finished my coffee. I felt nothing at all.
Then came the funeral on June 9 at the Methodist church in Steuben Mills. Three hundred and forty motorcycles, riders from four states, yellow ribbons on every vest. A line of strangers calling him Brother Lenny. A man named Sang holding up an eleven-year sobriety coin. And Ms. Galang, his lawyer, handing me his cracked saddlebag.
That night I found a letter signed Dad, ledgers showing $146,000 given away over seventeen years, and his bike’s title in my name.
The next morning Delores slid a folder across the shop counter and tapped the blank line.
“He wanted you to pick the first kid. Thing is, the first kid already picked you.”
The drawing on the third floor
“What does that mean, picked me,” I said.
Delores didn’t answer. She took her keys off the nail by the register, flipped the sign on the door to CLOSED, and said, “Bring the coffee.”
I brought the coffee. I sat in the passenger seat of her truck with that chipped mug in both hands for forty minutes to the children’s hospital, because she drives like Lenny drove, which is like the road owes you money, and I didn’t want it in my lap.
The third floor smelled like hand sanitizer and grape juice. Delores knew every nurse by name. One of them hugged her and then looked at me and said, “Oh, honey. You’ve got his chin.”
Nobody had ever told me that. I’d spent twenty years making sure nobody had a reason to.
At the end of the hall there was a playroom with a beanbag nobody could get out of and a window full of paper motorcycles. Dozens of them, taped to the glass, crayon and marker. Every one had a yellow flag stuck on the back.
A girl in a purple wheelchair was coloring at the low table. Nine, maybe. She had a pencil behind her ear like a carpenter.
She looked up at me and put her crayon down very carefully, like a person setting down something that might go off.
“You’re Katelyn,” she said. “The accountant.”
“I am.”
“He said you’d have a bag.” She pointed at the saddlebag on my shoulder. I’d brought it in without thinking. I’d been carrying it since the church. “He said if you came, you’d have that bag, because it was yours now.”
Her name was Hanna. She’d been on the ward on and off since she was six. Her spine curved in a way that was going to start pressing on things that mattered, and the surgery that would fix it cost more than her mother’s insurance would cover by an amount that made me, a professional, sit down on the beanbag. I couldn’t get out of the beanbag. Hanna watched me try twice and didn’t laugh, which was generous of her.
“Lenny came every Thursday,” she said. “He did the toy run in December, but he came on Thursdays anyway. He told me about you.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That you could add a whole page of numbers in your head and never be wrong. That you were the smartest person in your whole school.” She frowned. “He said you didn’t ride, though. He said that was his fault, he never pushed.”
I had to look at the paper motorcycles for a while.
“He said when the fund started, you’d pick who got it,” she said. “So I asked if it could be me. And he said that was up to you, but he’d put in a word.”
Delores was leaning in the doorway with her arms crossed.
“That’s the first kid,” she said.
A man in a white coat came in behind her. Sixties, round glasses, the tired kind of handsome doctors get. He shook Delores’s hand with both of his.
“Dr. Barone,” Delores said. “He runs the place.”
“I don’t run anything,” he said. “The nurses run it. I sign things.” He looked at me a long moment. “You’re Lenny’s daughter.”
“Katelyn.”
“I know.” He sat on the edge of the little table, which groaned. “The riders’ account for Hanna’s surgery. Your father raised twenty-six thousand last year on the December run. After the funeral the guys passed a helmet around the church lot. They’ve matched it. It’s at fifty-two thousand now.”
Fifty-two thousand. On the third floor of a children’s hospital, from men I’d watched walk up the aisle in leather the day before and quietly decided were not my people.
“The account’s in the fund’s name,” Dr. Barone said. “Somebody on the fund has to sign the check. And the run’s on Saturday the twentieth. Fourteen miles, from the shop to our front doors. Lenny always rode point. The riders want to know who’s riding point.”
Hanna was watching me now with her whole face.
“I don’t ride,” I said.
“That’s what he said,” Hanna said.
Dr. Barone walked me to the elevator. Delores stayed behind to tape up a new motorcycle.
At the elevator he pressed the button and then didn’t let go of it.
“Your mother was Joy,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I was a resident in nephrology in 2005. Your father brought her in for dialysis three times a week for two years. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Never missed. Sat in that plastic chair in his work shirt doing crosswords wrong.”
“He did them in pen,” I said. I didn’t know I remembered that.
“He told me once that a pipeline outfit out of Texas had offered him a welding contract that spring. Three times what the shop paid. Six weeks on, two off.” Dr. Barone took his thumb off the button. “He turned it down. Said, ‘Who’s going to drive Joy?’ That’s all he said about it. Then he went back to his crossword.”
The elevator opened. I didn’t get in.
I was eight that spring. I remember only that I wanted a bike with streamers and he said not this year, and I told him Jessica Cobb’s dad was buying her a horse. I said it at dinner. My mother, who was gray by then, put her fork down and looked at me, and he said, “Eat your peas, kiddo,” and that was that.
He stayed small. He stayed small on purpose, for her, and then for me, and then I spent twenty years being embarrassed by exactly how small.
I got in the elevator. The doors closed on Dr. Barone’s tired face.
In the lobby I took the masking tape out of the tin and read it again. For the girl who never learned to ride.
Then I called Delores’s cell from twenty feet away.
“Who teaches people to ride,” I said. “In nine days.”
Maurice and the lake house
His name was Maurice, he was seventy-one, he’d been in the Army and he had opinions about my posture.
“You sit on it like it owes you an apology,” he said, on Thursday, June 11, in the empty gravel lot behind the shop. “Sit on it like it’s yours. It is yours. I saw the title.”
Everybody had seen the title. Apparently Lenny had shown it to half of Ohio.
My father’s bike was a 1979 everything-he-could-find. The tank was a faded orange he’d never repainted because he said the dents were where the stories lived. The seat had been rebuilt to his shape, and I fit in it like a kid wearing a coat. I couldn’t reach the ground flat-footed. Maurice lowered it an inch with a wrench and a lot of language.
I stalled it eleven times the first morning. I counted. I count everything, that’s the job.
“Clutch out slow,” Maurice said. “Slower. Like you’re letting go of a grudge.”
“I’m not good at that.”
“No kidding,” Maurice said. “I was at the wedding.”
I looked at him.
“Not inside. I was the one who drove him home. His truck wouldn’t start, the club wouldn’t let him park the bike in front, so he’d come in my truck.” He spat in the gravel. “He didn’t say one word about you the whole way back. Not one bad word. Just asked if I thought the cake was any good.”
I put my helmet on so I wouldn’t have to do anything with my face.
By the second day I could go across the lot. By the third I could go around it. On the fourth I took the county road for a mile with Maurice behind me on his Harley, and a pickup came up on my left and I flinched so hard I nearly put us both in a soybean field.
Maurice pulled up beside me on the shoulder.
“Trucks,” I said. My hands were shaking. “He was afraid of the trucks. Yvonne said.”
“Everybody’s afraid of the trucks,” Maurice said. “That’s why we wear the yellow.” He reached into his vest and handed me a ribbon. “You go when you’re ready.”
I went. It took twenty minutes. He waited.
Then Sunday came, and with it the lake house.
Pawel’s family had Sunday lunch at the lake every week from Memorial Day until it got cold, and I had been going for four years in white sandals and a sun hat, saying yes to the potato salad. I hadn’t been since the funeral. Pawel said they all understood, which I suspected meant they had all discussed it.
I drove up on the bike.
I hadn’t planned to. My car was at home and the bike was at the shop and I’d ridden it there and it was just easier, I told myself, and I had nine days, and every mile counted. All true. Also I wanted them to see it, and I wanted to see what they did.
What they did was come out on the deck.
Pawel’s mother. Pawel’s father, holding tongs. And Aunt Ariella, who had looked at my father’s boots at my wedding and then at me with the face of someone who’d found a hair in her soup.
I took my helmet off. My hair was flat and my jeans had a grease stripe from the kickstand.
“Oh,” Ariella said. “Oh, Katelyn. You poor thing.”
Pawel came down the steps fast. He took my elbow and turned me a little away from the deck.
“Hey,” he said. “You okay? You rode that here?”
“I’m learning. There’s a run on the twentieth. For the children’s ward. I’m leading it.”
“Leading it.”
“Riding point. It was his.”
He looked at the bike. Then up at the deck. Then at me.
“Babe,” he said. “Can we talk about it after lunch?”
Lunch was grilled salmon and Ariella. She asked if the bikers had been “respectful” at the service. She asked if there’d be “some kind of estate,” in the voice of someone asking whether a stray dog had its shots. She said, to the whole table, “It’s admirable, it really is, giving to charity. But on that kind of income. You do wonder about the planning.”
“He planned,” I said. “He kept a ledger since 2009.”
“Of course he did,” Ariella said, and patted my hand.
I had sat at this table for four years letting her pat my hand.
Pawel’s father cleared his throat. “What Ariella means, sweetheart, is that you’ve got a lot of grief right now. And you’ve got a career. People at your office, people in our circle. A woman on a motorcycle in a parade with a lot of, well.” He made a shape with the tongs. “It’s a picture.”
“It’s a picture of what?” I said.
Nobody answered. Pawel looked at his plate.
That was the worst part. I’d expected Ariella. I’d expected the tongs. I had not expected my husband to examine his salmon while his family told me my father was an unfortunate picture.
I knew that look on him because I’d seen it in a mirror. I’d worn it on a dance floor on May 16.
I rode home alone. Pawel stayed to help his dad with the boat.
Monday, June 15
On Monday Maurice put me on Route 7.
He didn’t tell me first. We went out the shop’s back gate and turned left instead of right and I knew where we were before the sign, because of the curve, and because there was a cross at the shoulder now, white, with a yellow bandana tied to it and a pile of flowers and a socket wrench somebody had left.
I pulled over. I sat on the bike with the engine running and my boots, which were cheap sneakers, braced in the gravel.
“Why here,” I said.
“Because Saturday the run comes down this road,” Maurice said. “Fourteen miles from the shop to the hospital and this is mile six. You don’t want to see this for the first time with three hundred bikes behind you.”
He got off his Harley. He took the socket wrench off the flowers, looked at it, and put it back exactly where it had been.
“He was coming back from the hospital,” Maurice said. “That Wednesday. Hanna’s mom called the shop. Some paperwork with the insurance. He went over to help her fill it out.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t read half of it himself. Told her his daughter was an accountant, she’d know. Said he’d call you.”
I hadn’t picked up the phone in eighteen days. I’d seen his name on the screen once, on June 1, and turned it face down on my desk.
I didn’t say that to Maurice. I didn’t have to. He’d known my father thirty years. He knew who didn’t call back.
Here is what I did. I turned off the bike. I walked to the cross in my sneakers. I untied the yellow bandana, put it in my pocket, and replaced it with the yellow ribbon Maurice had given me. Then I got back on.
I stalled it. Twice. Maurice didn’t say a word.
The third time it caught.
That night I took the bike up the driveway at home and dropped it.
I’d made it fourteen miles, there and back, and on my own concrete, going two miles an hour, I put my foot down on an oil spot and the whole thing went over on its left side with me under it. The left saddlebag mount snapped clean off. The cracked leather bag that had hung there my entire life skidded across the driveway into the mulch.
Pawel came out of the garage at a run. He got the bike off my leg. My ankle was fine. My pride was in the mulch with the bag.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, this is the sign. Kate, you can’t do this in five days.”
I sat on the driveway holding the snapped bracket.
“Mom called,” he said. “Ariella’s coming to the run. The whole family is. She says if you’re going to do it, they’re going to be there to support you.” He said support the way you’d say a word in a foreign language you’d memorized off a card. “Dad thinks it might be good. You know. If it’s a good look for the family. If you’re up front. In something nice.”
“In something nice.”
“Not the leather. You don’t have to look like one of them.”
I looked up at him.
“Say that again,” I said.
He didn’t. He knew. His ears went red. But he didn’t take it back, either, and he didn’t sit down on the driveway with me, and after a minute he said he’d get ice and went inside.
I picked the saddlebag up out of the mulch. Inside, in the bottom corner I’d never checked because I’d thought it was lining, was a folded paper program.
My wedding program. White, cardstock, my name and Pawel’s in gold script. He’d folded it in quarters and carried it eighteen days on the left side of his bike, on the side the trucks came from.
On the back, in pencil, in his cramped little columns, he’d written: Kiddo. Next time I’ll wear the shoes.
Mile fourteen
Saturday, June 20, the lot behind the shop opened at seven.
By eight there were three hundred and forty bikes. I know the number because Sang stood at the gate with a clipboard and counted, and he said, “Same as the funeral, Katelyn, nobody’s missing,” and then had to walk away for a minute.
Delores had welded the bracket back on Thursday night. She didn’t let me watch. She said the torch was hers and nobody else’s, Lenny’s rules, and then she came out with the saddlebag back on the left side, the old mount ground smooth and a new bead of weld along it bright as a scar.
Pawel’s family arrived at eight-fifteen in two cars. Ariella had on white linen. Pawel’s mother had brought a cooler of sparkling water nobody asked for. Pawel was in a polo shirt, holding a garment bag.
“Mom picked something,” he said. “For the photos.”
It was a cream silk blouse and tailored slacks. It was lovely. It was what I’d have worn a month ago.
I was wearing Lenny’s leather jacket with the sleeves rolled four times. Under it, a gray T-shirt from the shop that said STEUBEN MILLS MUFFLER & FRAME across the back. Yellow ribbon on the collar.
And on my feet, his boots.
Steel-toe, polished. Delores had stuffed the toes with newspaper and laced them so tight my calves went numb. They were still a size and a half too big. I’d practiced shifting in them for two days.
Ariella saw them before she saw my face.
“Katelyn,” she said. Loud. The way she says things she wants a room to remember. “Oh, sweetheart, no. Not those. Not today. There will be photographers from the hospital, there will be people from Pawel’s firm, you cannot be standing in front of all of them in a dead man’s work boots.”
Sang heard it. Maurice heard it. Yvonne, in her silver braids, set her helmet on her seat and turned around. The lot had been loud with engines and coffee and somebody’s radio, and the part of it nearest us went quiet, then the part behind that.
I stood up off the bike.
“I said that,” I said. “At my wedding. I said almost those exact words to him. Not in those boots. And he went home.”
Ariella opened her mouth.
“No. You can wait.” My voice came out higher than I wanted. I let it. “I’m going to say this to everybody, because I said it to him in front of everybody, so this is the rule now. I told my father he couldn’t dance with me because his boots embarrassed me in front of your family. I called him Lenny for fifteen years so nobody would know he was my dad. He drove my mother to dialysis three times a week instead of taking a job that paid three times as much. He gave away a hundred forty-six thousand dollars. He went to the hospital the day he died to help a little girl’s mom fill out a form, because he couldn’t, and he was going to ask me. And I’d turned his name face down on my desk.”
Somebody behind me, a big man with a gray ponytail, said, “Aw, kid,” very softly, and nobody else said anything at all.
“So today,” I said, “I’m wearing the boots.”
Ariella’s face did a thing like a wet napkin folding.
“Well, I only meant,” she started. “There’s no need to make a scene. Pawel. Say something to her.”
Pawel was standing between his aunt and me with the garment bag over his arm.
I watched him decide. It took a long time, longer than a dance does.
Then he unzipped the garment bag, took out the cream blouse, folded it carefully, and handed it to his mother.
“Aunt Ari,” he said. “Go sit in the car.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You looked at his boots at our wedding. I saw you. And I let it go, and I let her go out there alone, and he walked off that floor, and I said nothing.” His ears were red again. He kept going. “You don’t get to do it twice. Go sit in the car. Or go home. But you don’t get to stand in his parking lot and say that.”
Pawel’s father started to say, “Son—”
“Dad. I mean it.”
Ariella looked at Pawel’s mother, who was looking at the ground. She looked at the three hundred and forty riders, none of whom had moved. Yvonne had picked her helmet up again and was holding it at her hip like she might have use for it.
Ariella turned around in her white linen and walked to the car. The door shut. A minute later the engine started, and she drove out of the lot and onto the county road, and Sang, at the gate, made a little mark on his clipboard and said, “Three hundred and thirty-nine,” and somebody laughed so hard they had to sit down on their bike.
Pawel came to me. He didn’t take my elbow this time. He stood in front of me and said, “I’m sorry. To him too.”
“Tell him on the way,” I said. “You’re riding behind me.”
“I don’t have a bike.”
Maurice threw him a helmet. “You do now. You’re on the back of mine. Hold on and don’t talk.”
Kiddo
I rode point.
Fourteen miles. Out the back gate, left on the county road, onto Route 7. At mile six the cross went by on my right with the yellow ribbon snapping on it, and behind me three hundred and thirty-nine engines throttled down all at once, so the sound dropped to almost nothing and you could hear the wind in the corn. Nobody had told me they’d do that. I kept my eyes on the road and the bike steady and his boots on the pegs, and I did not stall.
At the hospital the nurses had lined the front walk. Kids in wheelchairs and kids with IV poles and kids in their parents’ arms, and paper motorcycles taped to every window on the third floor.
Hanna was out front in the purple chair with a pencil behind her ear.
Dr. Barone held a clipboard and a giant cardboard check somebody in the gift shop had made, but I didn’t want the cardboard. I walked past it to the folding table and the real one, the fund’s checkbook, the Lenny & Daughter Fund printed across the top.
Fifty-two thousand dollars. Payable to the hospital, for Hanna’s spinal surgery.
I wrote it out in pen, in my best accountant’s hand, and checked the numbers twice anyway, because that’s the job. On the memo line I wrote: First award. From Dad.
Not Lenny. I wanted it on paper where a bank would have to read it.
Hanna’s mother cried into Delores’s shoulder. Delores, who does not hug, let her. Sang held up his coin to Hanna and let her keep it for the day. Pawel stood at the back in Maurice’s helmet with his hair stuck to his head and clapped until his hands were red.
The surgery got scheduled for July. It went fine. She sends me a drawing every week now. They are always of the same orange bike, with a woman on it in boots that are much too big.
On September 12, which would have been his sixty-third birthday, Delores and I opened the shop’s second bay as a free class. Eight teenagers, Thursdays after school, welding and frames and how to read a ledger. Maurice teaches posture. I teach the numbers. Delores still won’t let anybody touch the torch.
That first night, after the kids left, Pawel picked me up at the shop.
He’d brought a phone speaker. He set it on the counter between the register and the nail where the keys hang, and he looked at me, and I knew what song it was before it started, because it was the one the DJ had played on May 16 to an empty floor.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m in his boots.”
“That’s the point,” Pawel said.
I didn’t dance with my husband.
Hanna had come in with her mother at the end of class to see the bay, and she was sitting in the doorway in the purple chair watching us. I walked over to her in my father’s boots. I held out my hand, scarred now on the knuckles from Delores’s grinder.
“Just one song, kiddo,” I said.
She took it, and I turned her chair slowly around the shop floor while the music played for somebody.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still has a chance to call their dad back.
Family loyalty can get complicated fast – especially when the people closest to you cross a line, as in the story of a twin who tried to take over a condo and a mother who sidelined her granddaughter at a party.
