A twelve-year-old girl in a wheelchair told me during a benefit ride that the only thing she had ever dreamed of was knowing what it felt like to fly. “Mr. Garrett. I want to know what flying feels like.”
My name is Garrett Holbrook.
I am forty-eight years old. I work as a pipeline welder at an industrial fabrication yard on the west side of Memphis, Tennessee. I have been a patched member of the Bluff City Iron Circle MC for sixteen years.
I am writing this with permission from a twelve-year-old girl named Elara June Casillas and her mother, Yolanda Casillas, who live in a small one-bedroom apartment near South Lauderdale Street in Memphis.
Elara has cerebral palsy. She was born with the condition on March 22nd, 2013. She has relied on a pediatric manual wheelchair since she was two and a half years old. She cannot walk. She has minimal motor control below her hips. In her twelve years of life, she has been through nine surgeries.
She dreams of becoming a prosthetics designer when she grows up. She carries a sketchpad everywhere filled with drawings of articulated mechanical limbs. She has studied every behind-the-scenes documentary about every James Cameron film ever released.
I first met Elara in April of 2023 during a benefit ride my club organized for a children’s rehabilitation center on the north side of Memphis.
She had wheeled herself into the staging area to watch the motorcycles assemble into formation. She was alone. Her mother was still inside filling out insurance forms.
I knelt down roughly five feet from her wheelchair. I asked if she was a fan of motorcycles.
She answered, “Sir. I love motorcycles. I have never been on one. Could I please hear what one sounds like up close?”
I fired up my Road King while she pressed her palm flat against the fuel tank.
Her face cycled through about five different expressions in under two seconds.
Then she asked me – twelve years old, her hand still resting against my warm midnight-black gas tank – “Mr. Garrett. What does it feel like to fly?”
Her question lived inside my head for eleven months before I finally built an answer.
Beginning in April of 2023, with help from four brothers in the Bluff City Iron Circle MC, a sidecar fabrication specialist from Jonesboro named Dale, and 387 hours spent welding, cutting, painting, and engineering, we constructed a custom sidecar for Elara. It locked her pediatric wheelchair into a reinforced steel floor cradle and featured a four-point harness adjusted for a twelve-year-old, a padded headrest, a roll cage wrapped in impact foam, an acrylic windscreen that could be folded completely flat so the air would rush directly into her face, and a compact insulated compartment for her medication bag.
We hand-painted one word in white script along the rear side panel.
FLY.
Her first ride took place on Sunday, March 9th, 2024, along a quiet two-lane stretch near Shelby Farms, east of Memphis.
I locked the windscreen in the fully open position so the wind would hit her face without anything between.
I started the engine. I rolled onto the road at ten miles per hour.
For nearly thirty seconds, Elara just sat there with her eyes closed and the breeze washing over her cheeks.
Then her small hands rose.
She stretched both arms straight out from her body like the wings of a bird. She tilted her face upward toward the wide open sky.
And then she screamed with every ounce of power in her twelve-year-old lungs into that cold March Tennessee morning – “I’M FLYING. MR. GARRETT, I’M FLYING. DON’T STOP. I’M FLYING.”
I kept riding.
Her mother recorded fifty-one seconds of our third pass on her phone.
She uploaded the clip to her personal Facebook page that Sunday evening, where she had roughly sixty followers.
By Wednesday, it had crossed one million views. By Saturday, it had passed four million. By the following Thursday – March 20th, 2024 – it had surpassed fifteen million views.
At 9:12 that morning, a man Elara had not laid eyes on in more than ten years found the video online and dialed Yolanda’s number.
His name is Roberto Casillas. He is Elara’s biological father. He walked out when Elara was five weeks old and still in the NICU at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis. It happened in the family waiting area in late April of 2013, when Roberto told Yolanda that he had never signed up to live “this kind of life.”
He had paid the court-ordered child support amount of $287 each month for twelve years. He had not shown up for a single one of Elara’s nine surgeries. The only birthday acknowledgment he had ever made was a single twenty-five-dollar gift card inside an envelope when Elara turned seven.
That afternoon, Yolanda forwarded his call to my phone.
I answered.
The eight words I said to him on March 20th, 2024 – and the words Elara later spoke to her mother while sitting at their kitchen table that evening – are the part of this story that cannot be captured in a headline.
The Number Yolanda Had Deleted
Roberto didn’t say hello.
He said, “I saw the video.”
His voice was lower than I expected. That’s a stupid thing to notice, but I had built a picture of him in my head over the past year. In that picture he had a loud voice. A cheap laugh. The kind of man who slapped a counter when he was angry.
Instead, he sounded like somebody calling the bank.
I was sitting in my truck outside the fabrication yard. The air conditioner was blowing hot air because the passenger-side vent had been broken since July. I had a welding hood on the seat beside me and a bologna sandwich in the wrapper on my lap.
“Which video?” I asked.
He went quiet.
Then he said, “The motorcycle one. With my daughter.”
I looked through the windshield at the yard gate. A forklift was carrying a bundle of pipe toward Bay Four. The driver, Donnie Pruitt, raised two fingers at me.
“Her name is Elara,” I said.
“I know her name.”
“Do you?”
That got him breathing harder.
He said he wanted to speak to her. He said he had tried Yolanda first, but she had sent the call to voicemail. He said he hadn’t known how to reach out. He said the video had made him realize some things.
I have heard grown men say a lot of things around motorcycles. Men confess at gas stations. They talk about their marriages while standing beside chrome. They tell you their sons are in jail and their brothers are dead and they don’t know why they keep waking up.
Roberto’s words had the same problem most words have. They showed up after the damage.
“You left before she could know your voice,” I told him.
Eight words.
He didn’t answer.
I counted them again while he sat there breathing into the phone.
“You left before she could know your voice.”
Then I hung up.
I didn’t throw the phone. I thought about it. The phone was a government-issued Samsung with a cracked corner, and the company would have docked my check.
Yolanda called me six minutes later.
“What did you say to him?”
I told her.
She made a small sound. Not crying. More like she had bitten the inside of her cheek.
“Thank you,” she said.
I didn’t feel thanked.
The Man in the White Pickup
That evening, Roberto parked outside Yolanda’s apartment in a white Ford F-150 with a missing front hubcap.
Yolanda saw him from the kitchen window. Elara was at the table drawing a hand with six joints in each finger. She had a red mechanical pencil between her teeth.
“He’s here,” Yolanda said.
Elara kept drawing.
“Who?”
“Your father.”
The pencil stopped.
Yolanda told me later that Elara didn’t ask why. She asked if he looked older.
He did. Forty-one years old. Thinning hair. Work shirt tucked into jeans. A brown paper bag from a grocery store sitting on the passenger seat.
He knocked once.
Yolanda did not open the door.
He knocked again. Then he called her phone. Then he sent a message that said, I just want five minutes.
Elara looked at the screen.
“Does he want five minutes with me or five minutes on the internet?”
Yolanda said she didn’t know.
That was the wrong answer, but it was the only honest one.
Roberto stayed outside for nineteen minutes. He never knocked a third time. At 7:04, the white truck pulled away from the curb.
Inside the apartment, Elara went back to her drawing.
She colored the fingers black.
The next morning, three television stations called Yolanda. Two wanted Elara to appear live in the studio. One offered a morning interview from the apartment. A producer from a national program left four messages and said they could send a car.
Yolanda turned them all down.
“They’re calling because of the ride,” she told me. “Not because they know her.”
The club had started getting calls too. People wanted pictures beside the sidecar. A dealership in Germantown offered to pay for a new Road King if we displayed their logo. A man in Arkansas wanted to buy the design plans.
Dale, the fabricator from Jonesboro, read that last message and spit coffee onto his workbench.
“The plans aren’t for sale,” he said.
Dale was sixty-three, with a left thumb bent sideways from a shop accident. He had made the sidecar in a storage unit behind his cousin’s tire business. The first steel cradle weighed too much and tore through the test straps. The second one rattled so badly that a socket fell out of the tool tray during a parking-lot run.
The third one held.
We had tested it with sandbags, water jugs, and a toolbox that weighed 180 pounds. We had driven over railroad crossings. We had stopped hard. We had tipped the empty sidecar onto its right side in Dale’s gravel lot.
Elara had been there for all of it.
She had opinions.
“The headrest needs to move two inches left,” she said during the second test.
Dale stared at her.
She pointed to the drawing on her lap. “Her neck would twist if you hit a pothole.”
Dale moved it two inches left.
She was right.
Elara’s Rules
Yolanda didn’t let Roberto inside that week.
She agreed to a meeting at a McDonald’s near Poplar Avenue on Saturday at 10:30 in the morning. Public place. No cameras. No surprise visitors. No touching Elara unless Elara reached first.
Roberto arrived at 10:18.
He sat in a booth with a paper cup between both hands. He had shaved. He wore a blue button-down shirt with the collar bent on one side.
Yolanda and Elara came in at 10:34.
I was parked across the lot with Big Mike and Travis, two brothers from the club. We weren’t there to threaten anybody. We were there because Yolanda asked us to stay close, and because Roberto had already shown what he did when nobody was watching.
Elara wheeled herself to the booth.
Roberto stood too fast and knocked his knee against the table.
“Hey,” he said.
Elara looked at him.
He smiled. His mouth shook on the left side.
“You’ve gotten so big.”
She glanced down at her chair.
“I’m not big,” she said. “I’m twelve.”
Roberto sat back down.
Yolanda ordered coffee. Elara wanted fries and a chocolate shake. Roberto said he didn’t want anything, then ordered a sausage biscuit after the cashier asked twice.
For seven minutes they talked about nothing.
School. The sidecar. The television stations.
Roberto had watched the video forty-three times, he said. He had saved it to his phone. He had shown it to people at work.
“Why?” Elara asked.
He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the paper cup.
“Because I was proud.”
“You weren’t there.”
His face pinched.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” She pulled the straw from her shake and put it in. “You know you weren’t there. That’s different.”
Yolanda looked at her hands.
I looked through the window at Big Mike. He had turned his back to the restaurant and was pretending to read a sign about breakfast specials. Big Mike has never read a breakfast special in his life.
Roberto said he was sorry.
Elara nodded once.
“Okay.”
He looked relieved.
It didn’t last.
“Do you want to come to my next ride?” she asked.
“Yeah. I’d love that.”
“You can come if Mr. Garrett says.”
Roberto looked at Yolanda.
“Why would he say?”
“Because he built it.”
“I can build things.”
“Can you?” Elara asked.
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
She took a fry and broke it in half.
Then she said, “The next ride is for kids at the rehab center. You can’t come just because people know my name now.”
He said he understood.
She shook her head. “You keep saying that.”
The meeting ended at 11:06.
Roberto asked if he could hug her.
Elara said no.
He nodded like a man accepting a parking ticket.
Outside, Yolanda buckled Elara into the back seat of her old Honda. Roberto stood near the curb with the grocery bag still in his hand. He had brought Elara a stuffed wolf.
She didn’t take it.
As Yolanda pulled away, Roberto remained there holding the wolf by one ear.
The Second Passenger
The father wasn’t the only thing that changed after the video.
A week later, a woman named Karen Bell called the club office. Karen ran a small adaptive sports program in Bartlett. She asked if Elara could bring the sidecar to an event for children with spinal injuries.
I told her we’d ask Yolanda.
Yolanda said yes.
The event was held in a church parking lot on a hot Saturday in May. There were folding tables, a barbecue smoker, and a row of modified bicycles. The sidecar drew people before we even took it off the trailer.
Kids came close and stared.
Parents asked questions.
One boy with braces on both legs wanted to know if the windscreen could come down. A girl with a feeding tube asked how much the whole thing cost. A teenager named Curtis asked if he could sit in it.
We let him.
Then we let everybody who was safe to fit sit in it.
Elara took charge of the line. She had a clipboard, a marker, and a strip of duct tape on the left wheel where she had marked the brake cable.
“No pushing,” she told the kids. “No touching the throttle. If you need a different strap, tell us. Don’t pretend you’re comfortable because you’re scared to ask.”
Dale stood beside me, wiping sweat from his neck.
“She’s running this better than you do,” he said.
“She has a clipboard.”
“That’s all it takes.”
At 2:40, a little boy named Marcus got into the sidecar. He was six. His father had to lift him from a stroller, and Marcus kept his hands clamped against his chest.
Elara rolled beside him.
“First time?” she asked.
Marcus nodded.
“You don’t have to smile.”
His father laughed once, then covered his mouth.
Elara showed him where to put his hands. She told him the engine would be loud. She told him the air might make his eyes water. She told him that if he hated it, they would stop.
Marcus went around the parking lot twice.
When he came back, he was crying.
His father thought something was wrong. He started unbuckling the harness.
Marcus grabbed his wrist.
“I want to do it again,” he said.
Elara smiled.
Not the big smile from the video. The private one. One corner first.
That was when I understood the sidecar had become more than an answer to one question. I didn’t say it out loud. I don’t like sentences that sound better than the thing itself.
I checked the straps.
Then we took Marcus around again.
What She Said at the Kitchen Table
Roberto came to the next ride.
He stood behind the crowd in a black baseball cap. He didn’t tell any reporters. He didn’t bring the wolf. He had his hands in his pockets and watched Elara explain the sidecar to a little girl named Penny.
Yolanda saw him first.
She didn’t wave.
Roberto stayed at the edge of the parking lot until Elara noticed him. Then he walked over.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Can I help?”
Elara looked at the sidecar.
“The left rear strap is loose.”
He bent down.
His fingers fumbled with the buckle. He pulled the strap too hard, and it snapped back against his knuckles.
“Ouch,” he said.
Elara watched him.
“You’re doing it wrong.”
“I guess I am.”
She rolled closer and showed him how the buckle worked. Roberto listened. He didn’t reach for her chair. He didn’t ask for another hug.
When they finished, Elara said, “You can stay.”
So he stayed.
For three hours, he held a cooler. He carried two folding chairs. He pushed the empty sidecar up the trailer ramp while Dale shouted, “Not there. The other side.”
Nobody took a picture of him.
That night, Elara sat at the kitchen table with Yolanda. The apartment’s air conditioner rattled in the window. A spoon had fallen behind the stove, and nobody wanted to reach for it.
Yolanda asked if she was glad Roberto came.
Elara peeled the label from a water bottle.
“Maybe.”
“Do you want to see him again?”
“Maybe.”
Yolanda waited.
Elara looked toward the sketchpad beside her elbow. She had drawn a new forearm design, this one with a small spring-loaded wrist.
“Mom?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think he came because he missed me?”
Yolanda didn’t answer right away.
Elara’s thumb kept working at the label. It came off in one long strip, then tore.
“Or because everybody saw me flying?”
Yolanda reached across the table.
Elara put her hand over her mother’s.
“Don’t make him be my dad just because he feels bad,” she said.
Yolanda’s eyes filled.
Elara looked down at their hands.
“I don’t need a dad who only knows me when strangers are watching.”
That was what she said.
Not a headline. Not something that fits over a picture of a motorcycle.
Just a twelve-year-old girl in a one-bedroom apartment, sitting beside a water bottle with the label torn off, asking an adult not to hand her life back to somebody who had dropped it.
The Road Outside Shelby Farms
We still ride every Sunday morning when the weather allows.
Elara has a helmet with a red stripe now. She designed the stripe herself. The first one had a crooked sticker on it because I put it on while wearing my reading glasses and didn’t notice the angle.
She noticed.
There are new marks on the sidecar floor from wheel clamps and muddy shoes. The white paint around FLY has chipped near the bottom edge. Dale says he can fix it.
Elara says not to.
She says the scratches prove it gets used.
In October, she rode with me past the lake at Shelby Farms while geese crossed the road and made everybody stop. She had the windscreen open. Her hair came loose from under her helmet and slapped my cheek at every red light.
“Faster,” she said.
“We’re already at thirty-five.”
“That isn’t flying.”
“That’s a traffic ticket.”
“Mr. Garrett.”
I looked over.
She was grinning.
So I gave the throttle another inch on the empty stretch. The engine rose under us. The sidecar shook. Her arms went out.
Behind us, Yolanda followed in the Honda with Roberto in the passenger seat.
He had started coming to the rides. He never sat in the sidecar. He never asked to. He learned how to tighten the harness and where the medication compartment latch stuck in cold weather.
Some days Elara talked to him.
Some days she didn’t.
That wasn’t mine to fix.
Last Sunday, rain came through around noon. We got back to the shop with our jackets soaked and the tires throwing brown water onto the walls. Elara had a new drawing tucked under her coat.
A mechanical wing.
Not the kind with feathers. Aluminum ribs, joint pins, a control cable running down to the elbow.
She spread it on Dale’s workbench.
“I want to make this one work,” she said.
Dale squinted at the page.
“For a person?”
“For anybody who wants to fly.”
He looked at me.
I looked at the drawing.
Outside, rain tapped on the metal roof. The sidecar sat under the fluorescent lights, wet and dirty, its white letters showing through the drops.
FLY.
Elara reached for a pencil.
“Mr. Garrett, hold this corner.”
I held it down while she drew the hinge.
For more heartwarming tales of unexpected heroes, check out what happened when the dog cried for five days and the biker scaled the building, or how an eleven-year-old boy silenced a mocking crowd. You might also find yourself captivated by the story of a father who knocked on a door at midnight and handed them his daughter when he was told men like them destroy lives.
