My husband bought a dead man’s motorcycle off his widow for $900 cash and laughed about it at supper: “She cried the whole time I counted it out, and I still talked her down two hundred.” When I said he ought to give it back, he told me I ran a register, not his business. Three years later her son walked in carrying a jar.
It was a Tuesday in March, a little after four.
The bell over our door has been broken since Christmas, so I didn’t hear him until glass touched the counter.
A pickle jar.
The big kind from Aldi, label soaked off, the lid rusty around the rim.
It was full almost to the neck. Quarters, mostly. Some dimes. Bills rolled tight with hair ties around them.
He was maybe eleven. Gray hoodie, the strings chewed down to nubs. He kept his arms around that jar like it might try to leave.
“Do you buy motorcycles or just fix them?” he said.
“Both,” I said. “My husband does the buying.”
“Is he here?”
“He’s in back with a riding mower. What do you need, hon?”
He dug in his hoodie pocket and came out with a square of notebook paper.
It had been opened and closed so often it had gone soft as a dish towel. Gray along every crease.
He flattened it with the side of his hand, careful, like it could tear from being looked at.
Seven characters in pencil. Traced over in pen later. Traced again.
“I’m trying to find this one,” he said. “It was my dad’s. Mom had to sell it when I was eight.”
I didn’t read it yet.
I looked at the jar instead.
“How much have you got in there?”
“One thousand three hundred twelve dollars and forty cents.” He didn’t check. “I write it down every time.”
He pulled a little spiral pad out of the other pocket to prove it.
Birthday money. Mowing. Ten dollars from a lady at church for carrying her groceries in. A long column of fives with Grandma Edith next to each one.
Then I read the paper.
My stomach went before my head did.
We sell maybe twelve used bikes a year out of this shop, on the east side of Muncie. I do the paperwork on every one of them. I have typed that plate into the BMV site exactly twice.
Once the week Lonnie bought it.
Once last Thursday, when he listed it.
“What kind of bike?” I said. I already knew.
“A Suzuki. Blue. It’s got a duck on the side.”
“A duck.”
“A sticker. I put it on when I was little. Dad said it was the fastest duck in the county.” He almost smiled. “He never took it off.”
Lonnie took it off.
He tried, anyway. He went at it with a razor scraper the afternoon he rolled the bike in, and he quit halfway because the paint started lifting with it.
There’s still a yellow beak and one orange foot on the left side cover.
I walk past that foot every morning on my way to start the coffee.
“What was your dad’s name?” I said.
“Devonte Byrd.”
And I remembered her then.
Raven. Thirty, maybe. She came in a month after the funeral with a boy in the back seat of her Corolla who would not get out of the car.
His heart had quit on him at thirty-one, she said. She needed eleven hundred for the headstone and the rent she was behind on. She knew the bike was worth more. She didn’t know how much more. She just couldn’t stand looking at it in the carport.
Lonnie gave her nine hundred.
I was standing right here. Right where I’m standing now.
At supper he did her voice for me. Her voice going high. Her wiping her face with the back of her wrist.
“Nine hundred,” he said, and laughed into his tea. “Bea. That’s a FOUR THOUSAND DOLLAR bike.”
I told him to call her. Give her the difference, at least.
“Nobody asked you,” he said. “You run the register.”
So I ran the register. Three more years.
Last week he put the Suzuki on Marketplace for $4,800. A man from up north is driving down Saturday with cash. There’s a PENDING tag zip-tied to the handlebar right now.
“Is it still around, you think?” the kid said. “People keep telling me old bikes just disappear. One man downtown said I was wasting my Saturdays.”
“How many shops have you been to?”
“This one makes fourteen.”
He’d ridden his bicycle here. It was leaning against our ice machine outside with no lock on it.
“Does your mom know where you are?”
“She thinks I’m at practice.” He slid the jar an inch toward me. “I know it’s not enough. I can get the rest by summer. I do eleven yards now.”
That’s when Lonnie came out of the back.
He was wiping his hands on the red rag he keeps in his back pocket. He saw the jar first. He always sees the money first.
“What’s all this?”
“He’s looking for a bike,” I said.
Lonnie leaned over my shoulder and read the paper.
His hands stopped moving in the rag.
Just for a second.
“Never seen it,” he said. Then, to the kid: “Those old Suzukis get parted out, bud. That one’s probably in a hundred pieces in somebody’s barn by now.”
Tucker didn’t let go of the jar.
That was his name. It was written on the inside cover of the spiral pad. Tucker B., in marker, the way a mom writes it.
“It’s got a duck on it,” Tucker said.
“Lotta bikes got stickers.”
I set the paper down.
There’s a drawer under our register where the titles live. In 2019, after his brother took him to court over a trailer, Lonnie put everything in my name. Every truck. Every bike. Every title in that drawer says BEATRIZ MAYO.
He did it so NOBODY could ever take anything from him.
I opened the drawer.
“Bea,” Lonnie said. “Don’t.”
I went through the folder to the S’s.
“Tucker, hon,” I said. “Read me that number one more time.”
He read it. Every character. Slow.
Lonnie’s hand came down flat on top of the drawer.
“That bike is SOLD,” he said. “Man’s coming Saturday. DON’T YOU DARE make me a liar in my own shop.”
“Your shop,” I said.
I pulled the title out from under his hand.
Tucker wasn’t watching either of us.
He was looking past us, through the open door to the back bay.
At a blue fender. And one small orange foot.
The S folder
It was the one. SUZUKI in the make box. The plate in the box under it, the same seven characters as the soft paper on my counter. And in the owner box, in the BMV’s block letters, BEATRIZ MAYO, with our shop address under it.
I laid the title on the counter next to the boy’s paper so the two lines sat one above the other.
Tucker looked down at them. Then back through the door.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the foot.”
“It’s a sticker,” Lonnie said. “Bea, put that back where it goes.”
I didn’t. Stapled behind the title, the way I staple every one, was the bill of sale. Raven’s signature at the bottom. Her phone number above it in her own hand, the sevens crossed like a schoolteacher’s.
I picked up the shop phone.
“Who you calling?” Lonnie said.
“His mother.”
Tucker let go of the jar. He put both hands flat on the counter, one on each side of it.
“Please don’t call my mom,” he said. “She’ll make me stop looking.”
2019
We’ve had the shop since 1998. Lonnie fixes mowers for every church widow on the east side at cost. He puts air in kids’ bicycle tires for free and tells them to tell their dads where they got it. People in Muncie say Lonnie Mayo would give you the shirt off his back. He has said it about himself, more than once, at this counter.
The year his brother Charles sued him over a car trailer, Lonnie came home from the lawyer’s office and sat me down at the kitchen table with a stack of papers. Every truck. Every bike on the lot. The shop’s lift and the compressor. The house.
“Your name, not mine,” he said. “Anybody comes after me, I don’t own a thing.”
He made me practice my signature on the back of a light bill until it came out the same every time. He said a title is only as good as the signature on it, and he wanted mine to be good.
He made a rule that year too, and I’ve kept it ever since. Every bike that comes in gets a folder. The title goes in front. The bill of sale goes behind it. The spare key goes in a little coin envelope, stapled to the back of the folder.
The main keys hang on a nail in the back bay. Lonnie has never once opened one of my folders. He calls that drawer my filing.
There was one other thing, and it didn’t seem like anything when it happened.
October before last. The wall phone rang, and Lonnie got to it first, the way he always does. He listened a minute. Then he carried the cordless out into the back bay and pulled the door shut behind him.
When he came back he hung it on the wall and said, “Lady wanting parts off an old bike. Told her we don’t part bikes.”
I didn’t write it down. There was nothing to write.
Now I had the receiver in my hand and an eleven-year-old asking me not to dial.
“Hang that up,” Lonnie said.
I hung it up. I hadn’t dialed.
When I looked back down, the jar was on the counter by itself and Tucker was already through the back bay door.
The back bay
Lonnie went after him. So did I.
The Suzuki was where it’s been since Thursday, nose out, between a Craftsman rider and a Honda with no seat. Lonnie had put new tires on it Friday and a battery in it Monday. The PENDING tag hung off the right handlebar on a white zip tie.
Tucker didn’t touch it.
He crouched by the left side cover and got his face down close to the foot. Three orange toes. Razor lines in the blue around them where Lonnie had gone at it and given up.
Somebody had left a Hardee’s cup on the seat of the Honda. I remember that cup. I don’t know why.
“Somebody tried to scrape it,” Tucker said.
“I scraped it,” Lonnie said. “It’s a sticker on a bike I paid for. I can scrape what I want.”
“You said you never saw it.”
Lonnie looked at me, not at him. He folded the red rag and put it back in his pocket like he was putting away a tool.
“Bud, listen to me,” he said. “Your mom sold this bike. I paid her cash money, and she signed for it, and that was three years ago. I put tires on it. I put a battery in it. That’s my money in there too. A man’s driving two hours to hand me forty-eight hundred dollars, and when he does, it’s his. That’s how buying and selling works. Your mom understood that. She’s a grown woman.”
Tucker stood up. He was looking at the foot, not at Lonnie.
“She told me it was gone,” he said. “She said a man told her it got parted out.”
Nine o’clock Wednesday
We went back up front. Lonnie walked behind us the whole way, like we might take a turn.
I tried it the easy way first. I have six thousand one hundred dollars at the credit union that I’d been putting by for a new roof. My money, from my paychecks, in an account with only my name on it.
“I’ll buy it from you,” I said. “Nine hundred. What you paid.”
Lonnie laughed. It was the supper laugh.
“Forty-eight hundred,” he said. “Same as anybody. You want to give me forty-eight hundred of roof money, Bea, I’ll take it.”
“Plus the tires.”
“Plus the tires.”
He walked out the front door with his phone. I could see him through the glass, pacing by the ice machine, next to Tucker’s bicycle. When he came back in he took the Suzuki key off the nail in the back bay and put it in the front pocket of his jeans and patted it.
“Man’s coming tomorrow instead,” he said. “Nine o’clock. Cash.”
He looked at the title on the counter.
“You take that boy home before his mama calls the law,” he said. “And you leave that paper in the drawer where it lives.”
I put the title in my purse.
I put Tucker’s bicycle in the bed of my Ranger. He rode up front with the jar on his lap and gave me directions, left at the Dollar General, right after the church with the sign that says GOD ANSWERS KNEE-MAIL. He held the pad the whole way and didn’t open it.
At the last light he said, “Is that man going to sell it tomorrow?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Can you help it?”
I didn’t answer him. The light changed.
His building was the brick one past the laundromat. The Corolla was in the lot.
The door opened before we got to it. Raven had her Kroger smock on, and she knew me before I said one word.
The light bill
“What are you doing with my son,” she said.
Tucker told her before I could. Fourteen shops. The jar. Practice that wasn’t practice since September. She let him get all the way through it standing in the doorway, and then she said his whole name, Tucker Devonte, and he went quiet.
“It’s at our shop,” I said. “In the back bay. He saw it.”
Raven didn’t move for a while.
Then she said, “No, it isn’t,” and went into the kitchen.
I stood in her living room. There was a pair of size-something work boots by the door, a man’s, with the laces still tied. She came back with an envelope. A light bill, opened, the kind with the window.
On the back, in pen, it said: Mayo’s. Suzuki. Lonnie. 10/14. Parted out.
“I saved eleven hundred dollars,” she said. “The same eleven hundred I needed. Took me a year and a half. Overtime and no Christmas. I called your shop to buy it back off him. I said I’d give him more than he paid me.”
She tapped the envelope.
“He said he sold it the month after I came in. To a man who parted it out. He said it was probably in a hundred pieces in somebody’s barn.”
Tucker looked up at me.
Those were the words. Lonnie had said them to Tucker two hours before, at my counter, word for word, without thinking about them at all.
“He took that call in the back bay,” I said. “He shut the door. When he came out he told me it was a lady wanting parts.”
Raven sat down on the arm of the couch.
“So he had it,” she said. “The whole time I was saving. He had it in there.”
“He had it in there.”
“And now he’s selling it.”
“Tomorrow at nine.”
She laughed. It wasn’t anything like Lonnie’s.
“Then there’s nothing to do,” she said. “It’s his.”
I opened my purse and took out the title and put it on her coffee table, face up, with the owner box toward her so she could read it.
She read it. Then she read it again.
“Be at the shop at eight-thirty,” I said. “Borrow a truck with a ramp. Bring a pen.”
Eight-thirty
I didn’t sleep much. Lonnie slept fine. He ate his eggs and asked me if I’d put the title back, and I said I’d do it first thing, and that was true.
At eight-twenty I unlocked the shop and started the coffee and walked past the foot. I took the Suzuki’s folder out of the drawer and laid it open on the counter. The coin envelope was still stapled to the back of it. I slid the spare key out and set it on top.
Raven pulled in at eight-thirty-one in a neighbor’s F-150 with a ramp in the bed. Tucker got out with the jar.
Lonnie came up from the back with his coffee and saw all three of us, and saw the folder, and saw the key.
“What is this,” he said.
I uncapped the pen and filled in the back of the title. Seller, Beatriz Mayo. Buyer, Raven Byrd. Price, nine hundred dollars. The date. I signed it the way he taught me at the kitchen table.
“Oh, no,” Lonnie said. “No, ma’am. That’s MY bike. I paid for it. I put tires on it. I put a battery in it. You don’t get to sign away something I bought with my money, in my shop, because some kid came in here with a pickle jar and cried at you. Fuentes is a friend of mine. I’ll have a deputy out here in ten minutes. That’s theft. You hear me, Bea? That is theft.”
He didn’t pick up the phone.
“Your name’s on it,” Raven said. “Go ahead and show the deputy.”
Lonnie turned on her.
“You,” he said. “You came in here and sold it. Nobody made you. You were crying so hard I could barely count. You want to know why I told you it was gone? Because you’d have been in here every week crying on my counter. I did you a favor. I let you be done with it.”
Raven held up the light bill and didn’t say anything.
Lonnie looked at Tucker then. He set his coffee down.
“Tell you what, bud,” he said, real friendly. “You want it so bad. That jar’s thirteen hundred. That’s a down payment. Hand it over, you mow my lot all summer, and we’ll call it even. That’s a deal, right there. That’s a man’s deal.”
He put his hand out for the jar.
Tucker pulled it back against his hoodie.
I picked up the spare key and gave it to Raven.
“That key’s in my pocket,” Lonnie said.
“That one is,” I said.
Raven went into the back bay. In a minute we heard the Suzuki start. It caught on the second try.
At ten till nine a Silverado pulled in, and a man in a Carhartt jacket came in counting a roll of hundreds. Lonnie went right to him.
“Give me that title,” Lonnie said to me. “Bea. Give it here.”
The man looked at the title on the counter, upside down to him.
“Who’s Beatriz?” he said.
“Me.”
“It’s not for sale,” I said.
He looked at Lonnie, and at the boy with the jar, and he put his roll back in his jacket and left without a word to anybody. Two hours of driving.
Lonnie didn’t yell after that. He said it quiet.
“You walk out with them, you’re walking. You hear me? You don’t come back here.”
So I opened the drawer again and went to the F’s. My Ranger. I filled in the back of that title too. Seller, Beatriz Mayo. Buyer, Lonnie Mayo. Price, one dollar. I signed it the same way, and I took the Ranger key off my ring and put it on the folder.
“What’s that,” he said.
“Your truck.”
Raven had the Suzuki up the ramp. Tucker climbed in the middle with the jar.
I went out under the bell. It didn’t ring.
Raven’s carport
It’s May now. I stay with my sister Jenny out in Yorktown, and I run a register at the Lowe’s, and I’ve signed four more titles since March, every one of them to Lonnie Mayo. He sends them through Jenny. He hasn’t called.
Jenny drove me over on Sunday.
The Suzuki is back in the carport where Raven couldn’t stand to look at it. She looks at it now. She’s taking the class at the community college so she can ride it.
Tucker came out with the jar and set it down on the hood of Jenny’s car, glass on metal. There’s a strip of masking tape on it that says TIRES in marker. The pad has a new column.
He had a sheet of stickers from the Dollar General. He peeled the duck off and held it out to me on the tip of his finger.
“You do it,” he said. “Left side.”
I knelt down on the concrete and pressed it on next to the orange foot, and held my thumb on it till it took.
If you’ve ever stood at a counter and kept quiet while somebody got talked down, send this to the person who wouldn’t have.
The motorcycle sale sets off a story about a widower, a buyer on a deadline, and the page with Herbert’s name on it. For more family drama tangled up with bikes and the people left behind, there’s also the mechanic’s widow and the minutes that fired him and the daughter who brought a buyer to her father’s grave.
