The Biker Who Walked Her Home

“She hasn’t had lunch in nine days. I’ve got twenty-three of them, and I should have seen it. I didn’t see it either.”

I looked across the room. Lily was sitting very straight on the beanbag with the milk carton unopened beside her. She was folding the black bandana into a square, and then a smaller square, smoothing it flat on her knee.

“Jean,” I said. “Why would he do all that? He’s known her a month. Why would a man do that for somebody else’s child?”

Mrs. Novak took her glasses off and wiped them on her blouse, though they weren’t dirty.

“I asked him that,” she said. “He told me to look at his left arm.”

On the inside of his forearm, she said, in among all the rest of it, was a name. Not in tattoo-parlor letters. In a child’s printing, traced exactly, big and wobbly. Katie. With a sunflower beside it that had too many petals.

“I knew that printing, Amy. I taught that child to make that K. She always put the legs on it too long.” Her voice gave out and she had to start again. “Katie. Second row, by the window. Eleven years ago. She was out sick half of second grade, and she died the fall she should have started third. She was eight years old.”

“His daughter?”

“His granddaughter. He raised her, mostly. He walked her to this school every day of kindergarten and first grade and as much of second as she could manage. Down Walnut and across Fourth. They lived in the house with the blue shutters.”

The house next door to mine. He had not moved onto our street. He had moved back.

“I went to that funeral,” Mrs. Novak said. “He was clean-shaven then, in a suit that didn’t fit across the shoulders. I didn’t know him today. Not until he said her name.” She put her glasses back on. “He told me he still walks by here at three o’clock. He said his feet just do it.”

From the reading corner, Lily said, “Is Mr. Gus going to die like Katie did?”

So she knew about Katie. Of course she knew. She knew about the pill bottle and the thermos and the verse about the bushel. She knew more about the man next door than I knew about my own child’s walk home.

“I don’t know, baby,” I said.

“Can we go where he is?”

“Yes,” I said. “We can go right now.”

Shane found us in the waiting room at the hospital in Joplin a little before six. He had been to the school and found it locked, and then he had read the message I sent him. He came through the sliding doors in his work boots with concrete dust still gray in the creases of his neck.

He looked at Lily, whole and unhurt in a plastic chair. I saw his shoulders come down an inch. Then he looked at where we were.

“What are we doing here?” he said. Quiet. Level.

“Sit down, Shane.”

“No. Get her things. I am not having my daughter sit up all night for that man. Whatever happened to him, he had it coming.”

“Sit down,” I said, “because I am going to tell you something, and you are going to want to be sitting.”

I had never talked to him like that. Not in eleven years. He sat.