The Biker Who Walked Her Home

I told him all of it. I kept my voice down, because there were other families in that room with troubles of their own. The ditch. The lunches. The corner of Fourth at half past seven. The far side of the street. That’s enough, son. I’m not supposed to be on this side.

He listened with his jaw set. When I finished, he shook his head.

“No,” he said. “She’d have told me. If some boy was putting his hands on her every day for a month, she’d have come to me. I’m her father.”

Lily didn’t look up. She was still holding that bandana.

“I did tell you,” she said. “At supper. You said don’t make a fuss.”

Nobody moved. Down the hall a cart went by with one bad wheel.

I watched it land on him. It didn’t come all at once. It came the way cold water comes up a pair of jeans, slow, from the bottom. He looked at her. He looked at the scab on the heel of her hand, which had been there in plain sight for three weeks. He opened his mouth and nothing came out of it.

“It’s two blocks,” he finally said, to nobody. “It’s two blocks from my chair.”

A nurse named Kim came out about seven. Because there was no family, she bent the rules and talked to us. It was his heart, the way everybody had figured. They had gone in through his wrist and opened the artery. He was stable. He was going to be there a few days.

“He keeps asking one thing,” she said. “Every time he comes up out of it. He wants to know did the little girl get home.”

Lily stood up on her chair so she’d be tall enough.

“Tell him yes,” she said. “Tell him I’m holding his hat.”

We took her home. She fell asleep in the truck with the bandana under her cheek, and Shane carried her in and stood by her bed a long time after he had laid her down.

He didn’t come to bed himself. Around midnight I looked out the kitchen window and saw him in the yard next door. Gus’s trash can was still at the curb from the morning pickup. My husband rolled it up the driveway and set it beside the porch, square against the house, and then he stood there with his hands hanging, looking at those two lawn chairs and that coffee can.

He took Friday off. In fourteen years at the plant, I had never known him to do that.

They let us in at two. Gus had a room on the fourth floor with a window that looked out on a parking garage. He seemed smaller lying down. They had him in one of those thin cotton gowns, and for the first time I saw the tattoos without any leather over them. Up close, they weren’t what I had thought. There was a cross on one shoulder. There were praying hands. There were dates.

Lily walked right up and laid the folded bandana on his chest, and took two of his fingers.

“Well, hey there, Lily-bug,” he said. His voice was a scrape. “You get home all right?”

“Daddy carried me.”

“That’s good. That’s how it ought to be.”

“That’s Katie,” she said to her father, and pointed at the inside of the big arm. “See? She liked purple too.”

Shane was standing at the foot of the bed. He had taken his cap off when he came through the door, and he was holding it in front of him in both hands. I don’t think he knew he was doing it.

Gus saw him and tried to sit up some.