When our daughter was born, Linda insisted we give her a name that sounded gentle.
Mara.
I remember holding that baby in the hospital and being terrified.
My hands were enormous compared with hers. I could rebuild an engine without thinking, but I didn't know how to hold a newborn without imagining I might break something.
Linda laughed at me.
“Raymond, she's a baby, not a transmission.”
I looked down.
Mara's fingers closed around one of mine.
That was it.
I belonged to her from that moment forward.
For years, I thought being a good father meant keeping danger away.
I worked overtime.
Kept our bills paid.
Fixed anything in the house that stopped working.
And made sure my little girl knew she could call me from anywhere, at any hour, and I would come get her.
I told her that so often it became our family joke.
When she was six, she called from the backyard because she was too frightened to climb down from the apple tree.
When she was nine, she called from a friend's house after watching a scary movie.
At eleven, she phoned me from school because she forgot her lunch.
Every time, I came.
Eventually, Linda started teasing me.
“One day she's going to call you from another state because she can't find her favorite sweater.”
I shrugged.
“Then I'll bring the sweater.”
Mara would laugh and throw her arms around my neck.
“Promise, Dad?”
And I always answered the same way.
“Promise.”
That word followed me for decades.
It became the best thing about being her father.
Then, nine years ago, it became the thing that almost destroyed me.
The patch appeared on my birthday when Mara was eleven.
I'd just joined a small riding club called the Iron Ravens. We weren't outlaws, despite the assumptions people sometimes made when they saw a dozen large men in leather vests riding together.
Most of us worked ordinary jobs.
Mechanics.
Electricians.
Truck drivers.
A school maintenance supervisor.
A retired firefighter who still insisted he could lift more than anybody else in the room.
We raised money for injured riders, helped stranded motorists, and organized an annual toy drive.
We also argued about motorcycles more than grown men should.
Mara adored the club.
Not the noise or the tough-looking patches.
The people.
She called the president Uncle Bishop, even though he wasn't related to us. She knew which mechanic kept peppermint candies in his toolbox and which rider always pretended to be angry when she drew flowers on his motorcycle helmet.
On my thirty-seventh birthday, she woke me before sunrise.