“Your grandmother was there.”
“I was there.”
“I was pregnant with you.”
“They didn’t hurt us.”
“But they left a message.”
“What?”
Her mother’s face tightened.
“A photograph of our house taken through the kitchen window.”
The girl felt sick.
“He left.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you tell people he died?”
“He asked us to.”
The biker looked down.
The mother continued.
“He believed if everyone thought he was dead, they would stop asking where he went.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It made sense when we were terrified.”
The girl looked at the biker.
“Was he in witness protection?”
“No.”
The mother answered before him.
“Not officially.”
“Then where did he go?”
“New Mexico first.”
“Then Arizona.”
“Then New Mexico again.”
“Helping investigators?”
“For a while.”
The biker spoke.
“He gave evidence to state investigators after the corrupt deputy was removed from the case.”
“Several people were eventually arrested.”
The girl looked toward her mother.
“So why didn’t he come back?”
Silence.
The real wound.
Her mother sat on the roadside guardrail.
“He tried.”
The girl stared.
“When?”
“After the arrests.”
“And?”
The mother’s face collapsed.
“I told him not to.”
The girl could not understand the sentence.
“You told him not to come home?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because your grandmother died while he was gone.”
The girl had known that part.
Her grandmother died when the girl was an infant.
Complications from pneumonia, according to family.
The mother continued:
“She spent the last year terrified.”
“Every car outside.”
“Every phone call.”
“She blamed him.”
“I blamed him.”
The biker closed his eyes.
The mother said:
“When he finally called, the danger was mostly over.”
“He said he wanted to come back.”
“I had just buried my mother.”
“I had a baby.”
“I had no money.”
“I was furious.”
The girl whispered:
“What did you say?”
Her mother stared at the ground.
“I told him we already buried him.”
“And?”
“I told him to stay buried.”
The girl began crying silently.
Her mother continued:
“I was twenty-one.”
“I thought anger was the same thing as certainty.”
“I thought if he came back, all the fear would come back with him.”
“So he listened?”
“Yes.”
The biker said quietly:
“He tried writing.”
The mother looked at him sharply.
The girl turned.
“What?”
The biker reached into his vest.
Not another letter.
Nothing now.
“He wrote letters for years.”
“Did you get them?”
The mother shook her head.
“No.”
The biker looked surprised.
“He told me he mailed three.”