“How does my son know that name?” I said. I could hear my own voice going high and strange.
The big man’s name was Frank, but everyone called him Bear. He walked me down the hall away from the others, past the vending machines, to a little waiting area with two vinyl chairs and a coffee maker that had been broken since we got there. He sat down slow, the way big men his age sit down, one hand on the wall.
“Sit down, brother,” he said. “This is gonna take a minute.”
I sat.
“Your boy showed up at our door on a Saturday morning last September. Rode his bike right up to the gate and rang the buzzer like he was selling cookies. I opened up and there’s this little kid, helmet still on, backpack twice the size of him. First thing he says is, ‘Are you Bear? My uncle used to know you.’ I asked him who his uncle was. He said Danny Whitfield.”
I closed my eyes.
“I hadn’t heard that name spoken by a family member in fifteen years,” Bear said. “Danny rode with us. He wasn’t a full patch. He was a prospect. Sweetest kid you ever met. Twenty-two years old and had the biggest laugh in the county. He crashed on his way home from our anniversary run in October of 2010. Road was slick. Deer came out. He went into a guardrail.”
Bear’s eyes filled up. He didn’t wipe them.
“We paid for half his funeral. His mama wouldn’t let us come. Wouldn’t let us near the church. Blamed us. Blamed the bike. Blamed everybody but that deer and that rain. We understood. Grief does what it does. But we never got to say goodbye to that boy.”
I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears.
