The old biker who rented me the garage apartment behind his house is either a saint or a stalker, and I need someone to tell me which.
For three years I paid him eight hundred dollars a month. For three years he never cashed a single check.
I only found out on Monday.
When my husband left me, I had a four-year-old daughter, eleven hundred dollars, and a car that only started if you turned the key twice.
Six landlords in six weeks told me no. Bad credit. No rental history. Single mom with a kid.
The seventh was a man named Mr. Alvarez. Seventies, gray work shirt, an old Panhead under a tarp in the corner of his yard, and a face that didn’t give away a single thing he was thinking.
Six landlords in six weeks told me no. Bad credit. No rental history. Single mom with a kid.
The seventh was a man named Mr. Alvarez. Seventies, gray work shirt, an old Panhead under a tarp in the corner of his yard, and a face that didn’t give away a single thing he was thinking.
He met me in the driveway and asked me three questions. Did I smoke. Did I have a dog. Was the little girl in the car mine.
Then he said, “Eight hundred a month. First of the month. No lease, because I don’t like paperwork.”
I signed nothing. I shook his hand. I moved in that weekend.
Every month I slid a check under his back door on the first. Every month it was gone by morning. I never once checked to see if they cleared, because who does that.
Then on Monday my bank flagged my account. Suspicious activity, they said. When I called, the woman told me my balance was almost fourteen thousand dollars higher than I had ever thought it was.
Because not one rent check I had ever written had been deposited.
I got in my car. I drove home. I stormed into his backyard, where he was working on that old motorcycle with a rag hanging out of his back pocket.
“What is this,” I said. “What are you doing. Why have you never taken a single dollar from me. What do you want from us.”
He wiped his hands on the rag. He walked past me into the house without a word. When he came back out, he was holding a shoebox.
The corners were taped shut. His name and a date from 1987 were written on the lid in shaky handwriting.
He held it out to me.
“You should have found this three years ago,” he said.
“Not me. But since you’re asking now, open it. Because my daughter was pregnant when she left her husband. Same age as you. Same look on her face as you had that first day in the driveway.”
His hands were shaking. I hadn’t noticed until then. His hands never shook.
“Open the box,” he said. “Please.”
I sat down on the porch step. He sat down next to me, closer than he had ever sat before, and the shoebox settled into my lap like it weighed more than it should.
I peeled the tape off slowly. It came away in strips, brittle and yellowed. Whatever was inside had been sealed for a very long time.
The first thing on top was every rent check I had ever written him. Thirty-six of them, banded together with a rubber band. Every one still stamped with the same memo line I always used: FOR RENT.
Under the checks was a manila envelope. Under the envelope, a stack of photographs held together by a paper clip. Under the photographs, a small pink savings passbook. Under everything, a key on a piece of twine.
I looked up at him. He was looking at the tomato plants over the fence.
“Which one first,” I said.
“Photos,” he said.
I lifted them out. The one on top was a girl of maybe twenty-two, standing next to a rusted-out Ford Escort in front of this same house.
She was holding a toddler on her hip, and the toddler had her small fingers wrapped in her mother’s hair. Both of them were laughing at something the camera couldn’t see.
The girl looked exactly like me. Not vaguely. The same shape of face. The same dark hair pulled back with the same kind of clip I use every morning. The same tired eyes.
I stopped breathing for a second.
“Her name was Maria,” he said. “The little one is Nina.”
I flipped through the rest. Maria at a kitchen table, feeding Nina from a spoon. Maria asleep in a folding chair on the porch of this same blue house, with Nina asleep on her chest.
Maria and an old woman I assumed was his wife, standing over a tray of tortillas. Nina in the yard, hugging the leg of a much younger version of the man sitting next to me.
The photos went on for maybe a dozen more, and then they stopped.
“What happened to them,” I said.
He didn’t answer for a long time. I thought maybe he wasn’t going to.
“Nineteen eighty-seven,” he finally said. “March. Maria had left her husband about a month before.
He was not a good man. She showed up here with a busted car and a baby and forty-three dollars in her purse.”
He wasn’t looking at me. He was still watching the tomato plants sway in the wind that had picked up out of nowhere.
“I told her the same thing I told you. Eight hundred a month. First of the month. No lease, because I don’t like paperwork. Except back then it was two hundred.”
His voice cracked on the word two.
“She stayed eleven months. Working nights at the diner out on Route Nine. Ruthie and I watched Nina in the evenings. Ruthie taught her to make tortillas standing on a chair.”
He stopped. He rubbed his hands on the knees of his work pants like he was trying to warm them up.
“Then one night in February, her husband found out where she was.”
I felt cold in my stomach. I didn’t want to hear the rest.
“I was in Amarillo,” he said quietly. “Riding with my club. Three days out. She called me twice that night. Voicemail. I didn’t check my messages until the next morning.”
He looked at me for the first time since he had started talking, and his eyes were dry, but there was something in them that had been dry for a very long time.
“By the time I got home, Maria was in the hospital. She lived four more days. Nina was in his mother’s arms by the end of the week. The grandparents in Odessa took her back to Texas before Maria was even in the ground.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“I tried for years,” he said. “The lawyers I could afford were good. Their lawyers were better. The paperwork always came back the same.
Not a stable environment for a small child. Convicted felon in the seventies. Motorcycle club affiliation. And by then Ruthie had left me, so the address was a single man with a bike in the yard.”
“Why did she leave,” I said. It wasn’t my business, but I asked anyway.
“Because I couldn’t forgive myself, and she couldn’t watch me not do it. It’s not more complicated than that.”
“Did you ever see Nina again.”
“Once,” he said. “When she was fifteen. She wrote me a letter and asked if I was really her grandpa. Wanted to know what her mother had been like.
I drove twelve hours to Odessa and we had lunch at a Denny’s off the interstate. She was so much like her mother that I couldn’t finish my food.”
He stopped again, and I waited.
“And then,” he said, “she told me the family had told her I was the reason her mother died.
That I hadn’t picked up the phone. That I had chosen my club over my daughter. And she wanted to know if that was true.”
“Was it,” I said. I couldn’t help it. It came out before I could stop it.
“Yes,” he said. “In every way that matters, yes.”
I looked back down at the photo of Maria and Nina in the yard. I looked at the little pink passbook. I looked at the man sitting next to me on the porch step.
“Open the passbook,” he said.
I opened it. The account was in my name. Under my name was my daughter’s name. Under my daughter’s name was a balance of twenty-eight thousand, eight hundred dollars.
I made a sound I hadn’t meant to make.
“Every check you ever wrote me,” he said. “Plus the amount I should have raised the rent to two years ago and didn’t.
Plus interest, because the credit union pays it. Plus whatever I could put on top of it when the Social Security came in each month.”
“Ricardo,” I said. It was the first time I had ever used his first name. “I can’t take this.”
“You can,” he said. “You will. Because it isn’t yours and it isn’t mine.”
I stared at him.
“It’s Maria’s,” he said. “It was supposed to be hers. I was going to hand her a shoebox one day, when she was ready, when she said she and Nina were leaving town to start over somewhere he couldn’t find them again.
I was going to hand her this and say, don’t stay with anyone because you have to. Ever again.”
He took the passbook out of my hands and set it back in the box.
“You have to. Ever again,” he said, quieter this time.
I sat there on the porch step and I cried. I don’t remember when I started. He didn’t touch me. He just sat next to me and let me cry.
After a while, the back door of the garage opened and Ella came out in her pajamas, her hair sticking up on one side from her nap. She stopped when she saw me, and she looked from me to Ricardo and back.
“Mama,” she said. “Why are you sad.”
“I’m not sad, baby,” I said. “I’m okay.”
“Grandpa Al,” she said. “Why is Mama sad.”
He turned toward her, and I watched him work up a smile that didn’t quite make it to his eyes.
“Mija,” he said, “your mama is having a big feeling. Sometimes big feelings come out of the eyes. You know how it is.”
Ella nodded seriously. Then she walked over and climbed into his lap like she had done it a thousand times before, which she had, because for three years she had.
He put one big hand on her back and looked at me over the top of her head.
“I did not steal from you,” he said. “I would never have kept it forever. I was going to give it to you next spring. When your ex-husband’s parental rights got terminated. When you were sure. When you were ready.”
“How do you know about that,” I said.
“You cry in your kitchen sometimes. The window is right there. I don’t listen on purpose. I just hear.”
Ella had put her thumb in her mouth. She was watching a bird on the fence.
“Ricardo,” I said. “I want to give this back.”
“No.”
“Then I want to keep paying rent. Starting next month. And I want you to actually cash the checks.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“Two hundred,” he said finally. “That was what Maria paid. That is what you pay.”
“Eight hundred,” I said. “That’s what we agreed to.”
“Two hundred,” he said. “Or you can move out.”
I laughed, and I didn’t mean to. It came out with the tears still on my face and it made Ella look up at me, alarmed.
“Fine,” I said. “Two hundred.”
“Two hundred and I will cash the checks. I will put them in an envelope in the top drawer of the kitchen. When you are ready to buy a house of your own, I will give them back to you.”
“That’s not cashing them, Ricardo.”
“Yes it is. I move them from the shoebox to the drawer. That is progress. That is cashing them, for me.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.
We sat on the porch for another hour, until the sun got low behind the tomato plants.
Ella fell asleep in his lap again. The tarp on the Harley in the corner of the yard flapped once in the wind, then went still.
“You still ride,” I said eventually.
“No. Not since Nineteen eighty-seven.”
“Why not.”
“Because I was on it when she needed me. I made a promise to Ruthie before she left. She wanted me to sell it. I said I couldn’t sell it. She said then don’t ride it. And I haven’t.”
“Where is Ruthie now.”
“Passed,” he said. “Two thousand ten. Cancer. She wrote me a letter the week before she died. I keep it in the box too, under the photos.”
I didn’t open it. It wasn’t mine to open.
I helped him carry Ella into the garage apartment. He laid her down in her bed and stood over her for a moment with his hands folded in front of him like a man in a pew.
“Ricardo,” I said. “Can I ask you something.”
“Yes.”
“Would you teach her about the bike. Not to ride it. Just about it. Where the parts are. How to keep the leather from cracking. That kind of thing.”
He didn’t answer right away. He was still looking at Ella.
“Yes,” he said. “I would like that very much.”
“And can you tell her about Maria. When she’s a little older.”
He nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
That was on a Wednesday. On Saturday morning, I woke up to a sound I had never heard on Palmer Street. It was a low, uneven cough, then a sputter, then a steady rumble.
I went to the window over the sink and looked out.
The tarp was folded on the ground. Ricardo was sitting on the Harley in his gray work shirt with his hands on the grips and his eyes closed.
He wasn’t riding it. He was just sitting there in the driveway, letting it run.
Ella was in the yard in her pajamas, watching him with her mouth open.
He shut the engine off after about a minute. He got off the bike. He walked over to my daughter, crouched down in front of her, and he said something to her I couldn’t hear.
Ella nodded very seriously and put her small hand on top of his big scarred one.
I stood at the window and I cried again.
I have written him a check for two hundred dollars on the first of every month for the last seven months. He has cashed every one of them, exactly like he said he would. He puts them in the top drawer of the kitchen where I can see them when he opens it to get out a spoon for Ella’s cereal.
Last week, my ex-husband’s parental rights were finally terminated. I brought the paperwork to the porch on Palmer Street, and Ricardo read it twice, slowly, both times. Then he stood up and went inside and came back out holding the shoebox.
“You have to. Ever again,” he said.
“You have to. Ever again,” he said.
I didn’t fight him this time.
We are looking at a small house on the other side of town. Two bedrooms. A yard. A garage he can keep working on the Harley in.
Ella asked if Grandpa Al is coming with us. I told her yes. She asked if he could bring the tomato plants. I told her we would ask the neighbor.
Then she asked if he could bring Maria and Nina too.
I said, “Baby, they’ve been coming with him the whole time.”
She thought about that for a long time, the way she thinks about things she means to remember. Then she said, “Then that’s four grandmas and grandpas for me. I’m the richest kid on the block.”
I said, “Yeah, mija. You are.”
