She Rode a Harley

by Mary Jane Black

  “We’re riding.”

  We curve over the mountains late on Friday night. The neon lights of Las Vegas spread out below us. Our motors hum contently in harmony. The warm desert breeze flows over my face. I take a deep breath, and the sandy, arid air fills my lungs; I place my hand on my gas tank, letting the vibration shake my fingers, content to be back on my Harley again.

  We shut off the motors when we reach our hotel. We back the Harleys into the parking space. We sit there side by side for a few minutes.

  He reaches across the space between us and lays his hand on mine on the handlebars. “I’m the happiest fucking man in the world right now.”

  I nod and smile in agreement, blinking back the tears. We pull our duffel bags out of the saddlebags and begin our reunion celebration together.

  At midnight on Saturday we stroll down a casino hallway. I balance a margarita in one hand and my purse in the other. Suddenly Dwayne takes my elbow. The margarita sloshes onto my hand from the sudden stop.

  He points to his left. The open doorway of the wedding chapel stands open. The glow of the lights spreads out across the carpet. “Will you marry me again?”

  “Of course, but we’ll never find anyone to do it tonight.” I begin to plan how we can do it later.

  He shakes his head. He tells me all we need is the two of us and a promise.

  We walk hand in hand down the soft blue carpet. We stand on the small stage at the front. The smell of lilies fills the air. Points of light from the chandelier bounce off the mirrored walls.

  We stand face-to-face. We vow to love each other. Until death do us part. In sickness and in health.

  I swear I will always remember the miracle of our blind date and finding love at first sight. We kiss. I lay my forehead against his, and our breaths merge.

  We go home the next day. I spend months looking for a new job as a principal of a smaller high school with less stress. He plans the opening of his long-delayed custom motorcycle and hot rod shop. We find both in a small town in Sonoma County.

  The move to our new hometown happens without incident. The superintendent’s secretary helps us find a small house on the banks of the Russian River. I like the view. Dwayne likes the garage.

  I sit with a glass of wine and my laptop on the deck one cool evening shortly after our move. Inside the garage he bangs happily on the roof of his ’37 Ford truck, the first car he’s rebuilding to sell. The phone rings. It vibrates across the table. I pick it up and answer.

  “Mary, Mom is in the hospital in Temple,” my brother-in-law Doug’s voice comes across the distance. “It’s bad. We need Dwayne to come here right away.” I tell him he’ll call him back as soon as I talk to him.

  I go to the door of the garage and watch him for a few seconds. He grasps the welding torch in his right hand. His face is hidden by his helmet, and he squats on the hard cement floor with a gray car fender in front of him. I move into his range of sight. He turns off the welder and flips up his helmet.

  “It’s your mom.” He stands up quickly. “She is in the hospital after passing out at home. You have to go to Texas tonight.”

  He packs while I call airlines to get a ticket. We drive the ninety miles to Oakland so he can catch a late-night flight to Austin. As I drive, he spills out stories of his childhood and of his mother.

  I hug him at the curb and tell him I love him. I apologize for not going with him since school starts next week. He kisses me firmly and reminds me his mom is going to be fine, so there’s no need for me to go. He runs into the terminal to be at the gate on time.

  Every morning and every night we talk on the phone. I cradle the phone to my ear, listening to him tell me about his day spent sitting by her bed. She never wakes up. He talks to her anyway, and he sings old country songs to her.

  I am walking through classrooms with my lead custodian when my secretary runs up to me. “Your husband’s on the phone.”

  I run into my office and grab the receiver. I only hear sobs when I say hello. “Dwayne?”

  “It’s me, baby. She’s gone. My mom is dead. I need you.”

  I tell my assistant principal he’ll be opening school. I drive to Oakland and get on a plane. I see Dwayne when I drop down on the escalator in the Austin airport. We find each other in the middle of the crowd and hold each other for a long moment. He grabs my suitcase, and we drive to his small Texas hometown to bury his mother. The mother he called every Monday since he was sixteen. The mother who fixed him her special iced tea every time we visited her. The mother who played a mean game of Yahtzee with us. The mother who gave us a check for $10,000 when we moved to California.

  ENDINGS

  The day of his mother’s funeral, I know Dwayne’s not his usual healthy self. We sit in the small dim alcove off the main room of the funeral home. We breathe in the overpowering scent of lilies and roses. I look out over the crowd of people crammed into the wooden pews. Seldom-worn suit coats stretch tightly over the men’s bulging arms. Dresses rustle in the fan’s breeze. Tissues in sweaty hands wipe tears and sweaty foreheads.

  Roberta was an important part of the community of Cameron, Texas, and today it appears most of the town is here to say goodbye. Every seat is filled. A row of people stand shoulder to shoulder around the edges of the room. The clear soprano of the singer fills the air with “How Great Thou Art.”

  Beside me, I feel Dwayne stiffen. His usually tanned face shines gray in the fluorescent lights. A small groan escapes his lips. He clutches his stomach with his right hand.

  I lay my arm over his bony shoulders beneath the starched white shirt. “Are you okay?”

  He shakes his head violently back and forth. Suddenly he lurches up. Jessica, on his right, looks up at him with confusion. Married last year, she has just told us she’s pregnant with his first grandchild.

  He quickly walks to the side door and leaves. I look at both Jessica and Stephanie and motion that I’ll go and check on him.

  As I walk down the hallway, I hear the organ music swell and the solemn voice of the minister begin talking. I hear the bathroom door slam. I hurry to it and put my ear against the hard wood. “Baby, what’s going on?”

  The silence is filled with the sound of his vomiting. I slowly open the door. He is kneeling on the floor. He rests his head on his arm over the toilet. I squat down by him and gently lay my hand on his head. “I’ve never seen you this sick.”

  He looks up at me with a tear-stained face. “I’m sorry I left the service in front of everyone.”

  I hug him. “Only your sister, Myrna, worries about funeral etiquette.” A smile flits across his face. We sit on the hard tile floor for a moment.

  He clutches my hand. “Mom is really gone. No more Monday calls. No more cards with newspaper clippings.”

  I touch his cheek with one finger and kiss him softly. Then I pull myself up and take his hand. He uses me to balance himself forward.

  We walk back to the family room. We inch past his brother on the end and take our places on the front row. Myrna glares at us. I smile back at her. Stephanie and Jessica bookend Dwayne as he sits down. They each take one of his hands. I sit by Stephanie and watch the three of them as the funeral finishes with a long line of mourners parading past her pink-silk-lined coffin.

  At the cemetery Dwayne and I get out of the limousine slowly and walk across the dried brown grass. The blast of August heat rises from the asphalt behind us in waves. In the distance we can see the narrow ribbon of Little River shining in the sunshine. We walk to Roberta’s grave and stand stiffly by the bronze coffin covered in ivory and yellow roses. We lean against each other. Our bodies balance together as we close our eyes. I secretly watch him through half-opened eyelids. I wrap an arm around his waist and pull him closer. I lay a calm hand on his stomach. I can feel the muscles clench and relax beneath my fingertips.

  The church hosts a lunch after the funeral. Somehow we make it through the sympathy and the photo taking. Usually Dwayne is the center of attentio
n with his stories. Today he doesn’t eat. He doesn’t talk much. He often leaves the room. We go home early.

  We leave his brother’s house at dawn the next day. We fly home to California. School has opened while I was gone. I am busy the next few weeks with teachers and schedules and students and football. It takes weeks, but Dwayne finally agrees to see a doctor.

  On the day of his doctor visit, I come home and find him napping in our darkened bedroom. I lower myself down by him and rest my hand on his forehead. My fingers register the moist heat of his skin. “What did the doctor say?”

  He tells me the doctor said it was just the stress of the move and his mother’s death. I curve around him. We lie awake but silent in the darkness.

  At a home football game one week before Thanksgiving I see Dwayne in his black leather jacket coming in the back gate. He dangles his helmet in his right hand. I know he had a follow-up doctor’s visit today. I watch him search the sidelines of the field. He knows that is where I usually stand. I wave from the edge of the crowd standing on the narrow strip of grass in front of the stands. He waves back.

  We move toward each other, and I jostle people, pushing my way through the mass of fans. Several try to talk to me about their sons. I ignore them and keep my eyes on Dwayne’s face, and he moves toward me with the same hurried pace. We soon stand face-to-face. The noise deafens us. The band plays. People scream. The loud speaker squawks the play-by-play.

  He reaches over and pulls my head forward. He puts his mouth close to my ear. “The doctor thinks it’s my gall bladder. They have to take it out. I had to take an MRI to confirm it, but they won’t have the final results until tomorrow.”

  I close my eyes in relief. I feared something much worse.

  The next morning Dwayne welds a strip of metal along the rusted edge of the 1937 Ford truck he is rebuilding. I sit in a lawn chair with a cup of coffee and the morning newspaper. Sunlight streaks the garage floor. Fields of bare grapevines blanket the fields and hills around us. The welder turns off with a hiss, and he flips up the visor of his welding helmet.

  “Look, baby!” He points to the windshield and uses his hands to demonstrate how low the top is going to be after he chops it. I remind him he has to wait for the rest of the work until after his gall bladder surgery. I promise I’ll help him over Christmas break.

  His phone on the workbench rings and interrupts us. He grabs it and presses it against his ear. I return to reading the newspaper. I can hear the rhythm of his words as he paces around the garage, but I fail to pick up the individual words until I hear the change in his tone. I watch him across the tool-crowded space and see fear and panic move across his face. His hand whitens as he tightens his grip on the phone.

  My heart races in my chest. I clench my eyes shut for a minute. As I stand up quickly, my newspaper floats to the floor. My foot knocks over my coffee. A pool of brown liquid spreads across the concrete. I take three steps toward him.

  He senses my movement and cups his hand over the phone. “I have cancer.”

  A wave of dizziness washes over me. I step forward and clutch the edge of the truck door. The still-warm metal burns into my palm as I watch his mouth move. The words are lost in the hum in my ears.

  I feel an urgent need to talk to my daughter, and I step out of the garage. I call Stephanie, trembling as I push the buttons on my cell phone. I hear the distant ringing a continent away. It is only when I hear her hello at the other end that salty tears fill my mouth, and I choke out the news.

  While I am sitting on the front steps of our house talking to her, Dwayne eases the door shut behind him and sits down beside me. I say a hasty goodbye and promise to call later. We instinctively move so our bodies push against each other—shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh—the way we did on the first night we met at Chili’s. Our words fragment into chunks of pain and confusion.

  He stumbles over explaining where the tumor is located. As soon as he utters the word pancreas, our eyes meet. Ten years before, a phone call from a doctor told me my mother had cancer, a large mass in the pancreas. Three weeks later, she was dead.

  Night falls across the mountains and the river. We sit unmoving until the chill of the cement beneath us cramps our muscles. We stand and stretch our aching backs.

  We stagger through the shadowy house to our bedroom and fall upon the bed. We gently remove each other’s clothes. We make love quietly. I cry myself to sleep and hear Dwayne’s quiet weeping beside me.

  After a month of surgeons’ appointments and medical tests, I find myself spending a cool misty San Francisco morning in a hospital waiting room. Outside the window the Golden Gate Bridge rises orange against the gray fog. Red and green lights blink on and off on a plastic Christmas tree in the corner. My stomach clenches from the stench of poinsettias. A Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee with a skin of powdered creamer is clutched in my hand. I have been sitting here for four hours. My last view of Dwayne was the top of his mint-green gauze cap when he was wheeled through the stainless-steel surgery doors.

  Now I rock back and forth slightly and try to convince myself it is going to be all right. We have been told there is a 50 percent chance they can remove the mass. I close my eyes and lean my head back against the wall.

  “Mrs. Black,” I hear someone say. I pop open my eyes and see a woman in baby-blue scrubs standing in the doorway. She’s the one the surgeon said was his resident doctor. I stand up quickly. She motions me to follow her. We walk out the door, which swishes shut behind us. We face each other in the hallway.

  She starts to introduce herself. I stop her. “Just tell me what happened. How is he?”

  “We couldn’t get the tumor.” She explains the difficulties the surgical team faced. She describes the procedure they performed, rerouting his digestive system. I watch her lips move. Her words blend into each other. She stops and stares, then she takes a deep breath. “He made it through surgery, but we don’t think he’s a good candidate for chemotherapy. The survival rate for someone with this advanced a stage of pancreatic cancer is not high.”

  Her face blurs in my tears, and my voice cracks when I tell her to shut up. I choke on my angry words. A moan rises from within me. People walking down the hall glance at the pair of us and rush past. I turn and lean my forehead against the wall. I slap my hand repeatedly against it. Thud. Thud. I take a trembling breath, and the tears shudder to a stop.

  Wiping my face on my sleeve, I tell her I just want to go be with my husband. She leads me up several elevators and through row after row of walls and swinging doors. She stops at the end of a long hallway. She reaches out with her right hand and swings open the door. She stands back so I can enter.

  I see his white-wrapped form in the middle of the bed. Machines bleep and blink around him. His scarred mechanic’s hands form a brown mound against the stiff bleached sheets. I drop into a chair by his bed. I place my hand on his arm. Minutes tick by.

  Finally I hear him whisper, “Baby, are you here?”

  I stand and lean over the bed. “I’m here.” I move my hand to his shoulder. It’s one of the few places without a tube or a needle in it.

  “Did they get it?”

  I swallow the stony lump in my throat. “No.”

  He opens his eyes. Nose to nose we look at each other. Our I love yous mingle in our breaths. Then he painfully shakes his head. I lean closer so I can hear him.

  “Don’t fucking let me die in California.”

  HOPE

  I grip Dwayne’s hand with my left hand as I fill out the forms in the oncologist’s office with the other one. His knee jiggles up and down rhythmically against my thigh. Red vinyl chairs fall into a line around three of the room’s sunny yellow walls. Someone sits in every chair in the cramped waiting room. Most of the women wear brightly colored scarves or knitted caps over their bald heads. Most of the men leave their hairless heads uncovered, with the exception of a few wearing baseball caps. Dwayne still has his hair, but he is wearing his Modesto Harley
cap.

  On my right a bulky man in a faded denim jacket writes on the same form as I do. He chews his bottom lip and pushes his black-rimmed glasses up his nose every few minutes. His wife leans against his shoulder. Her bony hands clench a fluffy pink shawl around her shoulders. She shivers and sways slightly in her chair.

  I remember visiting this waiting room every morning for the entire two weeks of my Christmas break after trying to call for an appointment. I decided I would come in person. I would ask the receptionist each morning for an appointment for my husband to see the oncologist. She would check the calendar and tell me there wasn’t anything available for several months. I knew we didn’t have months to get Dwayne into chemotherapy.

  Finally, after the usual apologetic denial of my request by the receptionist, a tall man in a white coat heard our exchange. He was Doctor Jensen, and after listening to my explanation for my repeated visits, he agreed to see Dwayne. The nurse whispered, “Pancreatic” across the small room. Dr. Jensen and I stared at each other in the silence echoing after the word.

  Doctor Jensen leaned over the counter and placed a large tanned hand over mine. “Then I think she needs an appointment tomorrow.”

  Now I finish completing the form and turn it in. Dwayne and I press against each other as we wait. Finally, a thin woman with her blond hair tucked into a loose bun at the back of her head swings open the door. She calls Dwayne’s name.

  I stand with my hand out. He reaches up and grabs it. He wavers slightly, trying to balance himself. I cup my hand under his elbow to help him. His white face pales in the fluorescent lights. We follow the woman to a small room.

  She smiles at us. “My name is Pat. I will be your primary nurse as you begin chemo.” Her kind blue eyes twinkle at us.

  We both smile back. I take a deep breath. The surgeon said he wasn’t a candidate for chemo.

  Pat assures us they have been successful with other patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. She guides Dwayne to the examining table. She helps him climb up. “I can tell he’s a fighter.”